HOW REGULAR IS “REGULAR SEX“?

I'm sure you've heard how sex in a marriage can compare with placing jellybeans in a jar. It is said that if you place a jellybean in a jar for each time you have sex during the first year of your marriage, and you removed a jelly bean from this jar each time you had sex with your partner thereafter, the jar would never be empty.
Q: How do you stop your girlfriend from having sex?
A: Marry her!
The message that one often hears is that in most relationships, sex begins to lose its excitement very soon after marriage. How frequently should you have sex and how good should it be?
My patients who are in new relationships or are newly married certainly report more frequent intercourse with their partner. This usually ranges from four times a week to up to four times a day. Unfortunately, this is also short lived. After a few months into the relationship, sexual frequency will have dwindled to half that.
Most men who are 12 months into a relationship have sex two to three times a week. Five years down the track, the frequency is one to two times a week. Ten years later it is once a week. If the relationship is not going well, sex is one of the first components to suffer. If sex is not going well, the relationship begins to suffer. It is my view that all couples should be having sex with each other at least twice a week for their entire existence together. I believe that the more often couples have sex, the healthier their relationship will be. Three times a week is very healthy for the relationship, four times and over is extremely healthy. If a couple is having sex once a week or once a fortnight, this should be an issue of concern. The concern is not just for the relationship, but also for the regular functioning of the penis. The penis is like most organs in the body: 'If you don't use it, you lose it!'
Physiologically, it has been demonstrated that prolonged periods of abstinence result in fibrous tissue being deposited in the penis. This begins to replace the normal expandable tissue of the penis. Men who do not have regular intercourse, or who have had long periods of abstinence, will often describe how their penis size has shrunk. This is as a result of this fibrous tissue deposit.
Having regular sex is not enough. How good should this sex be? 'Was it as good for you as it was for me?' Not always, I'm sure. I had a fascinating discussion with a religious counsellor recently. A lot of her work involves counselling women on marriage for two to three months before they tie the knot. For many of her clients, the sexual experience these women are about to have will be their first. Her counselling sessions help them prepare themselves for the immediate situation, as well as for the long term. She keeps in touch with her clients after marriage, and helps them with any difficulties they experience.
She described to me a situation where one of her clients, who had been married for several years, came in complaining that her husband wanted to have sex every day. She didn't enjoy this frequency and wanted some advice on how to 'cool him down'.
'Sex once in a while is enough for me', she had told her.
I told the counsellor to ask her client to describe her sexual sessions with her husband in detail. The aim was to find out whether or not her satisfaction was being acknowledged by her husband.
'He prefers to do it in the missionary position', she described. 'He'll pound away for about ten minutes and then he will orgasm.'
'Do you orgasm at all?', asked the counsellor.
'I don't think I've ever had a real orgasm', said the woman.
'Does your husband know this?'
'I don't think so. I always make the right noises at about the same time he's having an orgasm. But I'm not really having one.'
'Only 20 per cent of women are able to have vaginal orgasms', I explained to the councillor. 'The vast majority of women require clitoral stimulation to reach orgasm.' It seemed to me that this woman had not communicated to her husband for all these years that she was not experiencing the pleasure she deserved from their lovemaking. Each time they had sex, her husband's 'pounding away for ten minutes' at a time gave her no pleasure, and in fact, was sometimes quite uncomfortable.
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