Subscribe to Elle for up to 84% OFF the newsstand price – that's like getting 20 FREE issues. Jean Advice Videos ELLE Decor Accessories Accessories Spotlight Trends Accessories News Astrology News ElleShops ElleTV --> Beauty / Health & Fitness Sexless Relationships-->Sexless Relationships Does a couple have to be hot and heavy to be happy. Sometime during their second year together, Kathleen realized they hadn’t had sex in a month. True, after four years of cohabitation, sex had dwindled to a biannual-at-best event. But that felt like “the cheap, weird part of it,” Natalie says, whereas the impending wedding “was about our love. And he brings an element of joy into my life that wasn’t there before. But most of us assume that, barring significant health or emotional issues, a good relationship has to have at least a little of it. When sex slumps, it’s supposed to be a red flag, a sign that other things—intimacy, connectedness, romance—are on the way out, if they’re not gone already. She insists that while her marriage isn’t perfect, it’s happy, stable, loving, and fun—without sex. It’s not that she thinks sex is somehow wrong or even unimportant; she just doesn’t happen to want it. And she’s sick of hearing from society at large (see Drs. Oz, Phil, and Berman) that if her marriage isn’t steamy, it must be somehow illegitimate. The few people she’s told have reacted with incredulity—“I think people would be less shocked if I told them I had one of those Sex Swings in my bedroom”—followed by unwelcome advice based on assumptions that range from false to insulting: He’s gay, she’s gay, they’re asexual…. The women I talked to for this story are dynamic, intelligent, attractive, childless, financially independent. When her book The Sex-Starved Marriage (Simon & Schuster) came out several years ago, she was inundated with e-mails from readers in their twenties and thirties. Meston, PhD, 32 percent of women aged 18 to 24 (single and married) reported having little interest in sex in the past year. According to Meston, who heads the Sexual Psychophysiology Laboratory at the University of Texas at Austin, that one-third percentage remained relatively constant throughout all age groups, until the fifties and sixties, when it rose to 37 percent. The decline of a once-thriving libido can be devastating: an identity altering loss that results in feelings of inadequacy and frustration not unlike those associated with erectile dysfunction. It happened, whether I wanted it to or not,” says Gina, 32. One can imagine our feminist forebears shaking their heads in disgust. For if The Feminine Mystique and Cosmo converged on one point, it’s that the modern woman isn’t just entitled to sex. She also wants it, enjoys it, and, by this point, should be pretty damned good at it. Today’s twenty and thirtysomethings are among the first American women to grow up operating under that assumption. Shouldn’t they, if anyone, be hopping into the sack. For some, monogamy becomes tougher if your single years conditioned you to expect different kinds of sex with different kinds of people. Newness, mystery, and novelty have always been an essential part of the turn-on; after a while, coming home to hubby, even if he’s Mr. In the heady, initial phase of love, “the brain chemicals are very much like those of women who have obsessive-compulsive disorder,” Meston says. You want to have sex constantly, and even being away from that person for a brief period can be depressing. But a few months later, each partner reverts back to his or her hormonal baseline. Your baseline drive compels you to want sex every night, while your partner turns out to be a oncea-weeker. Photo: Elinor Carucci TAGS: society and culture 1 2 3 Next Page /* =Lists */ol, ul { list-style: none; }ol. Sex Swings