It's well documented that women get tired of monogamy long before men do. They may like the coziness of it but it's hard on their libiidos - which is one of the reasons that it seems like women aren't as interested in sex after marriage.
“Moving In With Your Boyfriend Can Kill Your Sex Drive” was how Newsweekdistilled a 2017 study of more than 11,500 British adults aged 16 to 74. It found that for “women only, lack of interest in sex was higher among those in a relationship of over one year in duration,” and that “women living with a partner were more likely to lack interest in sex than those in other relationship categories.”
Although most people in sexual partnerships end up facing the conundrum biologists call “habituation to a stimulus” over time, a growing body of research suggests that heterosexual women, in the aggregate, are likely to face this problem earlier in the relationship than men. And that disparity tends not to even out over time. In general, men can manage wanting what they already have, while women struggle with it.
And in four national surveys conducted between 1991 and 1996, women and men under the age of forty-five were basically neck and neck in the cheating game, while a 1992 survey found that American women aged eighteen to twenty-nine reported even more affairs than their male peers, and a more recent GSS found the same thing. Meanwhile, a 2017 study shows that among women aged twenty-five to twenty-nine, group sex and threesome experience equaled that of men the same age, and women were nearly twice as likely to have gone to a dungeon, BDSM, swingers’, or sex party, challenging the easy assumption that men are the naturally more sexually adventurous sex. Some experts believe this new gender parity in sexual autonomy and sexcapades, often referred to more broadly as “closing the infidelity gap,” might be due in part to more women being out in the workforce.
Martin, Wednesday. Untrue (pp. 41-42). Little, Brown and Company. Kindle Edition.
Walker explodes several of our most dearly held notions about female infidelity: that women cheat only when they are unhappy in their marriages; that unlike men, they seek emotional connection, not sexual gratification, from affairs; and that like Diane Lane’s character in Unfaithful, who literally falls and skins her knee, thus attracting the attention of the man with whom she has tryst after hot tryst, women “just” stumble into affairs. For Walker’s cohort, this was no case of having one too many at the holiday party and then somehow sleeping with a coworker. “These women weren’t just falling into it or seeking out companionship,” Walker told me flatly when we spoke on the phone one morning after she had bustled her daughter off to school.
They were also dead set on having affairs. “The women I studied went on the [Ashley Madison] site. Created a profile. Checked back in for responses. Vetted candidates. And then met them in person. Then they ‘auditioned’ them. This was a very intentional process,” Walker emphasized. They undertook it, they told Walker, because they wanted to find partners. For sex. Most of Walker’s study participants, who ranged in age from twenty-four to sixty-five, reported being in sexless or orgasm-less marriages and told Walker they simply wanted and needed what they couldn’t get at home. But perhaps most surprisingly, the majority of women in Walker’s sample reported that they were otherwise happily partnered or married, and that these affairs were a way for them to remain in their primary relationships. They were not looking for an exit strategy or a new husband. They did not seek emotional connection or companionship. They wanted a solution to a dilemma: they felt unable or were unwilling to end their sexless or sexually unsatisfying partnerships or marriages, but they also wanted great sex. After years of sexual deprivation and dissatisfaction and struggling to stay monogamous, the women, who described themselves as otherwise unremarkable, decided to do something about it.
Martin, Wednesday. Untrue (pp. 53-54). Little, Brown and Company. Kindle Edition.
