Make Love Not Dinner: Why Putting Sex Back on the Menu Will Help Your Relationship

"Sex isn’t just about sex but about creating a physical bond, a closeness that is crucial in our hectic world," says psychologist Paula Nicolson. Making love, regardless of whether you are in the mood, can improve your relationship.

... For sex therapist Bettina Arndt, the question of whether or not we should be moving physical intimacy closer to the top of that to-do list is increasingly pertinent in a society of spiralling divorce rates. Last year, the highly respected psychotherapist asked 98 couples – from 20-year-old students to those who’d been married for more than 40 years – to keep intimate sex diaries in which they recorded every detail of their behaviour in the bedroom.

The diary results were both poignant and compelling. While women wrote of their dismay and resentment at being ‘pestered’ for sex, most men, she discovered, forlornly documented the fact that they were continually refused sex by their wives, feeling trapped in a sexless marriage where physical intimacy was doled out, as Arndt puts it, ‘like meaty bites to a dog’. Read more