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Title: Sorry, but marriage and sex DON'T go together
Source:
www.dailymail.co.uk
URL Source: http:///pages/live/femail/article.h ... icle_id=510248&in_page_id=1879
Published: Jan 25, 2008
Author: SADIE NICHOLAS
Post Date: 2008-01-25 12:55:39 by Ferret Mike
Keywords: None
Views: 358
Comments: 37
Carrie Jones hasn't had sex with her husband Hal, a City banker, for the past four years. Nor does she want to. Sex is something she can no longer summon the effort to endure - with the man she married, at least. She admits she stays in her sexless relationship for the sake of her children, aged nine and 11, and will remain celibate until the day they are grown up and she feels able to leave. At which point, she confesses, she will probably abandon her husband and begin a sexual odyssey to find the satisfaction that eludes her. An unusual case? A sorry lack of libido? She insists not. "If I thought I was unique in my sexual disappointment I'd probably be suicidal," muses Carrie, 45, a publishing executive, who lives in North London with Hal and their children. "I remember the first time my girlfriends and I admitted that we all felt the same about married sex as parents: we couldn't be bothered with it and felt guilty for not wanting to sleep with our husbands. It was a revelation. I remember thinking: 'Thank God! It's not just me!' "Now I believe there are thousands of other married women who would love to admit sex isn't all it's cracked up to be. But, if the constant cliches in women's magazines and chick-lit are to believed, we should all be enjoying prowess in the boardroom and swooning every night in the bedroom. "It's the great taboo that no one dares admit - that sex is often a let-down." So convinced is Carrie that her experience of sex in marriage - initially pleasant, dwindling to nothing at all after having children - is a universal one that she has just written a book, under an assumed name, highlighting the disappointment of her sex life. "It's a sort of 'Frigid Jones' Diary'," she laughs, though she is not joking. "I want to break the taboo. Sex frequently isn't the chandelier-swinging experience that certain authors would have us believe is every woman's rite of passage. "For me, the sense of being special to Hal faded away just as it did with previous boyfriends. I became obsessed with agony columns, poring over letters talking of boring marriages and the temptation of affairs and willing just one agony aunt to advise someone to run off with a lover. "Of course, they never did. It was always: 'Go and work at your marriage.' But I didn't want to work on mine. I wanted someone to say: 'Actually, perhaps nothing will make you want to sleep with your husband again,' which is how I feel. "I've made my choice. For now I'm caught up in marriage's net, bound up with responsibilities to my children. My interest in sex with the person I was supposed to be closest to has died. I could leave but for now I'll wait because of the desolation it would wreak on my family. "I want to maintain the family unit because it makes other things possible, like doing things together with the children. But one day, when they are older and I can think about my own needs again, I may leave and start all over again. "In the meantime, I want to tell other women that they are not alone in not wanting to have sex with their long-term partners. I don't think it's possible to maintain the passion of the initial chase. But it doesn't mean you won't experience those feelings again with someone else." She may be considering an extreme - some would say distasteful and selfish - course of action for the future but Carrie's upbringing was very conventional. A Cambridge graduate, she was raised in Yorkshire, the only child of teacher parents whose marriage, she says, "was pretty dull". She and Hal were introduced by friends when they were both 33, and she admits that they "clicked brilliantly". They had sex up to five times a week before having children. But like her previous experiences, the longer the relationship lasted, the more disappointing it became. "The problem is that sex in a long-term relationship inevitably becomes less alluring as domesticity sets in," she says. "Hal and I were very well suited in terms of our personalities and common interest in books, music, art and films but we never had the kind of wild, passionate sex that leaves you wanting more. "Like most successful long-term partnerships, our relationship wasn't built on sex or passion. At best, sex was simply fine." But even the "fine" sex Carrie recalls was soon replaced by despondency once the couple's first child was born. "I did the middle-class mother thing in a big way," she says. "I gave up my career, breast-fed each child for a year and spent my days in a dizzy whirl of playgroups and coffee mornings. "I'd flipped from wife to mother, and it gave me excuses - often genuine - to cold-shoulder my husband's sexual advances. He knew I was tired from the children and was always very understanding. He's an unusually kind and tolerant man." Indeed he must be. Certainly, once the first flush of love and lust gives way to familiarity, domesticity and parenthood, few would argue that making love is the wanton adventure it was. But Carrie goes one step further. She believes that marriage and motherhood are simply not conducive to having a sex life at all. "Providing a stable home for children is totally incompatible with having an exciting sex life. The two things are violently at odds," she adds. "After umpteen years with the same person, sex is bound to get boring. Some people put themselves first, have affairs or simply leave their marriages in search of sexual adventure. "I've chosen to sacrifice sexual thrills in order to do the right thing by my kids." But a martyr Carrie isn't, and surely Hal does not feel she is doing the right thing by him. The couple still share a bed, though physical contact is strictly off limits. "We've never discussed the demise of our sex life," she says. "It was more a case of reaching a low ebb of energy on my part. "For a long time I didn't even realise it was the end of marital sex for us. But when years have passed, you realise it ended a long time ago." Unbelievably, her poor, unsuspecting husband is not only unaware of her plans to leave him. He also, she insists, has no idea that she has written a book or posed for these pictures. She seems as confident of him not finding out as she is that he is understanding of her feelings. For when asked whether she worries that Hal may seek sexual gratification elsewhere, she says: "I'm not concerned. I don't think that would happen. It's not Hal's fault that I wish to remain celibate; it's nothing he's said or done. He's a good man and a great dad. It's just that I don't want to be intimate with him any more." Such cold words must leave her husband reeling? She insists not. "There's a general understanding between us that I'm keeping the family unit together," she says. "Children need to be brought up by parents in a monogamous marriage. I wouldn't want to blow that apart, and I certainly wouldn't want the burden of being a single parent. "I know from taking the kids on holiday on my own once when Hal was working that having sole responsibility for them is exhausting." So what of her sexual history? It seems that Carrie wasn't always this uninterested in sex. She admits to having 23 lovers before she married. "Ten were proper boyfriends," she recalls. "I regretted having sex with six of them, loved three of them but only one of the 23 ever gave me an orgasm. "As I entered my thirties, it was obvious my sex life had a recurring, rather depressing pattern: intense desire to begin with followed, if the relationship survived long enough, by a slow winding down into indifference. "Only an affair with a married man called John bucked the trend. But that was doomed by its very nature." Five years ago, Carrie almost cheated on her husband after regaining contact with an old flame on the website Friends Reunited. "I nearly lost my virginity to Mark when we were 17, but my mother arrived home as we enjoyed a fumble in my bedroom," she recalls. "He was gorgeous, looked like a man even back then in his school uniform, and remained in my consciousness for all those years. "When I looked on Friends Reunited, it was an enormous thrill just to find Mark's name. I e-mailed him immediately. He replied with an update on his life and said he was single - I was intoxicated. "We began to exchange flirtatious emails, then text messages and phone calls which became increasingly fraught with sexual tension. "After a few months of tantalising cyber sex, I booked a flight to go and see him in Germany, where he was living, over Easter 2003. But between booking the flight and the departure date, Mark found a girlfriend. I was distraught, my hopes of sexual adventure dashed." Did Carrie not feel an ounce of guilt about her plans to cheat on Hal? "I had been feeling so sour about my sex life with Hal. "But, back in contact with Mark, I suddenly discovered that my sexual urge wasn't dead as I had feared, just dormant. "It was glorious to feel aroused again, and those feelings blocked out any guilt I might otherwise have felt about Hal. "For the few months that Mark and I flirted online, I had two existences: one where I cooked and cleaned and went frigidly to bed at night. And another where I had butterflies in my stomach and stole off to write sexy, flirty emails and text messages to a man I hadn't seen for more than 20 years." Eventually Carrie was forced to confess her feelings about Mark to her husband after he discovered the email exchanges between the two on her computer. Astonishingly, Hal comforted her while she sobbed and, she says, for a short time the pair were closer and more able to talk. "But as time went on, it became clear this was just an interlude in our marriage rather than a permanent change," admits Carrie. "The old coldness returned and, since then, I have been unable to have sex with my husband." Such a sorry tale of a sexless, unfulfilling marriage is in stark contrast to the current throng of writers littering the Amazon book charts with jaw-dropping memoirs of lurid sex lives. Carrie admits that part of her envies those authors who claim to be having lots of sex and, more significantly, love it. The other part of her just doesn't believe them. "I do wonder if they are just writing what they think the audience wants to hear," she says. "I read their accounts of wild sex lives and then ponder my own sexual encounters and wonder: 'Where was the fun, the screaming ecstasy, the fireworks?'" Perhaps when her children are grown up, Carrie will do as she intends and leave her marriage. Only then will she know whether the fantasy of taking in multiple lovers and never committing to one man is a greater thrill than being in a monogamous marriage. • Cutting Up Playgirl: A Cheerful Memoir Of Sexual Disappointment, by Carrie Jones, published by Old Street on February 15, £8.99.
Poster Comment: I'd sure hate to be this one's hubby.
Carrie Jones: 'Providing a stable home for children is totally incompatible with having an exciting sex life'
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#1. To: Ferret Mike (#0)
Thanks. This explains my wife's 20 year headache.
If that's a real picture of her I'd be impotent myself.
Kittens aren't biscuits just because a cat gives birth in an oven.
"It does not take a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority, keen on setting brush fires of freedom in the minds of men." -- Samuel Adams (1722-1803)‡
"It does not take a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority, keen on setting brush fires of freedom in the minds of men." -- Samuel Adams (1722-1803)‡
A friends wife did that and moved in with another "female" and have lived happily ever after. Of course when she left she took him to the cleaners leaving him with nothing, now she and sweetie are a loving couple.
Wife threw away the jar huh???? Damn. Sad.
"It does not take a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority, keen on setting brush fires of freedom in the minds of men." -- Samuel Adams (1722-1803)‡
Just keep telling yourself that. "If a man isn't getting it at home, he'll get it somewhere else." - My grandfather. I do feel sorry for the man married to her, it will be very difficult to explain to the children why mommy is unable to love other people and puts self gratification about true feelings.
"The more I see of life, the less I fear death" - Me.
Here's where I expect we'll read about her next: Female Sex Tourists Hard On Scuba Instructors With Small Dinghies Thousands of 50+ British women are going to the Caribbean and elsewhere to hook up with the beach boys of the islands.
“I would give no thought of what the world might say of me, if I could only transmit to posterity the reputation of an honest man.” - Sam Houston
We build up too much expectation with sex. It is something that adds to a relationship, and it isn't meant to be a competition to see who can do it best or enjoy it the most. She is the one here who lacks the most perspective, though some of what she says is interesting. Ireland's clergy like to promote "Mom-ism," where the man and wife are to live as bro and sis giving up doing 'the nasty.' It is their answer to the support to have legal diverse in that country. She should go see a therapist. Too bad she didn't do it before becoming the Ms Frigid icon of Great Britain.
Looks wouldn't prevent someone from doing that. My mother could have been re-married half a dozen times over the last few years. Not because she is "hot," but because under her rough exterior (brought on by a rather harsh life) is a very kind and loving person. This woman though? Forget it. She wants nothing beyond instant gratification. I guess this tweaks me off so much because this woman sounds like a female version of my father. A near perfect relationship where my wife works, cooks, cleans, raises the kids, and never has a headache. He threw it all away because he was "bored." It's stuff like this that keeps me single and hiding in my bunker of solitude.
"The more I see of life, the less I fear death" - Me.
Hee hee, you forgot about the part where they moved to a lesbian Mecca like Eugene, Oregon, bought a gentrified old house in the Whiteaker Neighborhood to show how politically conscious they are and lived happily ever after with a garden and solar panels to boot. Seen that happen before; hard not to as I live in an unofficial West Coast capital of women couples. ;-)
This "lady" moved in with the "lady" next door and when they cleaned out their husbands, they took the children and left living happily ever after. My friend moved to Maine to get as far away as possible and started over again.
"It does not take a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority, keen on setting brush fires of freedom in the minds of men." -- Samuel Adams (1722-1803)‡
I'd get drunk and make a pass at Barney the Dinosaur's girl friend before romancing that one. I believe the setting on the beer goggles to make her pretty is in the red fatal dose of alcohol zone.
"It does not take a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority, keen on setting brush fires of freedom in the minds of men." -- Samuel Adams (1722-1803)‡
"It does not take a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority, keen on setting brush fires of freedom in the minds of men." -- Samuel Adams (1722-1803)‡
Which reminds me of a joke. What kind of food makes a woman stop having sex? Wedding cake!
Ouch. I've had a fling with an orthodox feminist before - one who calls men the inseminator class of primates currently. She went through a series of irrational angry moments. Example: she wanted the floor in the bedroom sanded and refinished, which I said would be fine; as long as she waited five weeks until I had the time to do this and can do well. But no, I came home and she had started gouging the floor with a cheap sander she had found and I just put my schedule into the stress zone doing that chore before she did even more damage. I probably would have been better off getting her drunk and shipping her off to Antarctica to be a penguin's mail order bride then to gently ease her out of my life as I did. She ripped off a bunch of stuff and tried to assassinate my reputation in the hood by complaining to the local political left wing matriarchy here in town. a group who really really hate men with a passion and live to show this in everything they do. I truly hate that woman's guts. But a can laugh now, a guy like her only with more anti-social talent then her did unto her far worse then she did to me. IT was fun to watch happen.
The woman sounds like she has mental problems as well as moral ones. lack of character and completely self-obsessed. sad.
"I don't know where Bin Laden is. I truly am not that concerned about him" funny :P
The only solution to this mess is to dig a hole big enough to nudge them all in and cover quickly
A remember a coworker, who used to share with us the orgasm competition she and her husband had every week. They were Cuban, and I thought maybe this was a cultural thing. Later I realized that probably had nothing to do with it. Of course then I began to wonder what's so healthy about Cuban cooking ;P
Ron Paul for President - Join a Ron Paul Meetup group today! The Revolution will not be televised! Doesn't is smell a lot like Red Lobster?
How was she in the sack, assuming you pile drove her?
What did the blind man say as he walked past the fish market?
"Good afternoon, ladies!"
"There is a Providence that protects idiots, drunkards, children and the United States of America." - Otto von Bismarck
I would be willing to bet that they don't have a television in their bedroom. The three years that we did, my wife and I almost forgot about how much fun sex was. Now that we are both retired, we are certainly more 'active' than when we worked everyday.
Ye gads! That chick from the 'X-Files' went downhill pretty fast...
These dumb bitches spend their days watching "Sex and the City" and "Desperate Housewives" and then wonder why their lives aren't like the make-believe crap that they watch on TV. Maybe they should realize that being an adult is about responsibility rather than endless fun and games.
The lack of energy is common. One doctor estimated that 25% of the population is thyroid deficient. My blood pressure is 90 over 65 without a thyroid supplement. With a thyroid supplement it is 122 over 78. The women who are low in thyroid can be overweight as this woman is. Some also lack a sex drive. Dr. Steve Langer identified 122 medical conditions caused by a thyroid deficiency. Good to see you posting again Pissed Off Janitor.
The Truth of 911 Shall Set You Free From The Lie
What's the difference between a dog and a fox? A six-pack.
Kittens aren't biscuits just because a cat gives birth in an oven.
Face reminds me of Grandfather Clock on Captain Kangaroo. Forty five?? Kee-ryst.
Linda Tripp's hot-looking sister.
You've heard of Butter-face? That's Buttah-face.
Advance to clit-lick for some real relief and satisfaction. This is not medical advice - it is for your entertainment purposes only.
Join the Ron Paul Revolution I almost spit my Synder pretzel on the screen.
"There are indeed two political parties in the US. The state-lovers and the freedom-lovers." - ghostdogtxn
What goes around...
"There are indeed two political parties in the US. The state-lovers and the freedom-lovers." - ghostdogtxn
#2. To: Ferret Mike (#0)
#3. To: Ferret Mike (#0)
#4. To: Ferret Mike (#0)
#5. To: Ferret Mike (#0)
She admits she stays in her sexless relationship for the sake of her children, aged nine and 11, and will remain celibate until the day they are grown up and she feels able to leave.
#6. To: ghostdogtxn (#4)
#7. To: Cynicom (#6)
#8. To: Ferret Mike (#0)
For when asked whether she worries that Hal may seek sexual gratification elsewhere, she says: "I'm not concerned. I don't think that would happen. It's not Hal's fault that I wish to remain celibate; it's nothing he's said or done. He's a good man and a great dad. It's just that I don't want to be intimate with him any more."
#9. To: ghostdogtxn (#3)
#10. To: ghostdogtxn (#3)
#11. To: ghostdogtxn (#3)
As for this dog's "fantasy of taking multiple lovers..." I don't think she's taken an honest look in a mirror in a while, Mike.
#12. To: Cynicom (#5)
#13. To: Ferret Mike (#12)
#14. To: Sam Houston (#9)
#15. To: YertleTurtle (#2)
"If that's a real picture of her I'd be impotent myself."
#16. To: Ferret Mike (#10)
#17. To: Pissed Off Janitor (#11)
#18. To: Ferret Mike (#0)
#19. To: Cynicom (#13)
(Edited)
"This "lady" moved in with the "lady" next door and when they cleaned out their husbands, they took the children and left living happily ever after."
#20. To: Ferret Mike (#0)
George W, Bush, 3/13/02 http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/03/20020313-8.html
#21. To: Ferret Mike (#15)
I believe the setting on the beer goggles to make her pretty is in the red fatal dose of alcohol zone.
#22. To: Ferret Mike (#10)
We build up too much expectation with sex. It is something that adds to a relationship, and it isn't meant to be a competition to see who can do it best or enjoy it the most.
I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it.-T Jefferson
#23. To: Ferret Mike (#12)
live in an unofficial West Coast capital of women couples. ;-)
#24. To: Ferret Mike (#19)
I truly hate that woman's guts.
#25. To: Sodie Pop (#23)
#26. To: Fred Mertz (#25)
What did the blind man say as he walked past the fish market?
#27. To: robin (#22)
A remember a coworker, who used to share with us the orgasm competition she and her husband had every week. They were Cuban, and I thought maybe this was a cultural thing. Later I realized that probably had nothing to do with it. Of course then I began to wonder what's so healthy about Cuban cooking ;P
#28. To: Ferret Mike (#0)
Remember...G-d saved more animals than people on the ark. www.siameserescue.org
#29. To: Ferret Mike (#0)
#30. To: Pissed Off Janitor, Cynicom, Ferret Mike, ghostdogtxn (#8)
#31. To: Ferret Mike (#15)
I believe the setting on the beer goggles to make her pretty is in the red fatal dose of alcohol zone.
#32. To: Ferret Mike (#0)
#33. To: Ferret Mike (#0)
#34. To: Ferret Mike (#0)
#35. To: Ferret Mike (#0)
chick-lit
Freedom*Peace*Prosperity
#36. To: Ferret Mike (#15)
I believe the setting on the beer goggles to make her pretty is in the red fatal dose of alcohol zone.
#37. To: Ferret Mike (#19)
can laugh now
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