Sex: 1% vs. 99%

I'm not a researcher; I'm not citing official studies or statistics; I am merely giving my opinion based on my lifetime of experiences. Sex is the smallest part of a relationship, smallest based on the percentage of overall time spent with your partner. For the sake of argument, let's peg this at 1% for sex, 99% for everything else. In looking at such a ratio, I have discovered a couple of oddities.

Sex is important, really, really, really important to a successful relationship. A bad 1% can have an enormous adverse effect on the other 99%. I would sometimes argue that the 1% of sex has 99% of the importance in a relationship. Why such importance? While I know it is possible to live without sex, I would very much categorize sex as one of the primordial urges and living without it, if not difficult, is unhealthy and in my opinion unnatural.

On the other hand, we spend 99% of our time with our partner not having sex. In considering such a vast amount of time, we had better make sure we have something more in common than just sex or we're going to have quite a time maintaining a healthy relationship. In fact, we could just end up bored out of our minds!


Of course, there are many variations on a theme, many exceptions to the rule and I'm sure that there are all sorts of situations which don't quite fit the above model. If I google the expression "sexless marriage", I find courtesy of Dr. Phil's web site:

• Married couples say they have sex an average of 68.5 times a year. That's slightly more than once a week. — Newsweek
• 15 to 20 percent of couples have sex no more than 10 times a year, which experts define as a sexless marriage. — Newsweek

I suppose that I could therefore conclude that 80% of married couples are normal or at least are at this so called normal level of frequency and normal is defined as about once a week. If I translate once a week into 52 days, out of a 365 day year, I get

52 days divided by 365 days times 100 = 14%

14% being a percentage a tad higher than the 1% I started with above. However, if I switch everything to hours, assigning 2 hours for sex

52 times 2 hours (1 session of sex) divided by 365 days times 24 hours times 100 =

104 hours divided by 8,760 hours times 100 = 1%

I have returned, as you can see to my ratio of 1% vs. 99%.

What are the exceptions to this rule? What may be the extremes? I will leave that question as a curiosity for further discussion returning rather to the question of the normal where the majority of us lie, no pun intended. :-)

2010-06-06

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