How to Think More About Sex (The School of Life)

To rescue a long-term relationship from complacency and boredom, we might learn to effect on our spouse much the same imaginative transformation that Manet performed on his vegetables. We should try to locate the good and the beautiful beneath the layers of habit and routine. We may so often have seen our partner pushing a buggy, arguing with a toddler, crossly berating the electricity company and returning home defeated from the workplace that we have forgotten that dimension in him or her that remains adventurous, impetuous, cheeky, intelligent and, above all else, alive.

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Then again, if we have tried these solutions and they haven’t worked, if sex with our long-term partner remains a rare and less-than-dynamic event, how justified should we be in feeling surprised, annoyed and bitter?

Modern society will be apt to give full credence to our frustration: anything less than complete satisfaction smacks of compromise and capitulation. Frequent and fulfilling sex with a long-term partner is viewed as the norm, and any falling away from it as pathology. The sex-therapy industry, developed primarily in the United States during the second half of the twentieth century, has focussed most of its efforts on assuring us that marriage should be enlivened by constant desire. It was the pioneers of sexology, William Masters and Virginia Johnson, who first articulated the bold view that it was every married person’s ongoing right to enjoy good sex with his or her spouse, from the altar to the grave. In their bestselling Human Sexual Inadequacy (1970), they set out systematically to identify and provide antidotes for all the hurdles that a couple might face in their quest for this unending run of fulfilling sex: vaginismus, orgasmic dysfunction, dyspareunia, ejaculatory incompetence and the effects of aging.

Masters and Johnson equipped their book with helpful diagrams and kindly phrased suggestions about helpful exercises that couples might avail themselves of. Read today, their sober prose is fearless and in its own way impressive, in its dedication to dragging into the light some of the quiet intensities of human suffering. For a problem as old as time, for instance, the authors offered a practical and deeply sympathetic approach: