Sorry, but marriage and sex DON'T go together (British wife's book)

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!'

Carrie Jones: 'Providing a stable home for children is totally incompatible with having an exciting sex life'

"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.

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."

"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.

Timm, excellent points. Sounds like some personal experience or pain, too.

The woman makes the first move, but that doesn't mean there is no response from the husband, or the woman becomes his slave. Remember that old photo of how complicated a man is, and how complicated a woman is? The man had one single switch, and the woman had 100? The point is that once the woman makes the move, the man gushes back in response. One of the earlier posters to my comment affirmed this. Catilin Flanagan says that a woman shouldn't have to "put out to get that new refrigerator she's always wanted" but there is a small element of truth to it.

The other element here is that sex withing today's marriage has evolved to not an essential, like food and breathing, but an option. And the woman doesn't give in unless he made her 100% happy prior to bedtime. If he came home grumpy, didn't put one of the kids to bed, spent an extra 30 minutes watching ESPN, didn't rinse his own dishes, and forgot to fold his own laundry, then by gosh the little woman was not going to going to be in the mood for his advances. The feminist movement affirms this refusal. What's more, if he persists, the little woman can charge him with rape.

Dr Laura and Caitlin F say this is the wrong attitude. That after 20 or so years, the sexual need is not balanced, yet the key to a healthy marriage is to not let the man go sex-starved, mostly because the woman has an underlying anger about the little things. If he's basically a decent man, if he is "provisioned" with extra sex, then hopefully he compensates her with the little fillips that she loves -- flowers, new appliances, jewelry, weekends away, maybe even more effort around the house. And Flanagan says that once the woman doesn't make sex conditional, she actually starts enjoying it again.

A previous poster provided a link to Caitlin's article, and Dr Laura's book is an easy read. If these are real time issues for you, suggest you read them.

Sorry, this is a man's perspective. But before giving up on your marriage, or living with a simmering anger for more months or years, suggest you give this a try.

If you're Christian you might want to look up Nancy Missler's testimonies about this topic. She mentioned starting to wear nicer dresses, making delicious dinners, and trying to look more feminine. To a feminist, these are major concessions, but in reality they are very little. And it turned her husband around, and their marriage around, after a very stressful time in their marriage.

Rereading your post, there is one more comment I can make. Suppose the wife gives in, but he doesn't change. Here's what I would recommend. Change the attitude. Of course he'll be surprised. Maybe he'll ask why, maybe not. If he does, just say that you've been talking with friends and you felt a little guilty about not understanding his needs well enough, and that you will make yourself available to him. But don't demand a reply, and certainly don't let him suspect you have an agenda.

See if something happens naturally. Ask him to help you fold laundry the morning after a fun night.

But hold him lovingly -- and I do mean lovingly -- accountable a few weeks later. Ask him if he really understands why you've changed your attitude. Tell him you are praying -- not demanding, but praying and hoping -- that, now that you have fulfilled one of his open needs, he will backfill one of yours.

It's important here to make no threats, or to not make him feel that if he gives you the wrong answer, or no answer, that you'll pull away again.

If your husband is a decent man, he can't not respond positively.

My wife and I went through a version of this. The cold war, months without sex, anger. Then I read the Flanagan article and the Dr Laura book. I put them on her pillow and begged her to read them, and we both underlined them extensively and wrote comments in the margin.

I was the one reaching out. I told her that I had probably had underlying anger about sex 90% of the time since our first child was born 10 years earlier. I told her that I couldn't guarantee it, but that if she could find a way to lovingly love me a couple times a week, then I hope my anger would basically go away.

I didn't threaten her with leaving. I had already committed to stay with her for life and that never entered the discussion. I know she respected me for not trying to threaten or make conditional my words.

Sorry for the long-winded reply. Good luck and God bless. Give your husband another chance.

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