Marital Sex - Beliefs About Marital Sexuality, Sexual Frequency, The Decline Of Sexual Frequency Over Time, Sexual Practices And Preferences
Marriage is a socially sanctioned long-term mating arrangement that typically involves economic, social, and reproductive cooperation between the partners. Although the norms that govern selection of a marriage partner and the customs surrounding the marriage ceremony vary from culture to culture, all known human societies practice and endorse this type of long-term pairing (Daly and Wilson 1983; Goodwin 1999). Marriage and sexuality share an intimate and universal connection: Across cultures, marriage represents the most socially accepted, legitimate context for sexual intercourse. It is important to recognize that most research on marital (and other types of) sexuality has been conducted with participants from industrialized western European (particularly North American) societies. Very little data are available about the sexuality of men and women in non-Western and/or aboriginal or tribal cultures.
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There have been relatively few empirical investigations of marital sexual attitudes. However, several general conclusions can be gleaned from the available literature. First, sexual intercourse is considered part of the marital relationship. Historically, marriage has been defined by secular and nonsecular forces as a socially sanctioned sexual and reproductive relationship. During the seventeenth…
Rates of intercourse appear to have increased among married couples in recent decades. For example, pioneering sex researcher Alfred Kinsey and his colleagues (Kinsey et al. 1953) surveyed over eleven thousand men and women living in the United States during the late 1940s and early 1950s about a variety of sexual issues, including how often they had sex. The results of these large-scale surveys r…
The frequency with which couples engage in sex is affected both by the partners' ages and by the duration of their relationship. In general, older couples have sex less frequently than younger couples. For example, sociologist Vaughn Call and colleagues (1995) surveyed over six thousand married people living in the United States and reported that sexual activity was highest among the younge…
Married couples in today's society may not be having intercourse any more frequently than those living twenty or thirty years ago. However, they do seem to be engaging in a greater variety of sexual activities. For example, although vaginal inter-course remains the most common form of sexual expression among heterosexual couples (Laumann et al. 1994), a greater proportion report practicing …
The majority of modern North American couples expect that sexual activity will be pleasurable, and research indicates that most are in fact satisfied with the sexual aspects of their relationship. In a national survey of over 650 married couples, approximately one-third of the husbands and wives reported a "very great deal" of sexual satisfaction, and an additional one-third reported…
Another factor that is closely connected to sexual satisfaction in marital relationships is communication. Effective communication about sex—about expectations, preferences, attitudes, or standards—plays an important role in determining sexual satisfaction. One aspect of sexual communication that has received a great deal of attention from researchers is the initiation and refusal of…
Frequent, mutually rewarding sex, along with effective communication about sexual desires and preferences, clearly is associated with sexual satisfaction. In addition, all of these aspects of sexuality—frequency, practices and preferences, communication, and satisfaction—are related to nonsexual aspects of a couple's relationship. For example, there is a strong connection betw…
Across cultures, sexuality plays an important role in marital and other types of long-term, established relationships. The attitudes that partners hold about marital sexuality, the amount of sex that they have, their preferences and the kinds of sexual activities in which they engage, and how they communicate with each other about their needs and desires can have an enormous impact upon their leve…
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