Back then, men had career goals, and women wanted those men. These days, women are bringing home the bacon, and one out of five married moms has a higher income than her husband. A recent business school survey showed more women defining success through work, while men chose personal growth as a priority. A common configuration in New York City is the alpha woman working at an executive-level position married to a guy who works at home on his computer, if he works at all. He picks the kids up from school and might do some household chores while Mommy has meetings and travels for work. Powerful woman, slacker husband. See, opposites really do attract.
Because nearly two-thirds of families have two working parents, it’s a toss-up to see who’s going to be doing which chores. My thinking is, some people are more or less meticulous about particular things, so you divide the chores accordingly. Fess up to each other about the housework you don’t mind doing. Owning up to your traits is one way to be more authentic in your relationship. Sharing earnings and household chores decreases the likelihood of divorce, unless the wife earns more than her husband—then they’re more likely to report marital troubles and consider separating. The best odds arise if the wife earns around 40 percent of the household income and the husband does about 40 percent of the housework.
Even though the egalitarian marriage creates higher emotional satisfaction and promotes longevity of a relationship, there is a casualty. Sex. On one hand, women surveyed made clear that marrying a man who was willing to help out with the child care and household chores mattered more than his level of income or his religious beliefs. We want to marry a housewife as much as they do. The problem is, we don’t want to have sex with the maid. It turns out that sexism is sexy. We want the men to do the manly chores, like taking out the garbage and maintaining the car. When our husbands are doing dishes and laundry, we’re less likely to have sex with them.
I can’t tell you how many of my patients are in sexless marriages, but it’s more than I ever would have thought. These are perfectly peaceful partnerships where the division of labor seems adequate, and there’s love and comfort there, just no sex for very long stretches—months or years. There’s a spark missing, a frisson between partners that’s required for animal coupling. One requirement for sexual energy is gender differentiation. You’re manly and I’m womanly and those opposites attract. In households with stay-at-home dads, it may be that he feels less confident without his “day job,” and his harried, working wife may start to lose some respect for his position. Men who take care of the children and the house may seem a little less manly to us when we finally plop into bed at night, even though we tell them how happy we are with the division of labor during the day. What’s the problem? Equality and “consensual everything” just isn’t sexy.
For many of us, part of what makes sex hot is shifts in power. Being controlled, dominated, or “taken” is a common factor in arousal. As much as we’re for women’s liberation, some habits die very hard, especially in the bedroom. There is often a direct correlation between being powerful outside the home, in the boardroom, and then wanting to be submissive in the bedroom. It may be that when a man spends his days loading the dishwasher according to his wife’s tutorial, or folding laundry just so, he’s got no more mojo for doing his wife to her specifications.
Then there’s resentment. So unsexy, and so common. Wives in my office regularly voice their complaints about how hard they work, how they don’t get the help and support they desire and deserve, and it’s impossible to ignore these discrepancies at the end of the day when they finally turn in. Sometimes the bedroom is the only place where we can say no and have it be a complete sentence.
The Seven-Year Itch Is Real
As might be expected, the longer a couple stays together, the more likely sexual infidelity will eventually happen, with a spike in the numbers around seven years of marriage. When gender is teased out, the timing differs. Women are more likely to cheat in their twenties and less likely in their fifties, while men are most likely to cheat in their thirties. The likelihood of an affair peaks in the seventh year of marriage for women and then ebbs from there. For men, the likelihood of an affair decreases over time, until the eighteenth year of marriage; then it increases. High-risk times for men straying tend to cluster around pregnancy and the months following the birth of a child. This may be psychological more than biological as men’s testosterone levels naturally recede a bit when they’re new dads. But if their needs for sex and attention aren’t being attended to, they may look elsewhere. For women, it’s all about fertility. Women may be more likely to cheat on their husbands when they’re ovulating, thanks to the surge in testosterone, the hormone of novelty.
Monogamy in Nature? Not So Much
Very few animals are actually sexually monogamous: 3 percent of mammals, and only one in ten thousand invertebrates. Pair-bonding is rare among mammals; only 3 percent rear their young in this way. “But what about penguins and swans?” you ask. Well, sorry to burst your bubble, but they don’t have sex with one partner forever. Penguins are monogamous only until their eggs hatch; the next year they choose new mates. Over his lifetime the “monogamous” penguin may have created two dozen families. And though they do pair-bond to raise their young, swan nests were found to have young from multiple fathers. In fact, when you look at the offspring of the few “monogamous” birds and mammals, infidelity is present in 100 percent of species examined. This is why I think of monogamy as unnatural. Not undesirable, not unattainable, but certainly not natural.
So let’s look at our own family tree, where the primates are. First of all, we didn’t descend from apes; we are apes. We are part of the same family, the great apes (Hominoidea) containing gorillas, orangutans, chimpanzees, bonobos, and humans. Chimps and bonobos (formerly called pygmy chimps) are our closest primate relatives. Female bonobos and chimps mate multiple times with multiple males in a row, raising children fathered by different males. Humans and bonobos, but not chimps, have missionary sex, face to face. We both kiss deeply and look into each other’s eyes when mating. We also both carry the genetic codes for oxytocin release, which helps to bond lovers. Chimps stick to rear entry; the female’s vulva faces back, not forward, as in bonobos and humans.
In bonobo troops, the female status matters more than the male status, with older females outranking the youngsters. Bonobos are significantly less aggressive than chimps. Sex is used to keep social order, and genital rubbing between female bonobos is common, used to solidify female bonding. It should be noted here that the bonobo clitoris is three times bigger than ours, taking up two-thirds of the vulva, and positioned optimally for ventral stimulation, so all that rubbing has a big payoff. Suffice to say, none of this matriarchy or genital rubbing to keep the peace is seen in chimps. Also, only humans and bonobos have a significant percentage of homosexual sex and, most important, have sex outside of ovulation, a rarity in the animal kingdom. Pair-bonded monogamous animals have infrequent sex and only for reproduction. Sex to keep the peace or solidify the relationship is not practiced.
Among all the social, group-living primates, monogamy is not the norm. The
