The declining female sex drive

Interestingly enough, it appears that it may actually be women who are the sex more bored by a lack of sexual variety over time than men:

The participants reported being generally satisfied with their relationships and sex lives, but women reported lower levels of desire depending on the length of their relationship. "Specifically, for each additional month women in this study were in a relationship with their partner, their sexual desire decreased by 0.02 on the Female Sexual Function Index," the authors wrote online Jan. 23 in the Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy.

In fact, relationship duration was a better predictor of sexual desire in women than both relationship and sexual satisfaction. While the 0.02 decrease in female desire was small, it contrasts with male desire, which held steady over time, the researchers said.

While I am always very skeptical of studies that rely not only upon self-reporting, but self-reporting by the least self-aware group of people on the planet, namely, college undergraduates, this would be potentially useful information if the conclusions hold up over time.

This is because men tend to take it to heart as a wife's sexual interest in him declines over time. He might try harder, thereby annoying her, he might attempt to freshen things up, thereby upsetting her, or after meeting with consistent failure no matter what he tries, he'll eventually give up in despair and subsist on a guilty mix of porn, prostitutes, biweekly missionary sex and the annual birthday blowjob.

But if it is true that the declining female interest in sex is the simple result of proximity and familiarity, then a man in a long-term relationship has one of two choices. He can either remove proximity on an occasional basis - this could be seen as a gentler variant of the Dread approach - or he can simply do as men always did prior to the advent of the so-called love marriage and arrange to burn off his excess desire in other venues. The third option is not presently legally permissible in most Western countries, but the long-term trends suggest that some form of polygamy will soon be legalized.

But more importantly, men will be able to make much more informed decisions about whether or not they want to make themselves entirely dependent upon someone whose sexual interest in them is likely to decline regularly over time. While it is far too soon to take these findings seriously, if science does eventually collect a sufficient amount of material evidence to render it a reliable fact, this has the potential to be as significant a game-changer in intersexual relations as reliable male contraception.