Surely all life is about is finding the Heer to your Ranjha, the Aishwarya to your Abhishek?
Sex. Nookie. Love-making. Intercourse. Bumping uglies – call it what you will, but there’s no denying that sex plays a huge part in society. It’s thrust in our faces 24/7 and it’s especially important when you’re in a relationship.
Sex has many obvious benefits, but as good as sex in a relationship can be, can bad sex ruin it? Sure, sex is just sex to some people, but you cannot ignore that terrible sexual intercourse with someone that you love can be a massive turn off.
A quick Google search for tips on how to spice up a flagging relationship brings back an abundance of sex tips to impress your lover.
Stripteases, role plays, threesomes – the internet is rife with ways to satisfy and arouse your partner, to keep them both happy and interested. But surely sex isn’t that important?
Apparently it is – it is scientifically proven that truly awful sex has a negative impact on a relationship, for men at least. A study carried out by Kristina Dzara at Southern Illinois University aimed to examine the role of sex in marriage.
Dzara used the Marriage Matters Panel Survey of Newly Wed Couples that followed over 1000 couples in Louisiana from 1998 to 2004. The average age of the wives was 28, and the husbands, 30.
She also used three measures of sexuality in the first three to six months of marriage. These were the frequency of sexual intercourse and sexual satisfaction. Dzara used these measures to predict divorce by the 5th year of marriage.
What Dzara discovered was that women felt that although satisfaction with physical intimacy decreased the likelihood of divorce, marital quality and sexual satisfaction couldn’t be teased apart.
When it came to the men, the probability of divorce was dramatically reduced where the husband reported to being sexually satisfied. Dzara stated:
“A couple with a husband who has the highest self-rated satisfaction with physical intimacy, compared to a husband with the lowest self-rated satisfaction with physical intimacy, decreases their odds of experiencing a marital disruption by around 83.7%.”
Sure, it may not be the be all and end all, but sex plays a fundamental role in our physical and mental wellbeing. Sex is widely regarded as a way to make us feel wanted.
All humans crave the need to be desired – surely all life is about is finding the Heer to your Ranjha, the Aishwarya to your Abhishek?
Everything from magazines to television, music to advertising tell us on a daily basis that you have to be sexy to get anywhere in life – billboards constantly show gorgeous young models in a state of undress advertising everything from coffee to cars, screaming out at you with their airbrushed, perfect beauty that yes, they’re stunning and yes, they’re getting more sex than you and yes, it is a-ma-zing.
Quite simply, sex sells and we as a nation continuously buy into this notion that if we drink this brand of coffee or drive this make of car then we will also encounter with it amazing, earth-shattering, ground-breaking sex that will make us question just how we lived without it before. But how much of this is truth? Does more sex really equal more happiness?
Perhaps that would explain why millions of men and women worldwide watch pornography – you’d be hard pressed to find a porno that depicts miserable looking people engaging in rubbish sex.
They always look happy, like they’re having the best sex of their lives. But porn can give people unrealistic expectations of what sex should be like, or about the kind of sex that they should be having.
A recent survey by the Journal of Sexual Medicine concluded that subjects that admitted to watching a lot of porn took more sick days and were more depressed than those who didn’t claimed they didn’t watch any.
The effects of watching porn in relationships was also pinpointed – a Norwegian study of almost 400 couples concluded that 15 per cent of couples said they both used porn, in 8 per cent of couples, one partner used porn and the other didn’t, and 77 per cent of couples reported no porn use.
Couples where both partners used porn were the happiest in the bedroom and were the most open about their fantasies and desires, with the least sexual dysfunction compared to the other groups.
However, when only one partner watched pornography, men in this group reported being the least sexually aroused, with the women having the lowest levels of self-esteem. The study showed that porn could be the root of the problem, but people could also be turning to erotica to compensate for existing issues. The consensus seemed to be that although porn is fine and can even be beneficial for your relationship, you shouldn’t substitute real intimacy and affection with virtual sex.
We live in a society where computers, tablets, televisions and even smartphones can be a replacement for a bit of rough-and-tumble, but it’s worth remembering that nothing can replace real sex.
Remember, if it’s sex with someone you have feelings for, chances are is that it’ll always be great. And if not, you can have a hell of a lot of fun getting them to improve – just don’t let it ruin your relationship. After all, it’s just a physical act. Whether the cause is reproduction or recreation – sex is just sex, but it is an important aspect of any healthy relationship.
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