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New York Times

Yes, Dear. Tonight Again.

By RALPH GARDNER Jr.
Published: June 8, 2008

LET’S say you and your spouse haven’t had sex in so long that you can’t remember the last time you did. Not the day. Not the month. Maybe not even the season. Would you look for gratification elsewhere? Would you file for divorce? Or would you turn to your mate and say, “Honey, you know, I’ve been thinking. Why don’t we do it for the next 365 days in a row?”

That’s more or less what happened to Charla and Brad Muller. And in another example of an erotic adventure supplanting married ennui, a second couple, Annie and Douglas Brown, embarked on a similar, if abbreviated journey: 101 straight days of post-nuptial sex.

Both couples document their exploits in books published this month, the latest entries in what is almost a mini-genre of books offering advice about the “sex-starved marriage.” The couples, though, are hardly similar. The Mullers are Bible-studying steak-eating Republicans from Charlotte, N.C. The Browns are backpacking multigrain northerners who moved to Boulder, Colo. The Mullers’ book, “365 Nights,” is rather modest and circumspect in its details. The Browns’ book, “Just Do It,” almost makes the reader feel part of a threesome, sharing everything they used to stimulate sexual desire (it’s hard to visualize and even harder to explain).

To many spouses, “married sex” may sound like an oxymoron. And “married-with-children sex” may sound like that elusive antimatter. Indeed, reigniting a couple’s desire for each other has fueled an entire therapeutic industry — from Kinsey to Dr. Ruth to Redbook. According to a 2004 study, “American Sexual Behavior,” by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, married couples have intercourse about 66 times a year. But that number is skewed by young marrieds, as young as 18, who couple, on average, 84 times a year.

Either way, those statistics put the Mullers and Browns in Olympic-record territory. That they thought a sex marathon would reinvigorate their marriages might say as much about the American penchant for exercise and goal-setting as it does about the state of romance.

But the couples may also be on to something. “There’s a strong relationship between rating your marriage as happy and frequency of intercourse,” said Tom W. Smith, who conducted the “American Sexual Behavior” study. “What we can’t tell you is what the causal relationship is between the two. We don’t know whether people who are happy in their marriage have sex more, or whether people who have sex more become happy in their marriages, or a combination of those two.”

Do these couples provide any answers? Did sex every single night make them happier in their marriages and in life?

Charla apparently had no intention of writing about “the gift,” as she euphemistically refers to it. She was simply a homemaker and marketing consultant, who in 2006 wanted to give her husband a special 40th birthday present.

“This is something no one else would give him,” she said in an interview. “It didn’t cost a lot of money. It was highly memorable. It met all the criteria for a really great gift.”

Brad was less than fully enthusiastic, mostly because, he says, his wife often has big ideas and poor follow-through. After all, she hadn’t been especially generous in that department since they’d had their two children. He paid closer attention when he realized that she was serious.

The book idea came up serendipitously. Charla had lunch with a friend, Betsy Thorpe, a former book editor and her eventual collaborator, who had relocated to Charlotte. She saw the stuff of literature in the couple’s nightly trysts (the women met three-quarters of the way through the Mullers’ annus mirabilis).

While “365 Nights” was written from the women’s perspective, “Just Do It” was written by the guy, Douglas Brown, a 42-year-old reporter at The Denver Post. Yet the change in gender doesn’t seem to affect the point of view, perhaps because Doug comes across as a sensitive male, and because the sexual marathon in 2006 was his wife’s idea, a way to banish suburban boredom after they moved to Boulder two years earlier from the East Coast.

“I thought we don’t have anything else going on,” Annie said in an interview. “It might kick-start our marriage.”

They changed venues frequently — a cabin on an ashram, a yurt in the Colorado Rockies, and in a hotel room in Las Vegas, where Doug was covering the annual adult-entertainment industry convention. “That’s why we scheduled all these little trips,” Annie said. “We knew it had the potential of getting monotonous.”

And were it not for her competitive zeal, their streak might have died well short of 100 days. Annie even forced her husband to have sex during a bout of vertigo. “I’m not a quitter,’ she said. “The night he had vertigo, I said, ‘I’m sorry, guy, but you’ve got to keep going.’”

Doug said in an interview that on their 101st day, he felt “sort of like you had some long-forgotten appointment to hear some tax attorney talk about estate planning.”

After that, he said, “I think we didn’t do it for a month.”

The Mullers, or at least Charla, hit a wall somewhere around the 10th month. In her book, she describes the gift then as “my stupid idea” and “a hidden cross to bear.” But they say they dropped out only a few days a month, mostly because of Brad’s business travel. They averaged 26 to 28 times a month.

“The spirit of the gift was not to keep score,” Ms. Muller said. “When he was traveling, we tried to make up for it, but it wasn’t mandatory.”

The women are regarded with admiration, if not always envy, by their girlfriends. “My first reaction was please don’t tell my husband,” said Sydney Coffin, a friend of Charla’s.

Annie Brown is now viewed as a de facto sex therapist by her peers. Her adventure even inspired her friend Diane Elliston to turn off the television in the bedroom. (The Browns had draped tasteful fabric over theirs.)

“We did it every day for three days in a row,” Ms. Elliston said.

APPROACHING sex as a marathon, with its own version of Heartbreak Hill, may not be the solution for every stagnating marriage. Lois Braverman, the president of the Ackerman Institute for the Family, cautioned against couples trying to keep up with the Mullers and Browns. “Some couples are totally satisfied with being sexual one night a week, some twice, some twice a month,” she said. “There’s no number of times that’s right.”

Shoshana Bulow, a psychotherapist and certified sex therapist in Manhattan, pointed out that sex is a lot more complicated than frequency. “There’s all sorts of reasons people lose interest in sex with their partner — disappointments, life cycles, financial issues,” she said. “Just having it isn’t going to resolve those.”

Nonetheless, sex every day seems to have worked for the Mullers and Browns. Charla Muller and Annie Brown both talk about how mandated physical intimacy created more emotional intimacy. “It required a daily kindness and forgiveness, and not being cranky or snarky, that I don’t think either of us had experienced before,” Charla said.

Annie said that she and her husband reached a place in their relationship that they have seldom approached since. “It was just this intense closeness,” she said. “We were so aware of wherever the other person was mentally and emotionally and physically.”

Today, the Browns report they have sex approximately six times a month, or double their frequency before their adventure. The Mullers decline to discuss their habits, except to say that they fall well within the national average. And, Brad said, the sex is better. “It made it much easier to be open to the idea, more spontaneous,” he said, “So you don’t go back to that always gaming for it and always trying to get out of it.”

Charla agrees: “It’s a lot better than it used to be. I may be slow to the take, but it was a really meaningful lesson.”

Douglas Brown suffers less stage fright than he once did. “There’s much less of a sense of having to perform,” he said. “After 100 days, that kind of melted away.”

All the same, he doesn’t recommend the experience to everyone.

“I’m glad we did it,” he said. “But as far as a practical message, nobody needs to do it 100 days. You don’t have to climb Mount Everest to understand alpine sublime.”