Super Marital Sex Rule: Super sex depends on sex roles that evolve within the relationship and are comfortable and acceptable to both partners, not predetermined by society or limited by prior experiences, fears, and a reluctance to be and feel the way one wishes. The roles should be mutually developed, never assigned or surrendered to, and will likely change throughout the marital life cycle. Stagnant, pre-assigned sex roles will severely limit fulfillment.
He doesn’t touch. He grabs. That’s men for you.
WIFE
She just cuddles. She doesn’t get it on, really get down to it. She’s like all women, I guess.
HUSBAND
American marriage continues to struggle with the prescribed roles of man and women in our society. “I chase him until he catches me.” “All women want is love, but they put up with sex.” “He’ll trade a little love for a lot of sex.” These and other cliches were reported by the husbands and wives, and such preconceptions of role assignment severely limited the evolution of a balanced sexual interaction in marriage. It resulted in someone getting made love “to” or “for” and someone doing the “making” of love.
The original Kinsey studies of male and female sexuality indicated that marriage was often accompanied by a diminishing of orgasms for women and a turning to prostitution and affairs for men. It was as if the couples were taking part in a predestined gender dance of a sexist courtship, sexual trade-offs matched to expected roles, self-fulfilling prophecies, conceptions, maternal investment and paternal distance, inevitable decline of sexual interest, and extramarital sex primarily for the man as some form of genetic inevitabilty.
Dr. Donald Symons at the University of California at Santa Barbara suggests that women have a stronger evolutionary investment in the conceptive aspects of sexuality and that they provide the larger “mass” of procreation, the egg. Men contribute only little naked pieces of DNA with tails. He implies that men act somewhat like their sperm: quick, attacking, mobile, and low on investment Women act out their “egg” orientation: stable, receptive, committed, and selective.
Does it have to be this way? Will men always have to contribute a little for a lot and women a lot for a little? Are we victims of some mammalian script? As one sociobiologist had suggested, are our genes wearing us? Can we break away to a more egalitarian interaction between husband and wife? If we cannot, American marriage will continue to de-eroticize, because conceptive and genetic imperatives will have been met and marriage will become a state of maintenance in the evolutionary scheme of things.
Certainly, there is little value for intimacy when human-eating animals lurked behind us as we copulated. Get together, get it on, get out, and live to copulate again. The stress of our modern world seems to create symbolic human eaters and we behave from our neurohormonal past patterns, with men as hunters and women who are kept and who raise the children. Intimacy then plays the role of providing a place for child-rearing, not for providing sexual fulfillment for the cave owners. Are we victims of this mammalian past, or do we have a choice?
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