Hubbie gets sex every day for a year

Tag : Brad Point Bits

WHEN Charla Muller told her friends what she was giving her husbandBrad for his 40th birthday, she was met with a variety of responses- none remotely positive.
One thought she might have been going through a mid-life crisis ofher own when she came up with the idea. Another questioned hersanity, and yet another asked bluntly: 'Were you drunk when youthought of this?'

What on earth could the gift have been? A particularly hideous pairof cufflinks that light up in the dark? A speedboat so expensivethat it required selling the house? A session with a lapdancer? No,it was worse.

On the eve of Brad's birthday, Charla told him that his present wasgoing to be sex with her every day for a year. She had wracked herbrains to think of a gift that was original, intimate and - mostimportantly - memorable.

'I never wanted him to look back and ask himself: "Now, whatwas it Charla bought me for my 40th?"' she says. 'When I cameup with the idea of daily sex for a year, I thought I'd hit thejackpot. What man wouldn't think that was the best present ever?'

What a pity not everyone - actually, not anyone, if we are beingtruthful - agreed.

'To be honest, I didn't tell my friends what I'd got him untilhalfway through the year,' says Charla. 'When I did, they were justincredulous, with most thinking that I was quite mad.

'One girlfriend said I must never, ever tell her husband what I wasdoing in case he got any ideas.

'What they took issue with most was the timescale. Some could seethe merits in offering their husband daily sex for a week, perhapsa month. But a year? It was unthinkable.'

More disappointingly for Charla, the mother of two young children,even Brad thought the idea was a bit, well, unrealistic.

She had been expecting whoops of delight and much punching of theceiling when she told him of his gift. Instead, she got sheerbafflement.

'Then, to my horror, he declined the whole thing, saying that hedidn't want me to feel that I had to have sex with him - like itwas some sort of duty,' says Charla. 'He actually walked away fromme, saying we would discuss it later. I was quite deflated.'

Gosh, it is hard being a wife sometimes. All that effort and no oneappreciates it. Still, Charla wasn't that easily dissuaded.

She eventually convinced the skeptical Brad that her offer was bonafide, and in July 2006 they embarked on what she would eventuallydub the Dance Of The Daily Deed.

Unfortunately, the first night of Brad's gift coincided with afamily holiday to her parents' home, which meant a house full ofsquawking babies, demanding toddlers and organised games (always apassionkiller).

'It was hardly conducive to that sort of thing,' she says. 'I didthink: "What on earth am I doing?" And it wasn't the lasttime I would think that during the year.

'But I was pleased with myself for seeing it through. We'd neverhave considered doing something like that before, but once we did,we realised it's not that difficult.'

And so it would continue for an entire year. So successful was theventure - the couple don't claim a 100 per cent success rate butsay they had sex roughly 28 days a month for 12 months - thatCharla, a feisty American from North Carolina, was persuaded towrite a book on the subject, 365 Nights: A Memoir Of Intimacy.

Coincidentally, it is not the only one on the subject. Another bookrecently published, Just Do It by Douglas Brown, chronicles hisquest to have sex with his wife for 101 days.
Compared to Charla's longer challenge he got off lightly, but bothbooks (available on Amazon in the UK) have caused a publishingphenomenon in the U.S., causing armies of married women to examinetheir own sex lives, or lack thereof.

What's interesting - and compelling - is that Charla is the mostunlikely sex guru.

Church-going and cookie-baking, she exudes wholesomeness.Physically, she admits to being 'sturdily built' and is on thewrong side of 40.

'I'm hardly a sex kitten,' she says. 'But then, how many peopleare? That is the point.'

In fact, most of her book isn't about sex at all, but about all thestuff that gets in the way of it for married couples - loading thedishwasher, work, night-time TV, body image, bouts of depressionand the fact you need to shave your legs, but really can't bebothered. Whether you regard it as a funny book or a tragic onewill probably pend on your domestic status.

A newly-married woman who always finds time for waxing might readit and laugh, declaring she will never become one of those sadsouls who has to schedule sex in the way she schedules PTAmeetings.

But one who has been wed for ten, 15, or 20 years and who has spentmore than her fair share of 3ams consoling a sick child is morelikely weep in recognition of her own experiences.

And even if offering her husband sex every day for a year was aflippant gesture - which she says it wasn't - it made Charlare-examine every aspect of a marriage she had believed was solid.

As she puts it: 'By doing this I really questioned everything I hadassumed about my marriage and asked myself: "Was it reallythat good before?"

'The answer was that it couldn't have been, because the sex side ofthings had slipped into oblivion - and I had been guilty ofallowing that to happen.

'I am not the only woman I know who somehow made a career ofdodging sex with my nice husband. The trouble is that I didn't evenadmit that to myself until we were well into this process.

'The big challenge then was if we could put things right.'

When they married ten years before the audacious birthday gift, itwas all a little different.

She talks movingly of the early months of her marriage when she andBrad watched long married couples in restaurants - people withnothing to say to each other and clearly lacking in intimacy - andsneered at them.

'We did that old thing of saying we would never be like them.Intimacy was what our whole relationship was built on. How could itever not be the foundation stone?'

And yet that is exactly what happened. Sex - once all-important -slid down the priority scale once their first child came along.

Eventually, it would languish right at the bottom - 'Somewherebelow taking out the rubbish and unloading the dishwasher'.

Charla traces her ambivalence to sex back to being in the maternityward after the birth of her first child when a fellow patientadvised her to get the doctor to add a few weeks on to the 'no sex'recommendation on her discharge notes.

'That will buy you time,' the other woman advised. So began her'career of dodging sex'.

'I can't say I hated sex with Brad,' says Charla. 'Actually, whenwe did it, it was mostly very nice. But it was just that I neverfelt compelled to do it very often. Something else would always getin the way.

'Obviously it's normal for women to lose their sex drive for a bitafter children are born, but it was more than that. I didn't evenhave the desire to get it back. Worse, I didn't even see that wehad a serious problem.'

When she went back to work - she was a high-flying PR executive -she tried desperately to have it all.

'I bought the myth,' she says. 'I thought I could have the hotmarriage, great children and a rewarding job. Only now do I say toyoung women: "Maybe go for two of those, and see how far youget."

'I was naive. But most of us are. I was being pulled in so manydirections: trying to impress at work, getting home to put a goodmeal on the table, helping the children with their homework, thengetting round to the household chores once they were in bed. Ifound it exhausting and I was losing control.'

The final straw came when she returned to the corporate car parkone night after work to discover that she had not only left her carkeys in the ignition that morning, but left the engine running,too.

'I decided I couldn't go on and took a foot off that career ladder.I started to work just two days a week, which was a huge sacrificefor me. It meant giving up my prized corner office and training myreplacement, which was a huge wrench.

'However, I knew that I couldn't continue as I had been doing.'

But what she didn't reflect on then - and, with hindsight, says sheshould have done - was that her sex life with her husband hadbecome non-existent.

'There were times when the children were little that Brad and I didthe deed only very occasionally. The year after my daughter wasborn you could count the occasions on two hands. Maybe one.

'I didn't see it as a problem, though, and I thought my husbandagreed with me. I knew he would have preferred more sex, but he'dresigned himself to the "quality, not quantity" thing. Orso I thought.'

It wasn't until they were having regular sex that Brad confessed hehad been deeply hurt by her constant rejections.

'He said he hated feeling that he was pleading for sex. I neverthought of my rejecting that intimacy as rejecting him but, ofcourse, it must have felt like that to Brad. Why didn't I see thatthen?

'I had always thought my marriage was so safe, so solid. I'dcertainly never considered that Brad might stray, but he didconfess to me that he understood why men would.

'That was a bit of a wake-up call for me. I thought: "Howinconsiderate have I been here?" '

Mercifully, her book doesn't linger on what went on in the bedroom- 'I am quite prudish about being public about things like that' -but what comes across clearly is that it was a logisticalnightmare.

'We did have to sit down with the wall planner going: "Well,we have that PTA meeting on Wednesday and you are away for businesson Thursday, so we'll have to have sex on Monday evening andTuesday morning."

'Brad was appalled at first. His view of sex was that it had to bespontaneous and of the moment.

'I always thought that was rubbish. How can it be spontaneous inthe middle of family life? So we had to compromise a bit. As itwent on, I scheduled it, but tried not to make him aware of howmuch I was scheduling it.'

Sometimes, making time for 'it' was straightforward. 'Some nightsit was as simple as turning off the TV,' she says.

'Like so many couples, we'd fallen into the habit of watching someTV before bedtime. By the time we actually went to bed, we wereshattered.

'When I started looking at this, though, I realised there was ampletime for sex; we were just putting everything else first.

'I can't say that it was easy making all the effort. Sometimes itwas awful. But I reasoned with myself that it was important. Howmany things do we do in a day that we don't necessarily want to -from going to work to washing the kitchen floor?

'I don't mean that I saw sex with my husband as a chore (althoughmaybe I did some days), but I knew that it couldn't possibly alwaysbe the candle-scented, blissful experience we read about inmagazines.'

That Charla and Brad stuck to his 40th birthday present for theyear seems the biggest miracle of all.
At one point she talks hilariously of wanting to multi-task whilehaving sex - 'I actually wanted to talk to him while we were doingit. I didn't see anything wrong with discussing the babysitter' -but Brad wasn't having any of it.

Other than that, the sex itself wasn't a disaster and didn't becomejaded because of the frequency.

'Far from it,' says Charla. 'Because we were having sex so often,it actually took the pressure off, which was really liberating.'

Liberating? Some would say that Charla's offbeat project is theexact opposite.

Doesn't it smack of the advice meted out in Fifties manuals aboutbeing a good wife by meeting your husband's needs and to hell withyour own?

She disagrees. 'I gained just as much from this as Brad and, if I'mhonest, it was as much for me in the first place. I needed theboost in confidence it gave me.

'One of the saddest moments when I was thinking about my marriagewas when I realised that sex with Brad was the only thing we sharedthat was unique to us.

'It was what made us more than roommates, and yet I was denying ourmarriage that aspect.'

But did it change their marriage for the better?

'It changed completely,' says Charla. 'We started being moreattentive to each other, not just in bed, but about the triviallittle things. Brad would offer to do some chore or run an errand,and I wouldn't be thinking he was doing it to gain sex points.

'We became so much closer. You can't have that sort of regularintimacy in bed without it spilling over into the rest of life.

'There was a lot less narking and sniping. You just can't do thatall day then want to get into bed with the person at night.

'My self-confidence was greatly improved, too. I'd always been oneof those women who told herself she would want sex more if she justlost 10lb and felt a bit more sexy.

'Now, I realise feeling sexy isn't about being thin or gorgeous. Myhusband desired me as I was - it was just a case of acceptingthat.'

What of the couple and their incredible sex life now the year hasended?

She cites one of her husband's observations as the best way to sumit all up. 'It was Brad who said that sex every day wasn'tsustainable in a marriage, but nor was no sex at all. Now, I justsay that we've got a balance in the middle.

'When my girlfriends ask if it's healthy to do it once a week,three times a week or whatever, I just tell them to do it twice asoften as they are doing it at the moment.

'Their husbands will love them for it, and they might just findthat they love themselves that little bit more, too. If they letthemselves.'