The Once-a-Day Challenge
For his 40th birthday, Charla Muller suggested to her husband Brad that they have sex every day for a year. No more wondering about whether it will happen. No checking e-mails in bed. No putting it off to tomorrow, or the weekend, or next weekend. Just a promise that, unless one of them were traveling or sick, they would make time to have sex each and every day for 365 days.
Brad thought about it, and then turned her down. It’s not that the prospect of guaranteed sex with his wife was unappealing, he explained. After 8 years of marriage and two kids, their marriage was not as passionate as it once was, and he had fond memories of their early days. But he didn’t want her doing him a favor, or making a promise she’d end up regretting. Charla was confused. Wouldn’t any healthy heterosexual man jump at the offer she was making?
Eventually, she persuaded her husband she was serious, and their grand experiment began. As she described to a reporter afterward, nightly sex had a lot of benefits. Instead of negotiating whether they were going to have sex, Charla and Brad had to figure out how they were going to do it, and these conversations led them to explore desires they had never expressed before. There were other benefits as well:
Regular sex was allowing for feelings of health and wellness that sparked a desire to have more sex. Sex is a great stress-reliever too. A nice relaxing romp with Brad was a wonderful distraction from feeling like the world would crumble if I wasn’t out there battling dragons 24/7. I could relax, feel those endorphins pinging around my body and forget about my bad day. And perhaps best of all, our intimate moments were making me feel younger. (Jeffries, 2009)
But there were plenty of challenges too. For two working parents, finding time for sex wasn’t always easy, and often required the creative use of babysitters. Other times they found themselves “going through the motions.”
“Could you stop grimacing?” Brad asked me one night. “I’m not grimacing,” I said between clenched teeth. “Yes, you are. Could you pretend you’re enjoying it?” “How ‘bout you just close your eyes?” I suggested. He sighed huffily and did just that. (Muller & Thorpe, 2008, p. 230)
By day 305, it was hardly surprising when Brad came to bed and said “I think I’m going to pass tonight if you don’t mind. I’m tired, I have a big day tomorrow and we’ve been having a lot of sex lately.” They had made rules allowing each partner to decline any particular night they wished, but Charla nevertheless felt rejected. Although Brad had exercised their escape clause, Charla had never felt she could. As she writes, “I would have ‘passed’ about 200 times by now if the offer had been the other way round” (Muller & Thorpe, 2008, p. 213).
In the book she wrote later about their experience, Charla ultimately concluded that their experiment was a success (Muller & Thorpe, 2008). “Before, sex was abysmal. Now I have discovered I do have time for quality sex on a regular basis, which wasn’t what was happening before” (Jeffries, 2009). Lots of other couples have since taken up the “sex once-a-day challenge,” some for a whole year (Gibbons, 2016), some for 100 days (Brown, 2008), some for a mere 30 (Patz, 2016), or even 7 (Bowman, 2011). In books and blog posts encouraging other couples to do the same, they send a consistent message: For a better relationship, have more sex (Figure 9.1).
FIGURE 9.1 Try it, you’ll like it! To spice up their relationship, some couples have committed to having sex with each other once a day for 7, 30, 100 days—or even a full year. Can the key to a happier relationship be as simple as having more sex?
And yet, for Charla and Brad, the lesson was not that simple. At the end of their experiment, when Brad turned 41, Charla wrote: “I was giddy with the notion that I didn’t have to have sex” (Muller & Thorpe, 2008, p. 251). When Charla turned 40 herself a few years later, Brad offered to repeat their experiment for another 365 days. She politely but firmly turned him down.