a majority of long-term monogamous, hetero relationships are sexually unsatisfying for the man after a decade or so.
This seems supported by the popular wisdom. Question is, how much this is about relationships and sex specifically, and how much it is just another instance of a more general “life is full of various frustrations” or “when people reach their goals, after some time they became unsatisfied again” i.e. hedonistic treadmill.
sexual satisfaction is basically binary
Is it?
most women eventually settle on a guy they don’t find all that sexually attractive, so it should not be surprising if that relationship ends up with very little sex after a few years.
So, basically those women pretend to be more attracted than they are (to their partner, and probably also to themselves) in order to get married. Then they gradually stop pretending.
But why is it so important to get married (or whatever was the goal of the original pretending), but then it is no longer important to keep the marriage happy? Is that because women get whatever they want even from an unhappy marriage, and divorces are unlikely? That doesn’t feel like a sufficient explanation to me: divorces are quite frequent, and often initiated by women.
I guess I am not sure what exactly is the women’s utility function that this model assumes.
Why don’t the men in question just leave?
Kids, not wanting to lose money in divorce, other value the partner provides, general lack of agency, hoping that the situation will magically improve… probably all of that together.
Also, it seems to me that often both partners lose value on the dating market when they start taking their relationship for granted, stop trying hard, gain weight, stop doing interesting things, and generally get older. Even if the guy is frustrated, that doesn’t automatically mean that entering the dating market again would make him happy. I imagine that many divorced men find out that an alternative to “sex once a month” could also be “sex never” (or “sex once a month, but it also takes a lot of time and effort and money”).
Worth noting that this pattern occurs among gay couples as well! (i.e. sexless long-term-relationship, where one party is unhappy about this).
I think that conflict in desires/values is inherent in all relationship, and long-term-relationships have more room for conflict because they involve a closer/longer relationship. Sex drive is a major area where partners tend to diverge especially frequently (probably just for biological reasons in het couples).
It’s not obvious to me that sex in marriages needs much special explanation beyond the above. Unless of course the confusion is just “why don’t people immediately end all relationships whenever their desires conflict with those of their counterparty”.
A general source of problems is that when people try to get a new partner, they try to be… more appealing than usual, in various ways. Which means that after the partner is secured, the behavior reverts to the norm, which is often a disappointment.
One way how people try to impress their partners is that the one with lower sexual drive pretends to be more enthusiastic about sex than they actually are in long term. So the moment one partner goes “amazing, now I finally have someone who is happy to do X every day or week”, the other partner goes “okay, now that the courtship phase is over, I guess I no longer have to do X every day or week”.
There are also specific excuses in heterosexual couples, like the girl pretending that she is actually super into doing sex whenever possible, it’s just that she is too worried about accidental pregnancy or her reputation… and when these things finally get out of the way, it turns out that it was just an excuse.
Perhaps the polyamorous people keep themselves in better shape, but I suspect that they have similar problems, only instead of “my partner no longer wants to do X” it is “my partner no longer wants to do X with me”.
This seems supported by the popular wisdom. Question is, how much this is about relationships and sex specifically, and how much it is just another instance of a more general “life is full of various frustrations” or “when people reach their goals, after some time they became unsatisfied again” i.e. hedonistic treadmill.
Is it?
So, basically those women pretend to be more attracted than they are (to their partner, and probably also to themselves) in order to get married. Then they gradually stop pretending.
But why is it so important to get married (or whatever was the goal of the original pretending), but then it is no longer important to keep the marriage happy? Is that because women get whatever they want even from an unhappy marriage, and divorces are unlikely? That doesn’t feel like a sufficient explanation to me: divorces are quite frequent, and often initiated by women.
I guess I am not sure what exactly is the women’s utility function that this model assumes.
Kids, not wanting to lose money in divorce, other value the partner provides, general lack of agency, hoping that the situation will magically improve… probably all of that together.
Also, it seems to me that often both partners lose value on the dating market when they start taking their relationship for granted, stop trying hard, gain weight, stop doing interesting things, and generally get older. Even if the guy is frustrated, that doesn’t automatically mean that entering the dating market again would make him happy. I imagine that many divorced men find out that an alternative to “sex once a month” could also be “sex never” (or “sex once a month, but it also takes a lot of time and effort and money”).
Worth noting that this pattern occurs among gay couples as well! (i.e. sexless long-term-relationship, where one party is unhappy about this).
I think that conflict in desires/values is inherent in all relationship, and long-term-relationships have more room for conflict because they involve a closer/longer relationship. Sex drive is a major area where partners tend to diverge especially frequently (probably just for biological reasons in het couples).
It’s not obvious to me that sex in marriages needs much special explanation beyond the above. Unless of course the confusion is just “why don’t people immediately end all relationships whenever their desires conflict with those of their counterparty”.
A general source of problems is that when people try to get a new partner, they try to be… more appealing than usual, in various ways. Which means that after the partner is secured, the behavior reverts to the norm, which is often a disappointment.
One way how people try to impress their partners is that the one with lower sexual drive pretends to be more enthusiastic about sex than they actually are in long term. So the moment one partner goes “amazing, now I finally have someone who is happy to do X every day or week”, the other partner goes “okay, now that the courtship phase is over, I guess I no longer have to do X every day or week”.
There are also specific excuses in heterosexual couples, like the girl pretending that she is actually super into doing sex whenever possible, it’s just that she is too worried about accidental pregnancy or her reputation… and when these things finally get out of the way, it turns out that it was just an excuse.
Perhaps the polyamorous people keep themselves in better shape, but I suspect that they have similar problems, only instead of “my partner no longer wants to do X” it is “my partner no longer wants to do X with me”.