When Charla Muller told her friends what she was giving her husband Brad 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 of her own when she came up with the idea. Another questioned her sanity, and yet another asked bluntly: ‘Were you drunk when you thought of this?’
What on earth could the gift have been? A particularly hideous pair of cufflinks that light up in the dark? A speedboat so expensive that 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 was going to be sex with her every day for a year. She had wracked her brains to think of a gift that was original, intimate and – most importantly – memorable.
‘I never wanted him to look back and ask himself: “Now, what was it Charla bought me for my 40th?”‘ she says. ‘When I came up with the idea of daily sex for a year, I thought I’d hit the jackpot. What man wouldn’t think that was the best present ever?’ What a pity not everyone – actually, not anyone, if we are being truthful – agreed.
‘To be honest, I didn’t tell my friends what I’d got him until halfway through the year,’ says Charla. ‘When I did, they were just incredulous, with most thinking that I was quite mad.
‘One girlfriend said I must never, ever tell her husband what I was doing in case he got any ideas. What they took issue with most was the timescale. Some could see the merits in offering their husband daily sex for a week, perhaps a 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 the ceiling when she told him of his gift. Instead, she got sheer bafflement.
‘Then, to my horror, he declined the whole thing, saying that he didn’t want me to feel that I had to have sex with him – like it was some sort of duty,’ says Charla. ‘He actually walked away from me, saying we would discuss it later. I was quite deflated.’
Gosh, it is hard being a wife sometimes. All that effort and no one appreciates it. Still, Charla wasn’t that easily dissuaded. She eventually convinced the skeptical Brad that her offer was bona fide, and in July 2006 they embarked on what she would eventually dub the Dance Of The Daily Deed. Unfortunately, the first night of Brad’s gift coincided with a family holiday to her parents’ home, which meant a house full of squawking babies, demanding toddlers and organised games (always a passionkiller).
‘It was hardly conducive to that sort of thing,’ she says. ‘I did think: “What on earth am I doing?” And it wasn’t the last time I would think that during the year. But I was pleased with myself for seeing it through. We’d never have 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 the venture – the couple don’t claim a 100 per cent success rate but say they had sex roughly 28 days a month for 12 months – that Charla, a feisty American from North Carolina, was persuaded to write a book on the subject, 365 Nights: A Memoir Of Intimacy.
Coincidentally, it is not the only one on the subject. Another book recently published, Just Do It by Douglas Brown, chronicles his quest to have sex with his wife for 101 days. Compared to Charla’s longer challenge he got off lightly, but both books (available on Amazon in the UK) have caused a publishing phenomenon in the U.S., causing armies of married women to examine their own sex lives, or lack thereof.
What’s interesting – and compelling – is that Charla is the most unlikely sex guru. Church-going and cookie-baking, she exudes wholesomeness. Physically, she admits to being ‘sturdily built’ and is on the wrong side of 40.
‘I’m hardly a sex kitten,’ she says. ‘But then, how many people are? That is the point.’
In fact, most of her book isn’t about sex at all, but about all the stuff that gets in the way of it for married couples – loading the dishwasher, work, night-time TV, body image, bouts of depression and the fact you need to shave your legs, but really can’t be bothered. Whether you regard it as a funny book or a tragic one will probably pend on your domestic status.
A newly-married woman who always finds time for waxing might read it and laugh, declaring she will never become one of those sad souls who has to schedule sex in the way she schedules PTA meetings. But one who has been wed for ten, 15, or 20 years and who has spent more than her fair share of 3ams consoling a sick child is more likely weep in recognition of her own experiences. And even if offering her husband sex every day for a year was a flippant gesture – which she says it wasn’t – it made Charla re-examine every aspect of a marriage she had believed was solid.
As she puts it: ‘By doing this I really questioned everything I had assumed about my marriage and asked myself: “Was it really that good before? The answer was that it couldn’t have been, because the sex side of things had slipped into oblivion – and I had been guilty of allowing that to happen. I am not the only woman I know who somehow made a career of dodging sex with my nice husband. The trouble is that I didn’t even admit 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, it was all a little different. She talks movingly of the early months of her marriage when she and Brad watched long married couples in restaurants – people with nothing to say to each other and clearly lacking in intimacy – and sneered 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 it ever 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 – ‘Somewhere below taking out the rubbish and unloading the dishwasher’.
Charla traces her ambivalence to sex back to being in the maternity ward after the birth of her first child when a fellow patient advised 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, when we did it, it was mostly very nice. But it was just that I never felt compelled to do it very often. Something else would always get in the way.
‘Obviously it’s normal for women to lose their sex drive for a bit after children are born, but it was more than that. I didn’t even have the desire to get it back. Worse, I didn’t even see that we had 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 hot marriage, great children and a rewarding job. Only now do I say to young women: “Maybe go for two of those, and see how far you get.”
‘I was naive. But most of us are. I was being pulled in so many directions: trying to impress at work, getting home to put a good meal on the table, helping the children with their homework, then getting round to the household chores once they were in bed. I found it exhausting and I was losing control.’
The final straw came when she returned to the corporate car park one night after work to discover that she had not only left her car keys 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 sacrifice for me. It meant giving up my prized corner office and training my replacement, 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 she should have done – was that her sex life with her husband had become non-existent.
‘There were times when the children were little that Brad and I did the deed only very occasionally. The year after my daughter was born you could count the occasions on two hands. Maybe one. I didn’t see it as a problem, though, and I thought my husband agreed with me. I knew he would have preferred more sex, but he’d resigned himself to the “quality, not quantity” thing. Or so I thought.’
It wasn’t until they were having regular sex that Brad confessed he had been deeply hurt by her constant rejections.
‘He said he hated feeling that he was pleading for sex. I never thought of my rejecting that intimacy as rejecting him but, of course, it must have felt like that to Brad. Why didn’t I see that then? I had always thought my marriage was so safe, so solid. I’d certainly never considered that Brad might stray, but he did confess to me that he understood why men would. That was a bit of a wake-up call for me. I thought: “How inconsiderate 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 logistical nightmare.
‘We did have to sit down with the wall planner going: “Well, we have that PTA meeting on Wednesday and you are away for business on Thursday, so we’ll have to have sex on Monday evening and Tuesday morning. Brad was appalled at first. His view of sex was that it had to be spontaneous and of the moment. I always thought that was rubbish. How can it be spontaneous in the middle of family life? So we had to compromise a bit. As it went on, I scheduled it, but tried not to make him aware of how much I was scheduling it.’
Sometimes, making time for ‘it’ was straightforward. ‘Some nights it was as simple as turning off the TV,’ she says.
‘Like so many couples, we’d fallen into the habit of watching some TV before bedtime. By the time we actually went to bed, we were shattered. When I started looking at this, though, I realised there was ample time for sex; we were just putting everything else first. I can’t say that it was easy making all the effort. Sometimes it was awful. But I reasoned with myself that it was important. How many 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 (although maybe I did some days), but I knew that it couldn’t possibly always be the candle-scented, blissful experience we read about in magazines.’
That Charla and Brad stuck to his 40th birthday present for the year seems the biggest miracle of all. At one point she talks hilariously of wanting to multi-task while having sex – ‘I actually wanted to talk to him while we were doing it. 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 become jaded 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 the exact opposite.
Doesn’t it smack of the advice meted out in Fifties manuals about being a good wife by meeting your husband’s needs and to hell with your own? She disagrees. ‘I gained just as much from this as Brad and, if I’m honest, it was as much for me in the first place. I needed the boost in confidence it gave me. One of the saddest moments when I was thinking about my marriage was when I realised that sex with Brad was the only thing we shared that was unique to us. It was what made us more than roommates, and yet I was denying our marriage that aspect.’
But did it change their marriage for the better?
‘It changed completely,’ says Charla. ‘We started being more attentive to each other, not just in bed, but about the trivial little 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 regular intimacy in bed without it spilling over into the rest of life. There was a lot less narking and sniping. You just can’t do that all day then want to get into bed with the person at night. My self-confidence was greatly improved, too. I’d always been one of those women who told herself she would want sex more if she just lost 10lb and felt a bit more sexy. Now, I realise feeling sexy isn’t about being thin or gorgeous. My husband desired me as I was – it was just a case of accepting that.’
What of the couple and their incredible sex life now the year has ended? She cites one of her husband’s observations as the best way to sum it all up. ‘It was Brad who said that sex every day wasn’t sustainable in a marriage, but nor was no sex at all. Now, I just say 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 as often as they are doing it at the moment.
‘Their husbands will love them for it, and they might just find that they love themselves that little bit more, too. If they let themselves.’
Source: The Daily Mail