By: Lisa Armstrong
Like most working moms, Elizabeth, a sales associate and mother of two, has a detailed daily list of things to do to keep her northern New Jersey household running. Walk the dog. Buy laundry detergent. Take Nichole to ballet. Juggle a conference call. Have sex. Sex on the to-do list? Has it really come to this? For Elizabeth, the sad answer is yes. Even sadder, it's at the bottom of the list. Though she and her husband are trying to get pregnant, the only time they can squeeze in some lovin' is at 2:00 a.m., while they're both half asleep. "Sex is always at the top of my husband's list, but I have so much to do that I'd have to bump something off my list to find the energy," says Elizabeth.
While men are purportedly the ones constantly thinking about sex, chances are it's on your mind, too—whether you're wondering how to have more of it or calculating ways to fight your husband off so you can just sleep, damn it! We asked 800 working mothers about their sex lives and got responses like "Sex? What sex?" and "Three words:
just so tired." A whopping 73 percent said that they're unsatisfied with either the quantity or the quality of sex they're having. One woman said she and her husband were intimate so infrequently that she felt like she had her grandmother's sex life. Yet studies show that—yikes!—our grandmothers had more sex than we do. "Fifty years ago, there was a clear division of labor, and one of the wife's responsibilities in tending to domestic affairs was to fulfill her husband's sexual needs," says Scott Haltzman, MD, author of The Secrets of Happily Married Men: Eight Ways to Win Your Wife's Heart Forever. "Back then, the average woman had sex at least twice a week. Two thirds of today's young wives say they are too tired to match that rate."
Okay, admittedly we're exhausted. But is that the only reason our libidos get less attention than the dog and the laundry? It's not merely a matter of energy, said respondents to our survey, it's also a matter of time. More of us hold jobs that are demanding, partly because they're more fulfilling, and yet we still shoulder most of the cleaning, cooking and child-rearing responsibilities.
While men are purportedly the ones constantly thinking about sex, chances are it's on your mind, too—whether you're wondering how to have more of it or calculating ways to fight your husband off so you can just sleep, damn it! We asked 800 working mothers about their sex lives and got responses like "Sex? What sex?" and "Three words:
just so tired." A whopping 73 percent said that they're unsatisfied with either the quantity or the quality of sex they're having. One woman said she and her husband were intimate so infrequently that she felt like she had her grandmother's sex life. Yet studies show that—yikes!—our grandmothers had more sex than we do. "Fifty years ago, there was a clear division of labor, and one of the wife's responsibilities in tending to domestic affairs was to fulfill her husband's sexual needs," says Scott Haltzman, MD, author of The Secrets of Happily Married Men: Eight Ways to Win Your Wife's Heart Forever. "Back then, the average woman had sex at least twice a week. Two thirds of today's young wives say they are too tired to match that rate."
Okay, admittedly we're exhausted. But is that the only reason our libidos get less attention than the dog and the laundry? It's not merely a matter of energy, said respondents to our survey, it's also a matter of time. More of us hold jobs that are demanding, partly because they're more fulfilling, and yet we still shoulder most of the cleaning, cooking and child-rearing responsibilities.
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