The Sex Diaries

Book excerpt: 'From the time I started working as a sex therapist back in the early 1970s, people have been talking to me about their sex lives. What I hear about most is the business of negotiating the sex supply. How do couples deal with the strain of the man wishing and hoping while all she longs for is the bliss of uninterrupted sleep?' In The Sex Diaries Australia's leading sex therapist, Bettina Arndt, uncovers the night-time drama being played out in bedrooms everywhere the creeping hand and feigning of sleep, the staying up late in the hope that he will doze off. It is one of the great inconvenient truths of relationships that after the first blissful years together, most men want more sex than their female partners. Bettina Arndt recruited ninety-eight couples to keep diaries, revealing their intimate negotiations over sex. Who feels like having sex? Who doesn't? And how do couples cope if one person wants it more than the other? She draws on her thirty-five years of experience as a sex therapist and psychologist to provide a provocative analysis that challenges our basic assumptions about sex. With her characteristic humour and insight, Bettina Arndt proposes a new approach to how couples can enjoy regular sex and sustain loving relationships.