EVERYBODY appears to be at it – apart from me!

As I may have mentioned once or twice before, I had hoped

when I started writing this column about life as a single mum

that it might turn into a kind of Sex-And-the-City-on-Sea.

I live in hope, but I am starting to fear that a new

60s-style sexual revolution is going on all around me, and I'm

missing out … again (I was too young last time around, and am

probably too old now).

Everywhere I turn, it seems, sex is on the agenda.

It started at the hairdresser's last week where the hot

topic of conversation was an article in that day's Daily Mail

about a wife whose 40th birthday present to her husband was the

promise that she would have sex with him every single day for a

year.

It started a debate which involved everybody in the salon,

male and female, about whether sex every single day for 365

days was a stupendously good thing, or a stupendously stupid

idea.

Surely, having to do it every day would take away all the

romance and spontaneity and turn it into a chore, the women

thought. The men just made smutty jokes.

Then I find out that this book by cookie baking Christian

mother-of-two Charla Muller is one of two best-sellers in the

US about married couples who vow to have sex with each other

every night.

Doug and Annie Brown have written Just Do It, about their

101 consecutive nights.

Now all four have come together (so to speak) and appeared

on the Today show to discuss how both books were published

nearly simultaneously.

And then I open my Sunday Times magazine to find a feature

entitled 'Shagadelic – The Return of Free Love' about new naked

self-help workshops to help overcome the 'ludicrous, unnatural

social conventions that stand between you and spiritual

enlightenment'.

Of course, it's mostly just a load of headline-grabbing

tosh.

But what's really interesting is the Mullers' tale, of their

attempts to have sex every day for a year and the universal

truths their story uncovered about most people's experience of

love and marriage, especially once children come along.

One newspaper headlined the story: 'Wife has sex with

husband shock!'

And surprisingly Charla admits that, as a mother of two

young children, with a high-pressure job, she'd come to see sex

as a dispensable chore, something she could happily live

without most of the time.

So when she told husband Brad on the eve of his birthday

what his present was, she thought he'd be ecstatic.

“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.”

She eventually convinced the sceptical Brad and in July 2006

they embarked on what the couple began to call the Dance of the

Daily Deed.

The couple don't claim a 100 per cent success rate but say

they had sex roughly 28 days a month for 12 months.

The resulting book — 365 Nights: A Memoir of Intimacy — is

not really about sex at all. It is about the pressures of

modern married life.

“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', ” Charla says.

Charla is no sex guru. Church-going and cookie-baking, she's

as wholesome as apple pie. She describes herself as being

'sturdily built' and is on the wrong side of 40.

And because she admits to being 'quite prudish' about what

goes on in the privacy of the bedroom, the book is not a sex

manual.

More interestingly, it's about all the stuff that gets in

the way of sex for married couples — loading the dishwasher,

sick children, work, night-time TV, body image, bouts of

depression and not being bothered to shave your legs.

And it's all very recognisable for most of us who have been

married with children.

Charla thought their marriage was solid, but her 365-day

promise made her realise that she had been taking a lot for

granted: “The sex side of things had slipped into oblivion,”

she says.

“I made a career out of dodging sex with my nice husband.

The big challenge then was if we could put things right.”

She realised that sex — once all-important in their

10-year-old marriage, had gone to the bottom of her daily 'To

Do' list once their first child came along:

“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. Worse, I didn't even see that we

had a serious problem,” Charla says.

She was a high-flying PR executive and added: “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.'”

The thing she let go of was her sex life: “I didn't see it

as a problem, though, and I thought my husband agreed with

me.”

It wasn't until they began their year of nightly sex that

Brad confessed he had been deeply hurt by her constant

rejections: Charla said: “He said he hated feeling that he was

pleading for sex. I never thought of my rejecting that intimacy

as rejecting. Why didn't I see that then?”

And Charla says that having sex every day changed their

marriage completely: “We started being more attentive to each

other, not just in bed, but about the trivial little

things.

“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.

“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.”

Ah! How sweet.

Some of the website comments about the Mullers' story in the

Daily Mail are frankly nutty (you wouldn't expect much more

from Mail readers, would you?).

But I laughed at the wife who wrote: “My husband would have

taken this gift back and changed it for a modem.”

Yvonne from Norway sums up wisely: “Goes to show we

girls/women don't seem to realise how important intimacy is for

men. Most likely similar to what romanticism is to us!”