I found this article from the NY Times magazine quite interesting. While mainly about straight couples, it does refer to gay dynamics and seemed to me to also be applicable to us. Or, at least, something to think about.
I've always been fascinated by the biological underpinnings of sex. Just look at our life cycles: Young boys and girls are generally indistinguishable (were it not for clothing differences and hairstyles you would be amazed at how difficult it would be to tell them apart), they start to differentiate as they get older, reaching the height of this differentiation in their respective sexual primes. And then aging begins, and as they approach their 60's and 70's both genders generally seem to revert to looking the same. It seems to be the dynamic that the article suggests, sex needs differentiation. In order to rekindle desire, the partner who is so familiar in the day-to-day (as Esther Perel is mentioned here) needs to be seen as someone new. In her TED talk, Perel mentions the observation that spouses are most attracted to their partners when they see them at work, engaged in their passions in an unfamiliar context, the partner becomes someone...different. I can see this happening in LGBT couplings as well, the sexual roles that we take on can be very different from the roles in a couple...all fascinating stuff, and all so politically not correct! Sexual attraction seems to undermine our desire for equality in relationships, in essence, the bedroom must be a (safe) place, set apart in order to allow the imagination to play and for trying on different identities and roles.
I didn't read through all the study, I got through the methods and gave up. I'm looking for someone else's interpretation of the link to the actual study. The Data portion talks about using regression statistics to assign a value to the surveys that did not report sexual frequency and satisfaction. "Roughly 10 percent of respondents have missing values for sexual frequency, including those who report “don’t know,” and nearly 25 percent of respondents have missing data on this or another variable in our analysis". -pg 8 But then, it goes on to reuse those numbers in the analysis. It is like saying "I'm assigning the average value that I found using this statistical test to then go on and use as if it were reported to make my sample size seem bigger and cut down on my standard deviation" Then in methods it states that the regression model doesn't fit (the model that was used to determine the value to assign to the non reports), so they use a negative binomial distribution to draw conclusions instead. How is this binomial? Binomial is analog, yes or no, off or on. How is number of times you have sex binomial? Less than the average where 25% of the data points are made to fit a model that doesn't fit and has a very high standard deviation, even reported with 25% at the average? Anyone else as confused as I am? And the actual article is a bunch of anecdotes that are fun internet pseudo-science. The real math was lost in the article all this was written about. Did I totally misinterpret the study?
