It's Good Old Monogamy That's Really Sexy

By GARRISON KEILLOR Garrison Keillor is the author of The Book of Guys and the host of A Prairie Home Companion, heard Saturdays on public radio.

Somewhere, when I was young, I got the idea that the average American couple had sex twice a week, and I've carried this figure in my head for more than 30 years, as a benchmark, like the .300 batting average or the idea of three square meals a day. There have been times when any sex at all was a beautiful faraway ideal, like reincarnation, and there have been other periods when twice a day or hourly seemed pretty normal. But twice weekly was the norm, I thought, so it's a surprise to learn that according to the new survey, once a week is more like it. Only about a third of adults are keeping up the pace, another third are plugging along at two or three times a month, and for the remainder, sex is rare or nonexistent.

Despite the low numbers, though, almost half the adult population claims to be extremely pleased and satisfied, which is a lot of pleasure in a country this big. The happiest ones are the monogamous couples, married or not. Despite jobs and careers that eat away at their evenings and weekends and nasty whiny children who dog their footsteps and despite the need to fix meals and vacuum the carpet and pay bills, these couples still manage to encounter each other regularly in a lustful, inquisitive way and throw their clothes in the corner and do thrilling things in the dark and cry out and breathe hard and afterward lie sweaty together feeling extreme pleasure.

Probably the happy American couple has carried the old twice-a-week standard around in its head and in those weeks when there is only one sweaty encounter has felt that something must be wrong. Probably that feeling of not meeting one's sexual quota is what drives the multibillion-dollar diet industry and produces all those identical magazine articles about "Ten Ways to Make Your Marriage Sensational."

This survey is going to lift a huge burden off our backs. It was the idea of having to meet that quota every week that wore us out. Now, with the average down to one, a lot of us are going to be able to make three, four or five without a problem. The survey points to a pretty wide range of normality, but says clearly that monogamy is the good life, which we all knew, and that, despite the prurience of the Christian Right and the self-righteousness of Playboy, making love is a wonderful good time. It's no wonder that Senator Helms cut off government funding for the study -- Republican ideology today is so cynical, so hooked on visions of degeneracy and decline that Republicans dare not admit we are a nation of couples having a good time getting naked now and then. According to the results, however, the Fundamentalists among us are doing it too. Even in well-kept Republican homes in the suburbs, in bedrooms full of Early American gewgaws and praying-hands plaques and the memoirs of Quayle on the bedside table, there is an avid, ongoing interest in sex.

When I was 18, I could not imagine my homely face, my mournful eyes, my geeky clothes, attracting any woman at all. In novels, women tossed their heads and flared their nostrils at the scent of Real Men; they moaned as the hero unlaced their bodice and they felt his manhood against their snow-white thigh; but I wasn't like those men and felt that I might never enjoy a normal, twice-weekly sex life. I assumed I would grow up to be a weird old bachelor living in a house trailer littered with bean cans and dirty magazines.

I remember hearing stories told by fellow geeks about wonderful aphrodisiacs that you could give to women to put them into that perfect state of limp compliance that made geek love possible. A Coke with an aspirin slipped into it, or there was a tasteless, odorless, 180-proof liquor called Everclear that you could buy in North Dakota -- you slipped that into a girl's glass of punch, they said, and 10 minutes later her defenses were down. She stood there in her white taffeta prom gown and white corsage and said, "Why, thank you so much for the wonderful Pepsi, Jimmy -- it tasted so good. And now if you don't mind, I'd like to remove my underwear and lie down beside those begonias and have you do likewise."

Once I went to a bar called the Mixers on Cedar Avenue in Minneapolis with a woman who was 20, like me, and who drank enough whiskey sours to founder a Percheron. My hopes rose with every glass she took, and when she finally asked me to take her home, I assumed that the joyful moment was at hand. She leaned against me when I got her in the car, green around the gills, her eyes unfocused when I kissed her, and I realized that we had overshot the mark. Liquor had reduced her judgment to where her affection for me didn't mean so much. And a few minutes later, when she asked me to stop the car and I helped her out and held her as she bent over and vomited in the curb, sex became the last thing on my mind, truly the very last.

& Despite all you may have read lately, there is an incredible amount of normality going on in America these days, and it is good to know. Our country is not obsessed with sex. To the contrary. We wear ourselves out working, we are surrounded with noise and distraction and all manner of entertainment, we indulge our children as they run roughshod over our lives, the ghosts of old aunts and beady-eyed preachers lurk in the shadows watching us. Considering what the American couple is up against, it's astounding to think that once a week or once a month or maybe just on Memorial Day and Christmas or whenever the coast is clear, they are enjoying this gorgeous moment that is, despite its secrecy and long, shuddering climax, essentially the same experience as everyone else has had. It is almost worth all the misery of dealing with real estate people, bankers, lawyers and contractors -- to have a home that has a bedroom where the two of you can go sometimes and do this. It is worth growing up and becoming middle-aged to be able to enjoy it utterly.