Single people hoping to marry, brace yourselves, Robbie Williams has soured your dreams of a happy life with eight simple words: ‘Everyone knows there is no sex after marriage’. The 49-year-old opened up about his sexless marriage in an interview with The Sun alongside his wife, actor Ayda Field.
‘No sex in a marriage is only a problem if you’re on different pages; if one person wants it, and the other doesn’t; if you have different expectations or requirements,’ he said. ‘But really, everyone knows there is no sex after marriage. That’s just the way it is.’
Williams revealed that his sex drive increased when he was taking testosterone for mental health treatment (the hormone replacement medication can be used to treat depression), and that both he and Ayda ‘couldn’t take [their] hands off each other’. But since coming off the medication – due to his history of addiction – his libido has dropped.
‘Sometimes now, though, Ayda will turn to me on the sofa and say, “We should do sex,” and I’m sitting there eating a tangerine and just sort of shrug. So, ya know, sometimes we try,’ he admitted. How does Ayda feel about this? Just fine.
‘I think people confuse sex for intimacy,’ she explained. ‘We are always cuddling and kissing, holding hands, and touching each other when we are just watching TV on the sofa, or a movie, or whatever.’
Despite their apparent happiness, social media has reacted with disbelief at the confession. In fact, some have concluded Robbie Williams must not be heterosexual, countless tweets in response to the news predicting he will 'come out any day now'. Even over on Google, 'Robbie Williams gay' is a breakout search term right now.
And yet, his admission appears to line up with statistics. In a survey published by Cosmopolitan, 60% of married people said they used to have sex at least two to three times a week before they were married, with only 43 per cent estimating they are having sex at least two to three times a week post-marriage - 52 per cent of respondents wish they were having sex more often.
Young people are having less sex too. According to a study published in Archives of Sexual Behaviour, between 2009 and 2018, the proportion of adolescents reporting no sexual activity, either alone or with partners, rose from 28.8 percent to 44.2 percent among young men and from 49.5 percent in 2009 to 74 percent among young women. In fact, another study in the US recently found that all forms of patterned sexual activity have declined in the last decade.
So, what does that mean, is anyone having sex anymore? Well let’s be clear, these studies are almost all based on heterosexual relationships – so people in same-sex relationships may well be having enough sex for the rest of the world (fingers crossed). But why the major sex decline anyway?
Well, there’s a range of suggestions from various studies. Lower income is associated with greater declines in the frequency of sex (and many of us are feeling the cost-of-living crisis hit), while falling alcohol use and increased use of computer games is also associated with people having less sex. Some experts report that social media use and gaming is a distraction, while others suggest that the normalisation of rough sex is putting people (especially women) off engaging in the practice but ultimately, researchers say we need more studies to determine the cause.
For married people, the most commonly offered explanation is that life gets in the way. Kids, house maintenance, work – they can all result in two pretty exhausted people just trying to get by. But the bigger, and less salacious, question is whether any of this really matters.
According to sex therapist and author Marty Klein, we should not be using frequency of sexual intercourse as a meaningful measure of happiness across our sex lives or in married life. ‘People come to my office and say to me, “Tell me how often people have sex,” and I won’t do that,’ he told Time magazine. ‘Why are we problematizing the fact that Americans might be having less sex than they used to? The difference might not be meaningful in people’s actual lives.’
It's just like Ayda and Robbie were saying, people often confuse sex with intimacy and issues in sexless marriages only occur when two people are on different pages. So really, problems only arise through a lack of communication, not a lack of sex. Maybe we’re all just now realising that there are plenty of ways to live a fulfilling life outside of having tons of sexual intercourse? As the days of lad mag and sleaze culture come to an end, sex just doesn’t sell as well as it once did once people stop buying.