London - For the average couple, romance starts seeping out of marriage just 14 months after the exchange of vows, according to a survey commissioned - you're going to like this - by Better-Bathrooms.com.
Not surprisingly, bathrooms and toilets loom large in the survey's findings. At first, husbands tend to keep the door closed when they go to the loo, but following that 14-month watershed (how satisfying to unite watersheds and water closets), they throw privacy to the winds, while also tending to shave less often, and - horror of horrors - openly burping. Their wives, meanwhile, become less scrupulous about applying make-up and spend longer in unflattering dressing-gowns.
All this, of course, is called intimacy. It comes, whether after 14 days, months or years, with being comfortable in your partner's company, and it doesn't preclude romance at all, indeed one could argue that romantic gestures are all the more meaningful once the loo door has opened on a relationship.
Besides, problems are only likely to arise in a marriage if opinions differ on the definition of being comfortable in each other's company.
Some years ago a friend of mine, raised in a lively working-class household in the north of England, and newly-married to a privately-educated girl from an affluent Home Counties family, sat on the marital sofa picking and then chewing his toenails. “That's so inconsiderate of you,” said his appalled wife.
“Oh, I'm sorry,” he said. “Would you like one?”
Happily, she laughed. And four children later, they're still very cheerfully together.
In my own 18-year marriage - in which time, like the toilet seat, we've had our ups and downs - the ability to make each other laugh remains paramount. But folk have different ways of helping relationships endure.
Charla Muller from North Carolina, for example, having realised one day, after two children and eight years together, that she had become an expert at avoiding sexual contact with her husband Brad, decided to give him an unusual 40th birthday present: sex every day for 12 months. And then, inevitably, she wrote a book about it. The book is called 365 Nights: A Memoir of Intimacy, and I'm afraid we all have to wait until April to get our hands on it. Or to avoid it like the plague.
Personally, I'm not at all interested in reading Charla's book, but I wouldn't mind hearing her on Radio 4's Woman's Hour, being interviewed by the redoubtable Jenni Murray, who once described marriage as legalised prostitution.
And quite aside from matters of sexual politics, why just nights? Isn't a healthy sex life about variety, perhaps the odd bit of love in the afternoon? As for the intimacy bit of the title, give me open toilet doors and shabby dressing-gowns any time. I'm all for regular sex, but a daily dose doesn't strike me as much of a birthday present. I'd rather have a nice cardigan. -
The Independent