I thought of an analogy that some may find helpful and others may just find annoying:
Take eating as an example. What's the "normal" number of meals to eat every day? Yeah, depends on a lot of things. Some may want to eat three times a day. Others may want to eat two meals and a snack. Maybe some want to "graze" all day. Maybe some can do with a big meal at breakfast or lunch and then grab a snack if they're hungry. To me this discussion of meals is analogous to the discussion of a sitch where one partner wants sex three times a day and the other "only" wants it three times a week. Or twice a week. Or once a week.
Then, to continue the food analogy, what if a person-- for some reason-- only has the opportunity to eat once a week? Is that "normal." What if they can only eat once a month? How long do people live who go on hunger strikes? About a month? If someone decided they simply did not want to eat ever again, they would be hospitalized and fed with an i.v., subjected to psychiatric exams, and watched closely.
Yes, I know people will starve without food but they will not starve without sex. But we're talking about "normal" behavior here. It's not normal not to eat or to take in some kind of nourishment for the body.
And yeah, there are single people who choose to be celibate for a variety of reasons. The key word here is "choose." The people on the BB "asexuality.com" are outside the norm.
The question was not "what do people choose," or "what can they tolerate," or "what can they sacrifice," or "what can they live with," but "what is the range of behaviors that we call 'normal,' when it comes to frequency of sex within a MARRIAGE."
But when a person enters into a marriage and then stops feeding the marriage (and sex is one of the nourishing aspects of marriage) then maybe the people won't starve to death, but the MARRIAGE will starve to death.
