Everyone Feel Sorry For Russell Brand's Penis

Russell Brand used to get it on like 20 times per week. Now, he laments that all of the tilling he’s been doing recently had been in the garden. Hoes before ho’s. And so it goes.

Brand insists that during his years of being awarded various “lover of the year” titles by the British tabloid press, he was doing so much fucking that he barely had time to do anything else. Now that he’s married, his penis has spend much less time being pleasured and more time kind of hanging out by itself. In the garden.

“I can’t believe I used to have sex 20 times a week, especially now I’m married. But now I’m a bloody good gardener.”

It’s a long-standing stereotype that marriage reduces the amount of sex that a couple has. According to Time, the average American married couple has sex 58 times per year, which is a little over once per week. Time also reports that Americans who wait for sex tend to report higher levels of sexual satisfaction-

…restrained couples rated the stability of their marriage 22% higher than those who hadn’t kept their hands off each other.

Those with self-control also had 20% increased levels of relationship satisfaction, 12% better communication and 15% improved “sexual quality”.

For couples who became sexually involved only well into the relationship, the benefits were about half as strong.

– and this is where I balk. If you’ve only had sex with one person, to what do you compare your sex life? Of course if you go from zero to anal in like three months, it’s going to seem like you’re having crazy intense sex. If you fast for a week, the first crappy bologna sandwich you eat will taste like the best goddamn bologna sandwich ever made.

Remember like six years ago when everyone went nuts over Krispy Kreme? You couldn’t drive through an American suburb without seeing a full parking lot and a line wrapped around the building of one of those little donut shops, because, before that time, no one in town had eaten Krispy Kreme donuts before. They were strange and delicious and amazing and soft and warm and perfectly sweet and oh my god how did I go for this long in life without eating these succulent treats? And everyone loved them an no one could shut up about them. But, after a couple of months, everyone’s pants started getting tight and people in the burbs started tiring of the novelty of Krispy Kreme, and they’d read about people two towns over lining up for hours to get their mitts on glazed donuts and thinking, Krispy Kreme? Ugh. So over Krispy Kreme. Meanwhile, those of us who grew up in towns with amazing Swedish bakeries (and, if you’re from a town like mine, literally nothing else), you never understood what the fuss was about Krispy Kreme in the first place; you’d been eating excellent donuts for years.

Economists call it The Law of Diminishing Marginal Utility. People who aren’t all fancy call it “the novelty wearing off.”

Asking people to self-report on their level of sexual satisfaction in marriage is ridiculous, and it’s equally silly to tenuously connect Russell Brand’s lamenting amongst the petunias with his earlier sexual promiscuity. Just because the frequency of his sex-having has decreased doesn’t mean that he’s less satisfied. He didn’t say that he was experiencing X fewer units of sexual satisfaction as a result of the decreased number of his sexual encounters. Quantity doesn’t imply quality. I’m pretty sure that most people would rather have really great sex once every couple of days rather than the inevitable chafing that comes from marginally enjoyable sex five times per day, and that waiting for sex works great for some couples and not-so-well for others. But what do I know? I have very little self control and have thus probably doomed myself to a life of post-marital weeding.