Married-Sex Marathons

Americans are so inventive. Just as soaring gas prices make the cost of travel prohibitive, along comes a new trend to give a whole new meaning to the pleasures of staying home.

The New York Times Fashion & Style Department reports on two new entries in the "mini-genre of books offering advice about the 'sex-starved marriage'" featuring couples who discovered that daily sex is key to happiness and are sharing their adventures with the rest of us.

In this new arena of family values, politics seems to be beside the point.

"The Mullers," says the Times, "are Bible-studying steak-eating Republicans from Charlotte, NC. The Browns are backpacking multigrain northerners who moved to Boulder, Colo. The Mullers’ book, “365 Nights,” is rather modest and circumspect in its details. The Browns’ book, “Just Do It,” almost makes the reader feel part of a threesome, sharing everything they used to stimulate sexual desire (it’s hard to visualize and even harder to explain)."

Outdoing average couples who average 66 times a year, "the Mullers and Browns are in Olympic-record territory," and the theory that a sex marathon would reinvigorate their marriages "might say as much about the American penchant for exercise and goal-setting as it does about the state of romance."

Be that as it may, if the new trend catches on, it will show that American ingenuity never sleeps, especially when it comes to selling books.