Keeping keep passion alive over the long haul is the greatest challenge to monogamy.

After you’ve rolled around together a few thousand times, sex can become rote, which is, to use the technical term, a bummer. People in long-term relationships do all kinds of things to try to keep the passion alive—dressing in costumes, role playing, bringing gizmos and gadgets into the bedroom.

Or  they could try just talking, suggests a study titled “Day-to-Day Changes in Intimacy Predict Heightened Relationship Passion, Sexual Occurrence, and Sexual Satisfaction.”

Not any old talking, but the kind of talk that advances intimacy. That is, self-disclosure; telling your partner stuff he or she didn’t know about you. Of course, this only works when your partner responds with warmth and sympathy. And vice versa.

The researchers theorize that one reason passion is so high in budding relationships is because couples are learning about each other, and each sympathetically received self-disclosure causes passion to flare. Over time, however, the revelations slow, the new information dries up, intimacy reaches a plateau, and sex hits the doldrums.

"The Unmade Bed" by Imogene Cunningham/Yale University Art Gallery

The punchline to the question posed in the title of this post is “Who cares?”

Yes, it’s a joke, a guy joke that actually makes me laugh because it’s really about how loutish some men are about jokes and sex. Also, it’s funny because it’s true.

The Psych Central news hounds pointed me towards an article titled “Women, Men, and the Bedroom: Methodological and Conceptual Insights That Narrow, Reframe, and Eliminate Gender Differences in Sexuality.”

I wanted to learn more, so I dug up the original paper, which pulled together a number of studies debunking or reframing some of the things we know to be true (or do we?) about men, women, and sex.

Two in particular amused me, in a loutish female way.