I just read another dopey article claiming that married people have the best sex lives. How it's so great knowing all the person's buttons, the freedom in having just one partner, yada, yada yada.

I beg to differ. I speak from a long lack of experiences during my marriage and unless my friends — both men and women — are all lying to me, we were all to some extent in the same boat.

Take my beleagured friend D, who had the ill-fated date with me that stormy November night (check out my first post). He returned to home and hearth, willing to give his marriage another go.

"There is peace in the family and I have buried the hatchet, swallowed my miseries and decided to hang in there," he wrote me. "After looking at all the alternatives and the reaction of the brood to my breakout suggestions, I've just hunkered down. If I were in France, I would probably have found myself a mistress and lead a double life. But I'm in Norway, so I live a quiet Calvinistic life of middle class mediocrity."

Yikes.

Compare that with my randy neighbor, S, who left her husband and our quiet rural suburb and moved to a condo complex in a nearby town that had a rep of attracting lots of new divorcees. After a few months she confided, "In our neighborhood if you heard screaming, you assumed people are fighting. But here, when you hear screaming, you assume people are having really great sex." 

Or my friend P, who reunited quite literally with a former squeeze after years languishing in a sexless marriage. "It was like finding the magic lamp and getting my three wishes: sex, sex, and more sex!"

And another neighbor, R. Last Christmas her hubby left her and their two kids for a waitress, leaving her reeling. Good girlfriend that I am, I prescribed a rebound romp and hooked her up with an exceedingly attractive and perpetually available friend known to be very generous in helping women in these circumstances. (What a mensch, right?)

When I saw her a few months later, positively glowing, I asked her to dish. "My married friends are all totally scandalized," she laughed. "I tell them all we do is have sex — we see each other when the kids are at school. Our code is to call and ask if the other ‘wants coffee.'"

Gosh, I think I want what she is having. And make mine a venti!