IStock Photo 3242474 © Monika Wisniewska

Love and marriage go together like a horse and carriage, Sinatra once famously crooned. But what about sex and marriage? Is there a reason it doesn’t get a rhyme?

Popular opinion has it that as the years pass and the honeymoon fades, couples fall out of the habit of sex—and that what sex they do engage in becomes routine, even a chore, rather than an intimate and exciting act. It may be that sexual desires shift into something gentler, more platonic, as relationships progress, or that our biological clocks wind down as we grow older (however much those E.D. medication commercials may suggest otherwise). But it can become a problem when one partner wants more than the other does, or when both yearn for something in the bedroom but aren’t talking about it.

Surveys suggest that most people do prefer marriage over the supposedly sexier single life. The odds an adult prefers wedlock are 1 in 1.33 (75%), as compared to 1 in 5.56 (18%) who prefer to be single and date and just 2% who wish to remain single and not date.

Unfortunately, adults who responded to a 2004 poll by ABC reported that the quality of their sex lives does correlate negatively with the length of time they’ve been married. The odds they have sex at least several times a week worsen from 1 in 1.39 (72%) if they’ve been married for less than three years to 1 in 3.13 (32%) if they’ve been married for ten or more years. The odds they actually enjoy the sex they’re having a great deal worsen from 1 in 1.15 (87%) to 1 in 1.43 (70%) for the same range, and the odds that their sex life is something they’d call “very exciting” decrease from 1 in 1.72 (58%) to 1 in 3.45 (29%). There is some extrapolation in these assumptions—an expectation that those who report low sex rates are expressing low sex satisfaction as well. The responses, however, may alternatively reflect an equal tapering-off of sex drives or already-low libidos for both partners.

All ye who enter marriage need not abandon hope, however. As a sociologist who studies so-called sexless marriages pointed out in an interview in The New York Times, taking some time off for a vacation for two, or even just a day without the kids (for those who have them), may rekindle that old flame. On the other hand, the death of a sex life may signal (helpfully or not) that a marriage isn’t going to work out. The key seems to be communication between spouses, with or without the help of a counselor, about any dissatisfaction in the bedroom. With a little work, dissatisfied married couples might find that they can regain the passion they once had, or reach a new harmony. Now that’s something Sinatra would sing about.