Of D Minor and Snatches (Arts & Crafts)

As I’ve said many times (and any casual reader of this blog can confirm by perusing through the numerous posts), I normally don’t speak much about my life in here. I write to get better at writing, and when I have lots of writing to do in other venues (like preparing class materials or finishing a book) I can spend multiple months without posting without feeling I am missing on something. Sounds a bit autistic, but that’s how things are. However, today I intend to make an exception, and provide my readers with some data about what I’ve been doing lately in a number of fronts this last couple of years, for reasons that will become apparent es the post progresses. The apparently banal (or self-centered data) I’ll be providing at the beginning will serve (I hope) to put in context some more universal reflections on the nature of art, and the pursuit of the good life (that, consisting in a conscious application of artistic skills, the more difficult to acquire the better, constitutes an art in itself).  

2019 was for me a good reading year. Not stellar, but pretty close. I finished 85 books (a bit more than 7 per month, even if by saying so I risk being labelled as more of a frequency-obsessed guy than with my previous post) and 10 comic books (or graphic novels, although I’m not a great fan of that label), totaling a bit more than 24,000 pages (for an average of 67 pages per day). Not awful, but slightly below what I read in 2018, when I finished reading less books (just 76) but on average much thicker, as I went above 26,000 pages then (topping 70 pages/day, something I hadn’t done since I finished my first university career). I confess that I was a bit pissed by that, as since the birth of my last son, eight years ago, every single year I had managed to read a bit more than the previous one, as taking care of the young one demanded less time (as he became more independent, started attending school, and enjoyed more playing alone, or with his friends, than with his parents). SO, the fact that I had read less in 2019 demanded some introspection to find out what I had been doing that kept me from reading as much as I used to.

First place I looked was physical activity. On the weightlifting front, I continued consolidating my recovery from a semi old injury (tear of biceps tendon) trying not to fall prey of a much older one (replacement of ACL and removal of meniscus of left knee). I kept a fairly high volume of training (moved a bit more than 625 tons in the year, spread in 17 microcycles, which compares favorably with a bit less than 440 tons in 23 MCs in 2018) after leaving, in July 2018, a very Oly-centric training methodology that was really doing nothing for me (it kept me mobile and moderately fit from a cardiovascular perspective, but I was slowly losing peak strength), so in 2019 I ended up doing less microcycles (they went from during roughly a week to being planned for two weeks, allowing for better recovery between sessions) but moving many more kg in each of them. Although my left knee keeps degrading (the unavoidable wear and tear of old age) and losing mobility (apart from being a pain in the ass, aching now almost continuously, and giving me a really hard time after long hikes in the mountains) I have recovered a semi-dece level of base strength, and without breaking any lifelong PR I’ve put up some numbers in the squat, the deadlift, the bench press and the press that don’t compare too unfavorably with said PRs. All of that sounded good, but definitely I couldn’t say I had been devoting more time to training, as I went from training almost every single day to training 3-4 times a week, and just 2-3 when the teaching workload became higher (due to class material preparation or exams correction).

That pointed me to another potential culprit. On 2019 I started teaching the same subject (business ethics and corporate social responsibility) to a new set of students, less mature in theory (undergrads, instead of graduates within a masters degree), but that turned out to be extraordinarily engaged and enthusiastic, and also showed to have a quite solid background (I would say in some areas they could even teach some things to my masters’ students of previous years). However, I considered such different target population required a complete overhaul of the materials I had used in previous years, so I invested an inordinate amount of hours in preparing them, with all that such change entails (changes in exercises, continuous evaluation exams, group exercises and the like). Which was very rewarding, and lots of fun, but didn’t yet provide me with an explanation of why I read less, as it surely didn’t absorb me as much as the writing of a whole book did, which is what I did back when I started teaching this subject (by the way, such book was only published in December of 2019, and yes, proofreading it and making the final adjustments did consume quite a sizable amount of hours), in a year when I also managed to read more than this last one!

So maybe part of the explanation was the teaching load, but, on the other hand, I didn’t start learning a new language in 2019, as I had originally planned when I set out my course of language acquisition in 2015 (the plan back then was to consolidate French between Jan/15 and Sep/16, learn Italian between Sep/16 and Aug/17, learn German between Sep/17 and Aug/19, consolidate Latin between Sep/19 and Aug/20, consolidate classical Greek between Sep/20 and Aug/22, and learn Hebrew between Sep/22 and Aug/24, at which point I would recalibrate and set new goals). So in September of last year I should have started with Latin, but German proved to be a tougher nut to crack than I expected, and although I now read it quite fluently, it’s not as effortless as I wanted it to be, and still require substantial queries at a dictionary to fully grasp the content of either some pieces of news or some specially convoluted books. So I decided to give me some slack, and prorogue my German learning, which should have meant that I ended up reading more pages per day, as in 2019 I read much faster this new language than in 2018, and approximately half of the books I read are in the language I’m in “learning” phase, which means that both in 2018 and in 2019 half the books I’ve read were in German, but in the latter year I could coast through them much faster. As an aside, I’ll probably insert Russian before Latin as the next language I learn “voluntarily” (I may need to give a honest go to Chinese, due to work demands, but I’m not 100% sold on it, I’ll have a clearer picture in a couple months), but decade-long plans are intended to give wide guidelines, to be adjusted as we evolve and mature and adapt to the unexpected vagaries of life.  

However, at that point in my enquiry I had already seen the real culprit of my diminished reading performance. One of the things I wanted to do in my strategic plan for the decade was consolidate my combat skills by learning to box properly (something I could then pass onto my children, as I’ve recommended any reader of this blog to do repeatedly, to better prepare them for the more likely than not societal collapse in the coming 50 years, which I will probably not see, but they very well may). But, I’m ashamed to recognize to my attentive readership, that is something still in my “to do” list (towards the end of this year I may reconsider giving it a try), as after clearing my schedule in May last year to start searching for a convenient time and place to start boxing (the place I had already scouted, near my current job) I had kind of a bout of inspiration, went to a couple of music academies, and signed up for guitar lessons.

Now, anybody who has known me for just a couple of minutes would attest that I may well be the person less endowed with musical talent in the whole world (slightly paraphrasing David Hume, I’ve thought many times about myself and musical abilities something similar to what he thought of his cousin, Lord Kames, and arrogance: “when you say of someone he is the most arrogant person in the whole world, you normally only mean he is very arrogant, except when you say it of my Lord Kames, in which case it is the exact enunciation of the unvarnished truth”; in my case “when you say of somebody he is the most devoid of musical talent in the whole world you normally only mean he has no ear for tune and a limited sense of rhythm, except when you say it of the Vintage Rocker, in which case it is the mere truth”). Be it as it may, I’ve also enunciated many times (some of them in this same blog) that one of the measures of a life well lived is continuously striving to do difficult things, to master areas of practice that require conscientious application of our abilities, be they mental or physical; that take ourselves outside of our areas of comfort, and force us to experience again the agony and the frustration of being piss poor at what we do, and to have to struggle against things that a five-year-old does without much effort or attention. Seen in retrospective, I couldn’t think an activity that fit that bill better than me learning to play a music instrument.

I have to recognize that I probably underestimated the level of commitment that such endeavor would demand. In my original plan of learning to box competently, I assumed that 1 hour a week in class, plus some tweaks to my usual training routine (which is already optimized to keep me as explosively strong as possible at my age) would be enough. Not so with playing the guitar. The half hour I spend in class is but a minimal fraction of it, as if I really want to progress, I have to devote much more than that practicing at home. Between half an hour and one hour a day. Which I cannot detract from work (although I was freed from my responsibilities in the subsidiary of our company that builds thermal Hw for satellites, thanks God, as if it were not for that I wouldn’t have been able to do much outside of working like crazy, as I had been doing in previous years), and I can only partially detract from strength training (as I do not devote that many hours a week to that particular pursuit), so the time for doing my scales, and my following of a remorseless metronome with very basic rhythm patterns, and my occasional toying with some simple lick or other, had necessarily to come from reading.

Which is all well and good, and a price I’m more than willing to pay. I wouldn’t be entirely disingenuous if I said I’m loving every minute of learning to play the guitar… but I wouldn’t be far from the truth, either, as it is indeed a most enjoyable activity. And it’s already giving me enormously valuable insights into what art consists of (more about that in a moment), into the way the human mind works, and into the plasticity and adaptability of the brain. Specially when I compare my learning journey with that of my middle son, who started a few months before myself (and was one of the main sources of inspiration for me deciding that I wanted to do this). He “gets” complex rhythm patterns in seconds, and is able to replay riffs and long sequences of notes and chords with just a few repetitions after seeing other people play them (by just looking at their fingers running along the fretboard), while I need to see them written down in a tab, attempt to memorize them, then clumsily try to reproduce it continuously looking at the tab, the hand in the frets, the hand that strums, and sometimes the infinite in front of my, exasperated by how complex and challenging the whole thing is.

So if I think how far I still am from stop being an “absolute noob” and start being an “advanced novice” I may despair. Which I do not, because I think instead of how far I already am from “has never in his life touched an electric guitar” (which is where I was just seven months ago), and I’m nothing short of utterly amazed. My small advances may look laughable to any intermediate player (I can play three or four simple riffs, keep the rhythm and the tempo of another three or four famous tunes, still with a lot of interruptions and failed chords and missed beats), but are huge to me because, frankly, I never thought I could get this far. And I see better things coming my way in the future, just by sticking with it. As in weightlifting, perseverance, in most cases, trumps innate talent. And I may be distinctly short on the latter, but few people can beat me in the former (and, anyway, this is not a contest, I have absolutely no gripe with 90% of the population of Earth being better guitar players than me… as long as at some point I can play Johnny B. Goode, Sweet Home Alabama, Only Daddy that will walk the line and Summertime Blues I’ll be happy as a clam and more than satisfied).

Finally, let’s get to the deepest lessons I’m learning, fulfilling the (implicit) promise I made in the title of this post. The first thing that drew my attention in this process of learning an entirely new ability was how similar it felt to learning how to lift weights. It is a very physical activity, where you have to let the body deal with the little details as autonomously as possible, without having to pay conscious attention to every minute move, because consciousness is flexible (which you don’t need much, as you are doing repetitive, strictly patterned tasks) but slow, and you need to be distinctively fast both to lift well and to play well. Which is a nice illustration of Daniel Kahnemann theory of mind’s two systems, one “fast” (automatic, unconscious, based on quick heuristic rules, that feels effortless) and one “slow” (that engages our consciousness and attentiveness at the price of taking much more time to accomplish whatever it is directing us to do). But of course, to be able to delegate tasks to the “fast” system you need to train like crazy. When I started playing, I didn’t know (by heart) the position of a single note in the fretboard, much less where the fingers had to be to play chords. So before I played notes or chords I had to look at my hand, look at the fretboard, and slowly try to put each finger in turn where it had to go, then tentatively strum the string (or set of strings), which may require another look to the strumming hand, and usually find that the note was not right, the chord didn’t sound harmonious at all, and required some adjustment (move some fingers a few millimeters up, or down, or right or left). Needless to say, that took forever (a few seconds for barre chords), and such limitation on speed made the playing of any identifiable melody nigh impossible.

But, again, it felt oddly familiar, because it was not that different from learning to clean and jerk, where you first learn how to position the body under the bar in different moments of the lift (starting position, power position, receiving position of the clean, power position again with the bar on delts, receiving position of the jerk), and then practice how to go from one position to the next in the most efficient and fluid manner, and finally to start increasing the load on the bar whilst letting the body “do its thing” and keep the speed or even increase it (there are no “slow” movements in weightlifting). And to let the body do such moves reliably and solidly and producing the expected results you had to rely on countless repetitions, until the whole motor pattern becomes ingrained, and you could do it in your sleep (indeed, I found years ago that a good training method was to complete the Oly lifts blindfolded, I may reconsider doing that one of these days), and stop paying attention to the little details (“Are my shoulders sufficiently in front of the bar? Are my hips rising at the same speed as the shoulders? Am I extending enough the hips and knees at the end of this second pull, and thus should I start changing direction to get under the bar?”) and focus on the big picture, as if seen from the outside. You stop living each individual lift in the present tense, and start considering them once completed as a finished whole, that may require some adjustment in the next iteration (so when you crouch to grab the bar again you may say to yourself one or two cues, like “remember to finish the pull” if, after the last pull you have judged that indeed, you didn’t extend your hips and knees enough… something that you were unable to notice, and even less to correct, in the midst of doing it).

There is even an equivalent to the difference between the powerlifting moves (squat, bench press, deadlift) and the weightlifting ones (snatch and C&J). The powerlifting moves are like individual notes, where you just put one finger over one string in one fret, and strum that single string. You then put another finger over another string (in the same or other fret), and strum that other string, and so on. Thus, playing a scale is like completing a set. You try to play the scale faster, as you try to complete the set with more kg on the bar. Jeez, come to think about it, when I play I increase the bpm in my metronome in neat jumps of 10, as when I warm-up I increase the load on the bar by increments of 10 kg. When I approach the bar for a powerlifting move, I know in advance if I will complete the set (which I do 99.9% of the time, as I program conservatively), as there is no real “technical” difficulty involved. The moves are slow enough to allow for minimal adjustments of form during their execution, and they don’t really require the “fast” system to be in command. You can complete them as consciously as you want. Similarly, when I start a scale, unless I’m attempting a new speed, I’m pretty confident I’m going to complete it (almost faultlessly), as each single movement of the fingers is pretty short and easy, and can be kept under the control of the conscious mind. I have to go to really insane (for me, be somewhat indulgent here!) speeds to really have to rely on the “fast” system taking over, as it becomes impossible for the “slow” one to keep pace.

But of course, although most riffs and some melodies are just successions of notes, individual notes are like words in a poem, while chords are the verses that really define a lot of what they can express (starting, unsurprisingly, by the internal rhythm and cadence of the whole poem). And chords are an entirely different beast from notes. There is really no way you can consciously think where each finger goes and then setting them carefully in the fretboard before strumming the strings. You just put the hand the best you can, all at once, and there you go, and just pray it wasn’t too far off. And, if you have practiced enough, it normally isn’t, so instead of a dissonant jangle that offends even the most uneducated ear what you obtain most time (amazing as it still seems to me!) is a heavenly, melodious, harmonic tone full of resonance and grace and suggestive, like a good gulp of craft beer, with its aftertaste, its main notes accompanied in the right proportion by the secondary ones that enhance and underline it, making the whole experience even more intense and satisfying. Quite similar to what you feel when you complete a demanding snatch, in which every muscle has started contracting exactly in the right sequence, so the whole body moves through space in the most efficient manner to put the barbell overhead in a seemingly effortless flow, with each limb, like each note, underlining and enhancing the effort of the trunk to position itself stably under the load, so it can triumphantly rise it in a glorious sign of mastery and domination of mind over brute matter.

The most interesting element of the analogy, though, has to do with what it reveals about art itself, and the way to both produce and enjoy it. Artistry in guitar playing has a lot of additional components beyond just getting your chords to sound right, but it absolutely ride on getting that absolutely nailed. You can add color, and chromatism, and texture, and sub-rhythms and whatnot to your basic chords… once you have absolutely mastered them. And within that mastery there is always an element of uncertainty. You really are not sure, every time you move the hand on the fretboard, that you are going to get it right, because you have “outsourced” the execution of each chord playing to the fast system, to the subconscious mind (there is no way you could play artistically if you wanted to keep full conscious control of the position of the hand in each chord). So to reach the highest point of artistic expression (in order to be able to focus on the most sublime consequences of the action), to really let the spirit (or the deepest levels of the mind, or of the brain, I’m not taking sides in the whole monism vs. dualism argument here) you have to pay the price of renouncing a certain level of control, of delegating a certain level of the execution… to forsake a bit of your freedom (understood as the opportunity to judge and consciously decide how you take each step) and suffer, unavoidably, a considerable level of uncertainty. Even the most seasoned performer is nervous before walking into the stage, because she is not sure (and, furthermore, she cannot be sure!) of how things are going to turn out, if, regardless of how many hours she has practiced it in advance, she may not forget some element, or have a misstep, and end up delivering a very poor performance. Even the most seasoned lifter, doesn’t matter how many top-level competitions he has been through, is nervous before walking on the platform to confront the barbell, because he is not sure (and, furthermore, he cannot be sure!) if he is going to successfully complete the lift. I’m not saying with this that Olympic weightlifting is as artistic as music (although it is my opinion that it is, indeed, much more artistic than a lot of what passes for music nowadays), or that it has a similar social worth (however that is measured), or allows for a similar expression of the depths and powers and wonders of the human condition.

What I’m saying is that creating art, attempting to express the hitherto unexpressed, in addition to require a certain mastery of some mechanical skills that are foundational for each type of art, requires the assumption of certain risk, is just not amenable to the mere application of a predefined formula, needs to go beyond the application of those repetitive, quantifiable, consciously controllable skills. The writer that embarks in a great novel (not a piece of genre that just ticks all the right boxes to satisfy the public) is, when he starts writing, mostly unaware of how the final work is going to look like. He has a very vague idea of what he wants to accomplish, but he throws himself into the act of writing like a weightlifter throws himself into the act of lifting, knowing he will not be able, to a great extent, to consciously control where the writing process, where the work, are going to take him, to be sure of what the final result is going to look like (remember, furthermore, he cannot be sure!). He should have put on the time to master the “mechanical” elements of his craft: how to transcribe a dialogue between hos characters, how to describe the physical environment where the action takes place, how to give a lively impression of the feelings and emotions of the participants. If he is not solid enough at those (each one of which can be done carefully and conscientiously, are “craft” more than “art”) the final result will be clunky, disjointed, will not flow graciously, and will ultimately fail. But it well may happen that he is a master of the craft, but ends up producing a very subpar work, not very inspired, with a feeble structure, maybe because he attempted to play it safe and constrained himself to just weave those elements he was most sure about, not taking the risk to completely lose himself in the narration, and let it take him where it may. Like a guitar player that is competent in his handwork, can meet the right notes at the right time but is somewhat lacking “spirit”, lacking “inventiveness”, lacking “feeling”. Again, not taking the risk to take the melody to wherever it may, pushing the application of each unit to its emotional extreme. Like a very strong man doing a “somewhat power clean & press” (and lifting, slowly and under control, a very respectable amount of weight, way more than I for one will ever lift) for lack of… adventurousness? to really throw himself under the moving weight and be uncertain of how or if it may end up in the right place.

So there you are, I now understand better not just how to weightlift (I approach my snatches and C&Js like chords, to be played first competently, and then, God willing, sublimely), but how to write, or to paint, or to draw… or to live a good life, although that may require some additional explanation that I leave for another post.

Why you have (much) less sex than you would like

I don’t normally listen much to new music (a pity, I know), preferring to keep on hearing the same old songs I grew up with and that, to a great extent, have shaped my musical sensibility. When I hear a lot of noise and excitement in the media about some artist or other that I judge can be remotely close to my taste, I tend to buy the LP, and normally be disappointed after a few hearings. Sometimes I’m happily surprised (last installment of such: “Norman Fucking Rockwell” by Lana del Rey, which I’m still listening to and find quiet remarkable; “Beneath the Eyre” by the Pixies has also stood up to my fond memories of the group, which is also both surprising and nice) but more times than not I despair of the overall quality of the music produced these day. I know, I’m just old, it’s not the music, it’s me, and all that. That makes listening to the radio a most jarring experience, outside of the handful of stations that play oldies and the kind of music I idiosyncratically happen to like, as I can’t, for the life of me, stand people just talking (and, most of the times, blabbering about issues of exactly zero interest for me), so if there’s no semi-decent music program on the dial I just drive in silence. I know there’s this thing about podcasts being a great way of getting information nowadays, but I’m a visual learner, and again I just can’t be bothered to download (or stream) a couple of guys pontificating, even about subjects I may otherwise find of the utmost interest.

Which is not that terrible, as I move around in a motorbike, so the sound of the engine is most days enough to keep me happy as a clam, and the mechanical vagaries of my most usual ride are enough to engage my attention (old motorcycles are unreliable and mercurial, so there’s always a new clicking or rumbling or wheezing or whirring to pay attention to, a potential harbinger of some breakdown or other). However, last week I had to travel to a nuclear power plant 120 miles away from home, and it was raining cats and dogs, and, being old as I already mentioned, and having my rain gear in a state of mild disrepair (that is usually enough to keep me dry between my house and my usual workplace, only five miles away, but would certainly let me soaked in such a long haul), I preferred to fit myself into an unholy box of glass and steel, with way too many wheels (four! what an utter waste!), and drive in relative comfort, cozy and warm, for a few hours. Most of them silent, right away, but for some intervals I toyed with the dial, and heard a bunch of super crappy acts that I’ve quickly and mercifully forgotten, with one exception: I listened, with a mixture of surprise and delight (that had nothing to do with the quality of the music, by the way, but with the inventiveness and wit of the lyrics) to a song by the Puerto Rican singer Residente pithily and adequately called “sex”, in which he, after a nod to Sigmund Freud and Judith Butler, enumerates all the apparently innocuous and humdrum behaviors in which people engage, from buying a new car to writing poetry, because, in the end, “they want sex” (a sentence which the singer repeats remorselessly at the end of almost every single verse, creating an intriguingly powerful effect, not as boring or repetitive as it sounds, although subtle it certainly was not).

Of course, I’ve argued many times that any purported explanation of every facet of human behavior appealing to a single, simple, overarching principle is normally a big bunch of baloney, wont to leave out as much, if not more, as it explains. My own reading of Freud tried to unmask how his own underlying motive was very different from the one he presented to the world: when he said, and wrote, that sex was the hidden motive for every act and thought and utterance (and dream) he really meant that status (the position we occupy, as perceived by others, in the social hierarchy) was, in his own personal case, the real reason, and obsession, and all-consuming drive, which he cavalierly and nonchalantly assumed should be the case for every other human being, then and forever. That said, both the (unsubtle) followers of Freud and this Residente guy have a point. Sex is, no doubt about it, a powerful motivator and a hidden but comprehensive explanation of a vast array of actions nominally performed for supposedly more elevated reasons.

Now, why would that be the case? Why is it that there is this single cause, bordering on obsession, that allows us to understand so much of what we do, say, think and dream? The Scholastics said back in the day (that’s around 1200 or 1300 AD, for those of you of little philosophical training) that we desire that which we do not have, so I think it is safe to assume that we behave so ardently in sex-seeking ways because we have less (or much less) sex than we want. Not precisely breaking new ground here, or stating something beyond the blatantly obvious, I know. I dare to say that if there is one truly universal feature of human culture it is that males engage in less hanky-panky than they would like. In any civilization, in any land, at any time in history. The Egyptians, the Greeks, the Carthaginians, the Hebrews, the Canaanites, the Phoenicians, the Romans, the Germanic tribes, the Huns, the Mongols, the Aztecs, the Incas, the Mayans, the Pueblos, the Apaches, the Algonquins, the Ming Chinese, the Song Chinese,  the pre-Tokugawa Japanese, the post-Tokugawa Japanese, the Mauryas, the Mughals, the Abbasids, the Fatimis, the Ottomans… all their men struggled with a life that at times seemed to them almost sexless and devoid of carnal pleasures. My attentive readers have surely noticed that I started talking, vaguely and loftily, of humans in general, and now I’ve suddenly reduced my discourse only to half of the species, more precisely to the half endowed with a penis. Bear with me patiently, as I’ll show in a moment why such restriction is (mostly) necessary, as in the remainder of this post I will explain, as promised in the title, why it is that most people (men and women alike) do not have the amount of sex they would like, but for very different reasons, and how it is that only half tend to get less than they hope for, whilst the other half ends up having more. As usual, all arguments to be presented are guaranteed to be as politically incorrect as they come, and supported by as thin and unrepresentative sliver of empirical evidence (by drawing from such an small and weird sample of humanity as the one directly known by the author) as any unserious piece of folk psychology you may encounter in most reputed magazines (Playboy, Cosmopolitan, Men’s Health and the like).

Before getting into the thick of the argument, we need to define some useful concepts: We all understand that every human being, regardless of sex, gender, personal preferences, age or physical constitution, has a certain frequency of intimate encounters (understood to happen with another human being) that he or she is most comfortable with. We will see soon how that optimal frequency varies along a typical life’s arc, and how its average value differs between the sexes, but at this point let’s just give it a convenient acronym: IOF (individual Optimal Frequency), measured in the number of sexual encounter the person has in a year. That means that a person that would enjoy most having sex about once per week has a IOF of 52 (would need to make it 52 times per year, as a year has 52 weeks); one who needs/ wants to make it three times per week has a IOF of 156 (52 x 3), while one that prefers doing it once every month has an IOF of 12.

Let’s also highlight that such frequency is strongly correlated with the overall life satisfaction of the individual. Enough psychological studies attest that the person that has roughly as much sex as she  wants (uncommon as that situation may be) is in general much more satisfied with how her life is going: Her health is better, her immune system is stronger, her psychological outlook more relaxed and hopeful, her disposition more sunny, even her skin seems to glow more and her muscle tone is firmer. Small deviations from that optimal desired frequency do not change much the overall life satisfaction, but as the real frequency with which the person has sex gets further and further away from that local maximum, the life satisfaction precipitously drop, in a somewhat asymmetrical way. There is a certain frequency under which the person lives in a state of permanent deprivation, and can think of little but in how little sex he is having, thus bringing his life satisfaction effectively to zero. On the other extreme, there is also a point at which the person derives an extremely low satisfaction from life, as she considers that she has sex way more than what she would like, leading to questions of self-worth, self-assertion and the overall contribution to her well-being of the relationship she is in, but, as long as the frequency we are talking about is (even if grudgingly, or unenthusiastically) mutually agreed with her partner, it does not lead to a zero life satisfaction, only to a very diminished one. It has to be noted we are strictly talking about consensual sex here; if involuntary sex (rape) were to enter in the equation we would be facing an entirely different situation, as obviously being raped (and even more being repeatedly, and predictably, raped) has a much bigger, direr, devastating impact in a person’s well-being than not shagging enough. With that important caveat, we could graphically represent the relationship between frequency of sexual activity and life satisfaction as follows:

The two important figures to consider, along with the already mentioned IOF, are the IMAF (individual Minimum Acceptable Frequency), under which life satisfaction drops to zero; and the IPL (individual Physical Limit), which we can somewhat arbitrarily define as the point at which life satisfaction falls below 25% of its potential maximum. It is not, thus, an absolute physical limit, beyond which sex becomes painful, or nigh impossible, but the point at which it starts feeling more like a chore than a source of joy, more an obligation than a delightful experience. Before we get into the details, and the implications, of the last two, let’s see how to calculate the first variable. Based on extensive psychometric studies and a vast trove of minutely calibrated psychological surveys (which is the standard and scientifically reputable way of declaring “I’ve taken this numbers off my rear end, but want to fool you into acritically accepting their validity”), the following formula has been firmly established for calculating the IOF:

IOF = 52 + SF + TF + NF – AF – WF – OF - StrF

The factors having the following meaning:

·         52 (baseline) is what human beings tend to like by default, absent other factors (of which, as we are about to explain in detail, there are a bunch). Once a week seems to be what we come into this planet pre-programmed to enjoy most, and indeed it acts as a kind of happiness watershed. In most situations, psychologists have noted that there is a significant bump in life satisfaction between doing it less than once a week and doing it even a teeny-weeny bit more. And yup, I understand my younger readers may acknowledge this in disbelief and even in utter horror, as once a week surely will seem to them a frequency so absurdly low they may as well, if that is what their future older self may gravitate towards, renounce every worldly pleasure and join a Carthusian abbey. I would ask them to be patient and bear with me, as there are some mitigating factors they may want to ponder before taking such extreme measures.

·         SF (Sex factor): if you have a Y chromosome, SF=75; if you don’t, SF=0. Who said life was fair?

·         TF (Testosterone factor): If you have a significantly higher base blood concentration of said hormone than the average male (525 ng/dL), TF=20; if you have a somewhat higher concentration (say, by having been born with testes and still having both of them in working order), TF=10; all else, TF=0. As for most (sane) people doing a blood test to determine their precise testosterone level is neither necessary, nor advisable, a number of very apparent physical features can be used as a proxy, said features being: depth of voice, amount and thickness of facial hair, early occurrence of male pattern baldness, (speculative: difference of length between index and ring fingers) and overall level of muscularity. If you are indeed very muscular (regardless of sex), showing noticeable hypertrophy in “serious” muscle groups (traps, delts, quads and hammies), you can confidently assume your T-level is quite above average (regardless of how you got there… not all T is endogenous). If you show hypertrophy in “shallow” muscle groups (pecs, biceps and, worst offender, calves) all you can assume is that you spend way too much time in the gym…

·         NF (Novelty factor): if you are a female and you are in the first 2-5 years of a relationship, NF=50; if you are male, and are in the first 2-5 weeks of a relationship, NF=5. Again, life is not fair

·         AF (Age factor): also works differently for males and females (and in the former, its effect is compounded, but not strictly reduced to, the likely decline in testosterone levels, as such decline can be countered with exogenous means, something the pharma industry is very happy to encourage). Just apply the following table:

	16 to 25 YO	26 to 35 YO	36 to 45 YO	46 to 55 YO	56 to 65 YO	66 to 75 YO	> 76 YO
Males	-10	0	5	15	25	35	50
Females	0	0	0	30 (*)	20	20	20

(*) the decline in this case is much more abrupt, less gradual, than in males, in whom it is spread all along the decade (also, in females it partially reverts after 2-3 years), due to the sudden change in hormonal profile (and cascading physiological and psychological adjustments) known as menopause

·         WF (Weariness factor): surprisingly (and, I guess, counterintuitively and controversially), this one affects only women, where the weariness of sex, the lack of excitement, the boredom associated with seeing the same guy, attempting the same tricks, all increase with the exposure to the same couple (for complex evolutionary reasons) and goes well beyond the absence of a novelty factor, peaking around 30 years and then stabilizing at a slightly lower level. If you are a woman, and have been in a monogamous relationship for more than 5 years, the following table applies (the top line now reflects the duration of that particular relationship, not the age of any of the members of the couple):

	6 to 15 Y	16 to 25 Y	26 to 35 Y	36 to 45 O	46 to 55 Y	56 to 65 Y	> 66 Y
Males	0	0	0	0	0	0	0
Females	-5	-10	-15	-10	-10	-10	-10

·         OF (Obesity factor): if you are reasonably fit (BMI < 25, or body fat < 20% for men, < 25% for women) WF = 0; if you are moderately overweight ( 25 < BMI < 30, or body fat < 30%) WF = 10. If you are obese WF = 20. On the other extreme, if you are anorexic or severely undernourished, WF = 20

·         StrF (Stress factor): It is well known that being distracted by life circumstances that create tension, anguish and uncertainty (be they exogenous or endogenous to the couple’s shared life) is a great hindrance to the normal manifestation of desire. The level of stress (and its sources, the most frequent being job, kids, and the internal couple dynamics) are somewhat difficult to quantify, but for the purposes of our research we could define the following levels: High stress level (barely sleeps at night and can seldom take your mind off from some powerful stressor) StrF = 30; medium stress level (wake up multiple times most nights and have difficulties going back to sleep, find yourself many times along the day thinking obsessively on some particular stressor) StrF = 15; no stress or very manageable one (sleep soundly, may consider repeatedly some source of preoccupation, not always in negative and despairing terms) StrF = 0

So, let’s take as an example a young heterosexual couple in their late 20’s, both of them of average fitness and health (not specially muscular, not taking any funny stuff in the form of “supplements”, not overweight, not very stressed) that have been engaged for 2 or 3 years:

His IOF is: 52 + 75 + 0 + 0 – 0 – 0 – 0 – 0 = 127

Her IOF is: 52 + 0 + 0 + 50 – 0 – 0 – 0 – 0 = 102

Which sounds just about right. He would like to have sex a bit above twice a week (to be precise, doing it three times every other week would be perfect for him), while she is happy with just a couple times. They both can find a frequency between those two relatively close extremes that leaves them in almost total bliss. He wouldn’t mind doing it a bit more frequently, and sometimes he goes to sleep wishing for some extra physical action; she wouldn’t mind letting a few more days elapse between their lovemaking, and some nights she obliges him and humors his playful advances without being all that enthusiastic about it, but they can both live (and happily make their relationship thrive) with the way things go. If he became too insistent, and initiated sex a third time every week (attempting to take their shared frequency closer to his optimal one) his life satisfaction would increase only a little (as it was already pretty high, and close to his maximum), while her life satisfaction would take a substantial dive. That would make her start pushing back more forcefully (even unconsciously “somatizing” her loss of overall satisfaction, those famed headaches do not come out of thin air, you know!) until they settled back in a (lower) frequency that satisfied both of them equally (in the following graph, the male curve is depicted in blue, and his significant values are followed by 1, whilst the female one is depicted in red, and her values followed by a 2):

I’m sure my most astute readers can see where this is going. This little depiction of the beginning of a shared life already seems like too nice to be true, and one cannot avoid thinking that that is how God (or Nature, or GNON, or the Universe) intended relationships to work forever… were it not for the fact that “foerever” is an awfully long word, and the passing of time pushes those cornily close peaks of his and her optimal frequencies further and further apart.

To see how that plays out, and how relationships typically evolve, instead of the young, carefree, adventurous couple of the first example, lets now have a look at a couple of fifty-year-olds who have been together for thirty years already, where he has gained some weight and they are both somewhat stressed (because work, caring of an aging parent, wayward ways of teen children or whatnot -remember, IOF = 52 + SF + TF + NF – AF – WF – OF – StrF):

His IOF now is: 52 + 75 + 0 + 0 – 15 – 0 – 20 – 10 = 82

While her IOF is: 52 + 0 + 0 + 0 – 30 – 15 – 0 – 10 = -3

Which, again, sounds about right. Regardless of what he may say, or brag about with his friends (if he is that sort of indiscreet asshole), a not specially in shape middle aged man is more than content doing it once a week, twice every other week. And a recently post-menopausal woman with moderate stress and a not-that-attractive-to-begin-with, somewhat boring spouse, may very well find as the “ideal” frequency not doing it at all! She may be willing to give his husband some fleeting satisfaction every now and then (as long as he is gentle and caring and loving enough, and, most important, asks for it infrequently enough). The problem is, the maximum frequency she can stand without her life satisfaction taking a serious hit may be, at some point, below the one which provides said husband with a reason to get out of bed every morning:

Note that, apart from removing stressors from their life (something that many times is not in the hands of any of the members of the couple, and that only can take them so far), there is not much they can do to put a remedy to the situation. If he decides to lose weight, or takes testosterone supplements, he would only make things worse, as his curve would move rightwards, without much affecting his wife’s, thus making the gap between his IMAF and her IPL bigger, not smaller!

I guess a lot of the situations faced by couple therapists, in the end, reduce themselves to the above picture (from what I’ve heard, there are even cases when the opposite is the case, and it is the woman the one wanting more than what the man feels comfortable offering, but I can’t for the life of me fathom what anomalous and most uncommon combination of factors can lead to such outcome). There are a number of strategies I can think of to reverse such dire state of affairs, some more viable than others, some more likely to succeed than others (and I have the impression that the ones most recommended by the aforementioned therapists belongs more usually to the latter than to the former, what are the poor souls to do, being trained in psychology and all that!) but (if I can overcome my innate coyness, which is a big “if”) I would talk of them in another post, as this has already exceeded my very lax and generous standards of verbosity already…