New research claims to have measured how often women with low sexual desire have “mercy sex.”

What it actually measured was something far more interesting.

A woman agrees to have sex with her husband.

She was not thinking about sex beforehand.

She did not spend the afternoon in a state of barely managed erotic anticipation.

She was thinking about groceries, an unanswered email, and whether the damp towel on the bathroom floor had achieved legal residency.

But she likes him.

She likes being close to him. She is willing to begin.

Perhaps desire will arrive once they are touching.

Perhaps it will not. Either way, she does not experience the encounter as an injury or extraction.

Was that mercy sex?

Now consider another woman.

She agrees because declining will produce three hours of sulking, a speech about how they are “just roommates,” or another insinuation that a man cannot reasonably be expected to remain faithful under these conditions.

Was that mercy sex as well?

Dr. Orion Taraban has built an enormous audience by saying aloud what much of contemporary relationship culture prefers to discuss behind its hand.

Attraction is unequal. Beauty matters. Status matters. Sex matters.

We tend to compare our partners with available alternatives.

if we need the relationship less, we may possess more power within it. Kindness, regrettably, does not compel desire.

None of this is especially soothing, because the good doctor Taraban does not seem interested in soothing anybody.

The California psychologist and creator of PsycHacks has become one of the internet’s most provocative interpreters of modern relationships.

His 2024 book, The Value of Others, examines coupling through the language of behavioral economics: value, exchange, competition, scarcity, leverage and the availability of better options.

It is easy to understand why his ideas have found an audience, particularly among men who feel that conventional therapeutic language has described them mainly as defective women.

Taraban tells them that attraction is not a moral reward. Nobody owes them desire. Effort does not guarantee romantic success. If they want different outcomes, they must become capable of producing them.

There is something bracing about this.

There is also something stunted.

Friends with benefits sounds like something invented by a committee determined to keep desire from becoming inconvenient.

There will be friendship. There will be sex.

There will be no possessiveness, no Sunday discussion about where this is going, and certainly no one standing barefoot in a kitchen at midnight asking why a text went unanswered.

The arrangement is supposed to preserve the pleasures of intimacy while removing its administrative burden.

Sometimes it does.

Sometimes two adults understand the bargain, enjoy one another, and leave without requiring the experience to become a referendum on their worth.

But human beings are not famous for maintaining tidy internal arrangements.

Bodies attach. Expectations creep in through the side door. Someone begins staying later. Someone else begins leaving sooner.

Eventually, the friendship may mean more to one person while the benefits mean more to the other.

August Belmont Jr. built things large enough to survive him.

He financed New York’s first subway.

He created Belmont Park.

He backed the Cape Cod Canal, the industrial incision that turned Cape Cod into an artificial island and changed the geography of Massachusetts.

But the most interesting thing Belmont helped build may have been a second life for the woman he married.

Her name was Eleanor Robson.

When they met, she was not waiting to be rescued.

She was already famous.

Eleanor Robson came from the theater, although not from its luxurious end.

She began in a stock company at seventeen, earning $15 a week. When another actress became ill during a Hawaiian engagement, Eleanor suddenly had to learn leading roles in eleven plays.

She managed it, received a raise, and kept moving.

By 1900, she had reached the New York stage.

Within a few years, she was one of its most respected actresses—a performer known less for theatrical thunder than for naturalness and emotional intelligence.

George Bernard Shaw admired her.

He regarded her not merely as an attractive leading lady but as an artist. He wanted her for Major Barbara, although contractual obligations kept her from playing the part.

Eleanor had made herself.

This matters because the story can otherwise be mistaken for the familiar arrangement in which a wealthy older man plucks a lovely young woman from obscurity and bestows a life upon her.

August Belmont did not give Eleanor Robson a life.

She already had one.

That was the problem.

There are people who are exceptionally good at feeling love.

This is not necessarily the same thing as being good at loving someone.

Joe Cocker understood the distinction more intimately than most.

Watch him sing You Are So Beautiful in the 1970s and the performance seems almost indecently exposed.

Cocker does not so much sing the song as allow it to happen to his body.

His shoulders contract. His hands search the air. His face registers something between gratitude and injury.

There is no wink in it.

No protective irony.

He seems, for three minutes, incapable of withholding anything.

And yet the man capable of expressing tenderness with that astonishing intensity was, during much of the same period, living a life that made sustained intimacy extraordinarily difficult.

That is the interesting thing about Joe Cocker.

He could feel everything.

It took him considerably longer to learn how to stay.

There is a particular kind of disappointment that arrives in a long marriage.

It does not necessarily announce itself with an affair.

Nobody has emptied the bank account.

Nobody has developed a secret family in Cincinnati.

Sometimes nothing particularly terrible has happened at all.

You simply look across the kitchen one morning at the person you once regarded as an astonishing event in the history of the universe, and they are standing there in slippers, opening cabinets, asking whether you remembered to buy coffee filters.

This can be unsettling.

Because once, they were the moon.

The Outer Banks are beautiful in the slightly unnerving way of places that have killed a great many people.

The beaches are wide. The dunes hold their pale line against the Atlantic.

Pelicans pass overhead with the composure of creatures that have not spent much time reconsidering their marriages.

And beneath the water lie the ships.

These waters are called the Graveyard of the Atlantic.

Storms gather quickly. Currents collide. Sandbars move.

The coastline rearranges itself without consulting the charts.

A captain could possess a sound vessel, an experienced crew, and a respectable understanding of the sea—and still strike something that had not been there the last time anyone looked.

This is the first uncomfortable thing shipwrecks know about marriage:

The map can be accurate and still become useless.

Robert Heinlein spent much of his career designing improved arrangements for the human race.

Improved governments. Improved armies. Improved sexual customs. Improved marriages. Improved methods for occupying other planets, where presumably nobody would insist upon bringing the same tedious rules from Connecticut.

His novels considered communal families, plural marriages, nudism, sexual freedom, and the possibility that jealousy might be one more primitive habit intelligent people could learn to outgrow.

He was fascinated by relationships constructed deliberately rather than inherited wholesale from parents, priests, and county clerks.

Then, in 1948, he married Virginia Gerstenfeld.

They remained together for forty years.

It was not quite the domestic conclusion one might expect from the great speculative engineer of unconventional love. Heinlein imagined households populated by several unusually attractive adults sharing affection with astonishing administrative efficiency. What he created for himself was more concentrated: an intensely bonded marriage to one brilliant, disciplined, indispensable woman.

The man who kept redesigning marriage in his fiction appears to have found his greatest freedom inside a partnership of two.

Hermann Hesse became a patron saint of the 1960s without having the good manners to remain alive for most of them.

Young Americans like me discovered Siddhartha, Steppenwolf, and Demian and recognized a fellow traveler: suspicious of authority, hostile to bourgeois conformity, interested in Eastern spirituality, and convinced that the authentic self was hiding somewhere beyond the reach of parents, pastors, employers, and anyone wearing a necktie.

At the time, I was less interested in his marital history.

This was understandable.

The counterculture preferred its prophets wandering beside rivers, not negotiating childcare with an exhausted wife.

The same young readers like me who struggled with the notion that love should be free also tended to believe it should be easy—an arrangement history has not often managed to provide.

Hesse married three times. Some might suggest that Hesse displayed a degree of Avoidant Attachment.

The marriages were very different, but together they revealed something central about him.

He longed for intimacy, depended upon it, and repeatedly experienced its ordinary demands as an encroachment upon the sovereignty of the self.

He wanted love.

He was less enthusiastic about somebody being there.

Somewhere in America, a perfectly contented couple is worrying that they are not having enough sex.

They do not know who established the quota. No physician handed it to them.

It was not included with the marriage license.

Nevertheless, they have absorbed the idea that happy couples have sex frequently, unhappy couples have it rarely, and everybody else should be monitoring the situation like an underperforming retirement account.

The result is a peculiar form of intimate anxiety: two people may be reasonably satisfied until they begin wondering whether they are satisfied often enough.

The Wall Street Journal recently examined several popular beliefs about sex that do not sit comfortably with the available research.

One of the most persistent is the assumption that more sex necessarily produces a happier relationship.

It does not appear to be that simple.

Money enters a relationship wearing several disguises.

Sometimes it arrives as a paycheck. Sometimes it arrives as a house, an inheritance, a retirement account, or a suspiciously specific collection of vintage motorcycles described as “an investment.”

Money can represent freedom, safety, status, competence, loyalty, power—or the ability to order lunch without submitting a small grant proposal to one’s spouse.

When couples decide whether to combine their money or maintain separate accounts, the conversation is usually presented as practical:

Who pays the mortgage?

How much should each person contribute?

Can we afford the vacation?

Why did someone spend $780 at Costco when there are only two of us?

But money management is rarely just bookkeeping. It is an emotional constitution. Every couple quietly decides what belongs to me, what belongs to you, and what belongs to us.

Fascinating new research suggests that two forms of financial equality—equal income and equal wealth—may push couples in opposite directions.

When partners earn similar incomes, they may be more inclined to keep some money separate. But when they possess similar amounts of wealth, they may be more likely to combine their finances.

Apparently, equality does not have one financial personality. It has at least two checking accounts.

Leonard Bernstein did not enter a room so much as take possession of its weather.

He conducted orchestras with his entire body. He composed symphonies, ballets, operas and Broadway musicals.

He explained classical music to American children without making it feel like court-ordered enrichment.

He smoked, lectured, flirted, embraced, perspired, wept and generated more emotional electricity before lunch than most families produce in a fiscal quarter.

Felicia Montealegre was different.

She was elegant where Leonard was exuberant, contained where he was overflowing, and socially precise where he treated personal boundaries as an intriguing but unproven theory.

Together, they created one of the most glittering marriages of 20th-century cultural life.

Their homes were filled with actors, musicians, writers, activists and the sort of people who referred to Aaron Copland by his first name. They raised three children.

They made art together. They supported civil rights, protested the Vietnam War and entertained with such panache that even their political controversies appeared to have been catered.

They also constructed a family around a difficult truth.