Who Says Romance Is Dead? Workaholic Couples Resort To Putting Sex In The Diary
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- Published on Friday, 31 January 2014 22:11
If spontaneity is the secret of keeping the flame of romance alive the future is looking decidedly bleak for Britain’s working parents.
According to research by the parenting website Netmums, British couples’ lives have become so dominated by work that they are now resorting to booking appointments with each other to ensure that they make time for intimacy.
It might not be the most romantic approach to marital harmony, but the fashion for so-called “scheduled sex” has become so common that the website has ranked it near the top of a list of new parenting trends of 2014.
In an informal poll of users on the site, three out of five of those who responded admitted planning ahead for sex with their partner, with many even putting it into their diaries.
A third of them said they scheduled it as a weekly fixture but a quarter admitted they managed once a month or less.
It amounts to a reinvention of the fashion for “date nights” but without any hint of romance.
Siobhan Freegard, co-founder of Netmums, said: "Spontaneity is lovely when you have time for it but people are realising that actually if you wait for the spontaneous moment it will probably never come.
“The general consensus is that it is worth making the effort even if even if you don’t feel like it.”
She said that during the recession couples with young children increasingly gave up on going out together opting for evenings in.
“Because they know it is coming maybe they send each other little texts during the day – it is often a bit more than just a functional 10 minutes in the utility room.”
Top of the list of unlikely parenting crazes discussed on the site is the fashion for so-called “cake smashes”, when parents book a professional photographer to photograph their child tucking into a cake on their first birthday.
It combines the national passion for cake making, boosted by the Great British Bake Off, with new parents' love of posting picture of their children on social networking sites.
Other unlikely fashions include “labour playlists” in which pregnant women not only head to the maternity unit armed with their favourite musical tracks to help them through childbirth but increasingly share and compare the lists online.
Perhaps the most unlikely trend on the list is a craze for breast milk jewellery. Originating from the US, specialist jewellery makers now offer trinkets made from solidified drops of breast milk which have been turned into beads as a memento for mothers of when their child was a baby.
: One in six families would now consider paying for private tuition to help get their child get ahead even before they have started primary school. Research by Netmums found that overall have of parents have considered private tuition for a child and 15 per cent are currently doing so.
- Telegraph
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