This is Charla Muller and her (happy) husband Brad. Looking for an "original, intimate and memorable" gift for Brad’s 40th birthday, Charla decided to give him sex every day until he turned 41.
And then she wrote a book about it.

‘I never wanted him to look back and ask himself: "Now, what was it
Charla bought me for my 40th?"’ she says. ‘When I came up with the idea
of daily sex for a year, I thought I’d hit the jackpot. What man
wouldn’t think that was the best present ever?’

According to a UK newspaper interview:

What a pity not everyone – actually, not anyone, if we are being truthful – agreed.

‘To
be honest, I didn’t tell my friends what I’d got him until halfway
through the year,’ says Charla. ‘When I did, they were just
incredulous, with most thinking that I was quite mad.

‘One girlfriend said I must never, ever tell her husband what I was doing in case he got any ideas.

‘What
they took issue with most was the timescale. Some could see the merits
in offering their husband daily sex for a week, perhaps a month. But a
year? It was unthinkable.’

More disappointingly for Charla, the mother of two young children, even Brad thought the idea was a bit, well, unrealistic.

She
had been expecting whoops of delight and much punching of the ceiling
when she told him of his gift. Instead, she got sheer bafflement.

‘Then,
to my horror, he declined the whole thing, saying that he didn’t want
me to feel that I had to have sex with him – like it was some sort of
duty,’ says Charla. ‘He actually walked away from me, saying we would
discuss it later. I was quite deflated.’

Gosh, it is hard being a wife sometimes. All that effort and no one appreciates it. Still, Charla wasn’t that easily dissuaded.

She
eventually convinced the skeptical Brad that her offer was bona fide,
and in July 2006 they embarked on what she would eventually dub the
Dance Of The Daily Deed.

Unfortunately, the first night of
Brad’s gift coincided with a family holiday to her parents’ home, which
meant a house full of squawking babies, demanding toddlers and
organised games (always a passionkiller).

‘It was hardly
conducive to that sort of thing,’ she says. ‘I did think: "What on
earth am I doing?" And it wasn’t the last time I would think that
during the year.

‘But I was pleased with myself for seeing
it through. We’d never have considered doing something like that
before, but once we did, we realised it’s not that difficult.’

And
so it would continue for an entire year. So successful was the venture
- the couple don’t claim a 100 per cent success rate but say they had
sex roughly 28 days a month for 12 months – that Charla, a feisty
American from North Carolina, was persuaded to write a book on the
subject, 365 Nights: A Memoir Of Intimacy.

Church-going and cookie-baking, she exudes wholesomeness.
Physically, she admits to being ’sturdily built’ and is on the wrong
side of 40.

‘I’m hardly a sex kitten,’ she says. ‘But then, how many people are? That is the point.’

In
fact, most of her book isn’t about sex at all, but about all the stuff
that gets in the way of it for married couples – loading the
dishwasher, work, night-time TV, body image, bouts of depression and
the fact you need to shave your legs, but really can’t be bothered.
Whether you regard it as a funny book or a tragic one will probably
pend on your domestic status.

As she puts it: ‘By doing this I really questioned everything I had
assumed about my marriage and asked myself: "Was it really that good
before?"

‘The answer was that it couldn’t have been,
because the sex side of things had slipped into oblivion – and I had
been guilty of allowing that to happen.

‘I am not the only
woman I know who somehow made a career of dodging sex with my nice
husband. The trouble is that I didn’t even admit that to myself until
we were well into this process.

‘The big challenge then was if we could put things right.’

When they married ten years before the audacious birthday gift, it was all a little different.

She
talks movingly of the early months of her marriage when she and Brad
watched long married couples in restaurants – people with nothing to
say to each other and clearly lacking in intimacy – and sneered at
them.

‘We did that old thing of saying we would never be
like them. Intimacy was what our whole relationship was built on. How
could it ever not be the foundation stone?’

And yet that is
exactly what happened. Sex – once all-important – slid down the
priority scale once their first child came along.

Eventually, it would languish right at the bottom – ‘Somewhere below taking out the rubbish and unloading the dishwasher’.

It wasn’t until they were having regular sex that Brad confessed he had been deeply hurt by her constant rejections.

‘He
said he hated feeling that he was pleading for sex. I never thought of
my rejecting that intimacy as rejecting him but, of course, it must
have felt like that to Brad. Why didn’t I see that then?

‘I
had always thought my marriage was so safe, so solid. I’d certainly
never considered that Brad might stray, but he did confess to me that
he understood why men would.

‘That was a bit of a wake-up call for me. I thought: "How inconsiderate have I been here?" ‘

Mercifully,
her book doesn’t linger on what went on in the bedroom – ‘I am quite
prudish about being public about things like that’ – but what comes
across clearly is that it was a logistical nightmare.

‘We
did have to sit down with the wall planner going: "Well, we have that
PTA meeting on Wednesday and you are away for business on Thursday, so
we’ll have to have sex on Monday evening and Tuesday morning."

‘Brad was appalled at first. His view of sex was that it had to be spontaneous and of the moment.

‘I
always thought that was rubbish. How can it be spontaneous in the
middle of family life? So we had to compromise a bit. As it went on, I
scheduled it, but tried not to make him aware of how much I was
scheduling it.’

Sometimes, making time for ‘it’ was straightforward. ‘Some nights it was as simple as turning off the TV,’ she says.

‘Like
so many couples, we’d fallen into the habit of watching some TV before
bedtime. By the time we actually went to bed, we were shattered.

‘When I started looking at this, though, I realised there was ample time for sex; we were just putting everything else first.

‘I
can’t say that it was easy making all the effort. Sometimes it was
awful. But I reasoned with myself that it was important. How many
things do we do in a day that we don’t necessarily want to – from going
to work to washing the kitchen floor?

‘I don’t mean that I
saw sex with my husband as a chore (although maybe I did some days),
but I knew that it couldn’t possibly always be the candle-scented,
blissful experience we read about in magazines.’

But did it change their marriage for the better?

‘It
changed completely,’ says Charla. ‘We started being more attentive to
each other, not just in bed, but about the trivial little things. Brad
would offer to do some chore or run an errand, and I wouldn’t be
thinking he was doing it to gain sex points.

‘We became so much closer. You can’t have that sort of regular intimacy in bed without it spilling over into the rest of life.

‘There was a lot less narking and sniping. You just can’t do that all day then want to get into bed with the person at night.

‘My
self-confidence was greatly improved, too. I’d always been one of those
women who told herself she would want sex more if she just lost 10lb
and felt a bit more sexy.

‘Now, I realise feeling sexy
isn’t about being thin or gorgeous. My husband desired me as I was – it
was just a case of accepting that.’

What of the couple and their incredible sex life now the year has ended?

She
cites one of her husband’s observations as the best way to sum it all
up. ‘It was Brad who said that sex every day wasn’t sustainable in a
marriage, but nor was no sex at all. Now, I just say that we’ve got a
balance in the middle.

‘When my girlfriends ask if it’s
healthy to do it once a week, three times a week or whatever, I just
tell them to do it twice as often as they are doing it at the moment.

‘Their
husbands will love them for it, and they might just find that they love
themselves that little bit more, too. If they let themselves.’