Dry spells. What's the longest time you've gone without sex?

Think very carefully about the last time that you had sex. Okay not so carefully that you can no longer concentrate on what you are reading but just back to the last time you got jiggy with it. If you are happily loved up in a relationship and getting er, intimate with your partner on a daily, weekly or monthly basis you are going to have to take off your smug smile and cast your mind back a bit. If you don’t have a partner at the moment  you may relate to the way Sam de Brito is feeling.

He recently wrote about his dry spell in his column which appears in the SMH:

Men might routinely forget birthdays and wedding anniversaries but I reckon there’s one date every bloke has fixed unerringly in his mind: the last time he had sex.

It’s not actually a date per se, more a total – in weeks, months, or god help him, years since he successfully ran the ferret.

If it’s a matter of mere days and the sexual counter has just been reset, most men probably don’t even pause to consider this puny, unintimidating little number.

However, once the total has grown and can be measured in months, the figure sits in the back of a man’s head ticking over like the timing device on an IED.

Me? It’s been seven months since I scratched the awesome itch – after a split from my partner and child – and I can feel the one-year mark creeping up on me like a bloke with hairy wrists in a cell block shower.

For months my lack of sexual initiative hasn’t bothered me, but now it’s beginning to feel a little pathetic: I’m worried I might start collecting comic books or grow a ponytail.

Women probably have the same guilty awareness of their sex lives – in fact most gals seem to be able to blurt out the last time they bumped uglies as readily as a guy. I wonder, however, do they pay it as much heed as a man?

At high school we had a rule that if a mate had gone 12 weeks without sex, he’d officially moved into drought conditions, such was the lack of moisture in his life.

That means I’ve progressed through an incipient dry spell, past mild and moderate drought conditions, into severe aridity and am now staring down an extreme rainfall deficiency on the Standard Precipitation Index.

If I was a Third World country, I’d have Rebecca Gibney flying in to shoot an ad for World Vision next weekend. Foreign Correspondent would be preparing a cover story.

You can buy Sam’s new book, Hello Darkness, here. This article has been republished here with full permission.

Can you relate? What has been your longest dry spell? Was it self inflicted or a matter of circumstance?