In this episode of the Dad Starting Over podcast, host Ralph Brewer (DSO) first promotes the Help for Men Brotherhood, a support community offering forums, live Zooms, coaching, and his books to men dealing with dead bedrooms, divorce, and loneliness. He then examines a widely circulated statistic claiming married people have more sex than single people. Using survey data, Brewer breaks down sexual frequency among married couples, highlighting that 10% report no sex in a year, 7% once or twice, and overall 53% fall into what he defines as "dead bedroom" or under‑sexed relationships. He contrasts this with the minority who have sex weekly or more. Brewer critiques the simplistic advice that single men should marry to increase sexual activity, noting that many single men, especially ages 18‑30, experience little to no sex, with a third receiving none at all and many giving up. He discusses societal pressures toward enforced monogamy, arguing marriage serves a stabilizing function for children and society but is not universally beneficial. He categorizes men into two extremes—players who need to settle down and incels who need a partner to prevent dangerous frustration—suggesting marriage can help both, though most men fall in the middle where benefits are limited. Finally, Brewer advises men to assess their own sexual situation before deciding on marriage, acknowledging that for some it may improve sex life while for many it may not, and emphasizes a nuanced view of marriage rather than a blanket endorsement.
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Okay, if you're a frequent listener of the Dad Starting Over podcast and you find yourself saying, "Yeah, that sounds like me," well, you don't need another podcast episode. What you need is support. The Help for Men Brotherhood is where men go when they're done pretending that they got it all handled. You know, your dead bedrooms, your divorce, your loneliness, your rebuilding life. We have private forums, frequent live Zoom meetings, one-on-one coaching courses, all my books at no additional charge. And yes, we get together in person, real men and real conversations. So stop doing this alone and join the Help for Men Brotherhood today at help4men.com/join. I look forward to seeing you in the next member meeting. So there's been a stat going around that I've seen shared a lot lately. It's been social media, Twitter, Facebook, some of my favorite, uh, social media accounts and podcasters like Lauren the Dadvocate and Chris Williamson at Modern Wisdom Podcast have quoted a stat, which is true by the way, and the stat is that when surveyed, it seems that married people have more sex than single people. Now, depending on who you approach with this statistic, you may get either the reaction of uncontrollable laughter for a good half hour, Or, uh, really? Or something like, yeah, that makes sense. It's all over the place. And you could see comments on these posts. They, they reflect that. The responses all over the place. People's experiences all over the place. Is it true? It is statistically. But does that mean you should go up to the average single Joe out there and say, uh, how's your sex life going? And he says, It's all right. And you say, you know what the solution to your problem is? You should get married. Is that a proper conclusion to take from those surveys? The answer is no, not necessarily. So let's dig into this a little bit, flesh it out and see exactly what's going on. So let's start with married dudes. If you may or may not know, my name is Ralph Brewer Brewer Brewer. I go by the fake pen name you may have seen, DSO, which stands for Dad Starting Over. I have a website called dadstartingover.com. I have hundreds of articles that have been out there, hundreds of videos, and I wrote a book years years ago that got pretty popular called The Dead Bedroom Fix, and it's my thoughts on the whole issue of married men just not getting enough. And it's such a huge issue that anywhere you go online and look up forums, Reddit, video format, YouTube, my book, you will see a growing evidence that, wow, married people, a lot of them sure aren't getting any, at least not to the degree that makes them happy. So when those people, if you were to go to them with the stat of, you know, married people tend to have more sex than single people, again, they would all laugh in your face. But let's look at the stats. All emotion aside, exactly what are married people experiencing in the bedroom? Well, you can only go by surveys. You can only go by what people tell you. And there was a survey that is often cited by people, and it shows that 10% of married couples say they didn't have sex at all in the past year. Nothing in the past year. 10%. Holy crap. Moving on. 7% of those adults said they had sex once or twice in the past year. So keeping score, we're up to 17% of married couples are most definitely in a dead bedroom relationship. Moving on. 17% said they had sex around once a month. Now, I don't know about you, but by my definition of dead bedroom— this is a subjective thing— that qualifies. Once a month is dysfunctional. It's not healthy. And I imagine most of the men in that situation, if you were to poll them, would say, "Nah, it ain't cutting it." So, not good. Now we are up to 34% of couples dead bedroom relationships. Now here's the one that's a little iffy. 19%, uh, said they had sex 2 or 3 times in a month. So we're looking at every other week, about, yeah, maybe throw an extra one in there somewhere. Is that a quote dead bedroom? By my standards and the standards of a lot of guys, yeah, it's still not there. It's still not good. It's still not healthy to go a full, you know, couple of weeks At nothing? Any kind of marriage counselor would probably say, "What's going on with you two?" So now, if we include that number in the dead bedroom category, we are up to 53% of married couples. The majority of married couples have arguably, I understand this is a subjective thing, a dead bedroom relationship, or at the very least, um, an undersexed relationship, a dysfunctional relationship as far as physical intimacy. Is concerned. Now, moving on to the more positive, 25%, a full one-fourth of married couples say about once a week. And then we go to the lucky ones who say— 16% say that 2 or 3 times a week. And then we have the tippy top of the pyramid, 5% of couples said they had sex 4 or more times a week. Wow. Good for them, right? Okay. So, again, by my own personal definition, I'm gonna say that those first 4 groups that I mentioned, 53%, the majority, Just a little over half, 53%, but technically the majority of marriages are in dead bedroom relationships. And yet we have the stat that shows if you're a single person and you want to get more sex, you should go ahead and marry. Doesn't make sense, or does it? At the risk of sounding like, you know, Randy Red Pill here, that's not my intent, there's some not so nice stuff about the whole mating game, sex, marriage, singleness, all that stuff, um, that a lot of people don't like to mention. And that is this: the majority of men out there on the prowl looking for a mate in the singles market are not having frequent sexual encounters with women. There's a big chunk of men actually out there, young men too, the men that are supposed to be in the prime of their lives, 18 to 30 years of age, that are getting nothing. Approximately one-third of those guys aren't getting anything at all. And of that group, over half of them say, "I've given up on even trying." Ouch. So to those guys who aren't getting anything, and they've given up on the whole relationship process completely, what if somebody were to come along and say, "I got a wife for you." Some type of enforced monogamy. There's a term that's pretty controversial, but it's a thing. Basically means that society kind of pushes people to to pair up with one person and remain with that one person in a long-term monogamous relationship. We pressure people to do that. We push our men and women into these relationships. Well, what if they're in some type of social circle or culture, society that says, here's your wife? So you got a guy who's in that large chunk of men out there not getting any, and then you say, here's your wife. That guy will in fact have more sex than what he had before. Even if he's in that 53% group, even if he's the guy that gets it once a month, ovulation time, the wife's trying to make a baby, whatever it may be, he went from 0 to 1 a month. Huge increase. He went from 0 a year to 12 times a year. Huge increase. This points the magnifying glass at a very not so nice thing about marriage in general. It serves a purpose. It's good overall for society. It's certainly better for our kids to have a man and woman under one roof. The old male-female dynamic, the yin and yang, the polarity between mother and father, we've come to conclusion gives them the best of both worlds. It's a more secure environment for their upbringing. They have a better chance at positive mental health, physical health, and everything else. It's just overall a good thing for kids and society in general if people pair up in long-term monogamous relationships. But I'm the first to say it ain't for everybody. So who is it for exactly? Well, I've always kind of, to super simplify it, I say there's two guys on opposite ends of the spectrum that it really serves very well. One are your player types, your guys that sleep around with lots and lots of women, and they cause chaos, and they're leaving babies everywhere, and it's not good for society overall. But marriage says, can you just please focus on this one? Here's your wife, here's your kids. They see the subsequent downturn in testosterone as a result. They calm down, they settle down, and they're not going around causing chaos everywhere. Hallelujah. And then we have these guys over here on the opposite end of the spectrum who can never get any at all. Well, please don't go into a school with a gun and shoot up everybody. Please don't go into your car and mow down people in a Christmas market. We know that because Men, these, uh, incel celibate type of men, they're not the happiest creatures in the world. And an unhappy celibate man is a dangerous man. So here's your woman, this is your sexual partner, please don't go around causing chaos. So we have these two chaos makers on opposite ends of the spectrum, to which marriage for society overall works best for all of us if they have a wife partner. That sounds fairly cold and conspiratorial, but generations of people have come to this conclusion. It's just better overall if those two dudes match up with one woman and, you know, settle down. And then we just have those people that just flourish within long-term monogamous relationships. They love having a partner to go through life with. They're able to maintain the sexy, the lover side, as I often call it, and the provider side. They're a rare thing, but they exist. These people are together for decades and decades, and they die together. And they're happy as can be. So in conclusion, to tell people, um, if you're single and you want to have more sex, you better get married— it's not telling the whole picture, is it? I think first what it should do is say, let's first assess the person I'm asking. What's your sex life like? Are you one of those chosen few men who can get a lot of sex with a lot of different women? Well, it's probably best overall for society if you do settle down with one woman, but with a caveat that your sex life is probably going to go down, and you got to be cool with that. That's the message that doesn't get across to a lot of guys. A lot of guys are literally told, or maybe in a roundabout way society has told them, that, you know, married sex life is an overall more wholesome, better experience. They need to drop all this stuff of screwing around with all these women. You need the one woman, and if you play your cards right, it can be a hypersexual awesome thing. And that is true for a select few group of people. For the majority of you, as the stats show, not so much. I'm not trying to dissuade people from the institution of marriage. I'm just trying to shed a light on the reality of the situation. And if our— and I say our because I am married— if our institution cannot stand up to a little bit of scrutiny, to some light shining on it, that's not a good thing.
