The correct answer is: No. Actually, in my experience—and a quick survey of all the usual suspects confirms it, anecdotally anyway—transitional seasons seem to be the more active time for human, uh, rutting. Among ourselves, we men frequently talk about how the “sap begins to run” in the spring, and I can tell you from personal history that there is some truth to this. When the snow begins to melt, and the sunshine begins to stick, we start feeling just slightly more amorous than usual. (Obviously, we don’t go into hibernation through the winter. It’s just that in the spring, there seems to be a slight acceleration in the hormonal urgency to repeat that old act in the human comedy.)
Now, it may be that part of this elevated interest is related to sartorial triggers. No doubt men, being visually stimulated as we are, grow a little randy when we see our women begin to de-layer after a cold Midwestern winter. But all of creation follows this pattern: Procreation, especially among mammals, takes place early in the year. I assume this is to maximize the opportunities for the young to feed and grow and mature before life-threatening weather returns.
So it may be generally true that animals like to do it in the early spring, when the days are beginning to get warmer and longer, but we humans are more complicated than most animals. I think there is an equal kind if libidinous upswing for us in the late fall. When the light begins to fail, and the chimney has been cleaned, and you make the switch from summer lagers to winter porters—well, that can be an awfully romantic time of the year as well.
Do married women experience the same seasonality with their libidos? I asked my precious, and she doesn’t think so. She said that women tend to be overwhelmed by their own monthly schedule, and biologically seem less affected by seasons. Some interesting anecdotal evidence may bear this out. It used to be that a solid majority of children were born in the spring months—particularly in April. That would mean that most conceptions occurred in the late summer, just when the nights are beginning to cool down and you need an extra blanket on the bed. If you consider the relatively long gestation period of human babies, autumn would actually be the time of heightened sexual interest in the species, to maximize the chances of a spring birth.
But that’s all changed now, and there is an even distribution of birth throughout the year. I would hypothesize that this evening-out of the sexual calendar is a direct result of women being empowered to dictate when they want to get friendly, and not just accommodate their men as part of their “wifely duties.” And the downside is that married men, no longer being able to count on seasonally enhanced periods of intimacy, may go even longer than normal without any discernible uptick in the action. (Variety is the spice of life, they say.)
This is a sort of cautionary tale to married folks, I guess. My friend Steve recently told me the painful story about how, years ago, he’d gotten involved with another woman. It was a disaster, and, as you might expect, it almost ruined his marriage. He and Suzy spent months with a marriage counselor who forced them to talk about a lot of things that—in hindsight—Steve says were very hurtful, and probably would have been better left alone. But things were said, and new wounds were made that merely worsened the breach. One insight, however, did help their relationship a lot. It was a discussion related to this biological seasonality of sex. Their counselor told them that it was a proven fact that couples who are more frequent and irregular and creative about their intimacy tend not to have problems with infidelity. Which sounds pretty obvious, but it’s worth repeating in the simplest terms: Married men who have an active and not entirely predictable marital bed tend to have fewer problems with the wandering eye and the lustful heart.
It makes sense, then, that as long as we are acknowledging the biological imperative to make whoopie, we might want to be sensitive to the subtle fluctuations in desire that happen throughout the year. Whether they are seasonal or monthly, we married folks have to work extra hard to make our time tables jibe. Philandering is a moral failing, but there are certain forms of insurance a couple can take out, and one of them is a simple matter of scheduling. In the long run, it literally saved Steve and Suzy.
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