Not very often does a birthday gift provoke an international bout of soul-searching - but then most pressies don’t come in the form of a promise that requires no fancy gift wrap to make it stand out.
In Charla Muller’s case, it was a pledge to have sex with her husband Brad every single day of his 40th birthday year, a rather daring experiment which she subsequently documented in an unexpectedly bestselling book.
That was nearly five years ago, but still her concept invokes weary sighs among some womenfolk. When I mention to my girlfriends that I am due to interview Charla to find out how the Muller marriage is faring a few years down the line, the responses are fairly unequivocal.
“Divorced, probably,” says one, with a snort. “Or depressed,” says another. Another suggests that if there were any justice in the world, Charla will have been put off sex for life.
This all seems a bit harsh - but then Charla’s book, 365 Days, A Memoir Of Intimacy, lit a touch-paper of anxieties in the hearts of many married couples, and women in particular, when it was first published in the US two years ago.
It detailed how, like many women of a certain age juggling jobs, children and assorted domestic duties, Charla, now 44, had become an expert at dodging sexual contact with her husband.
After upholding her promise, however, her memoir - while warmly written and by no means hectoring in tone - effectively wags a warning finger at those women heading down the same road. In many ways it could be said to boil down to three simple words: Just Do It.
But those hoping for hubris to have struck Charla in the intervening years will be sorely disappointed. Instead, she claims she is more happily married than ever before.
In fact, as she puts it: “One of the reasons I wrote the book is that “the gift”, as it became known, went from being a fun campy thing to something more transformative which endures to this day. It was the best year of our marriage, without question. But I would never have predicted that at the beginning, or that it would have such an impact.”
Certainly the self-confessed ordinary working mum from North Carolina never intended to set herself up as a sex guru. Instead, back in July 2006, she was just looking for an imaginative 40th birthday gift for her husband.
At the time, she considered herself happily married. After two children, the lovestruck, passion-filled early days of their courtship were long gone, but she believed their eight-year union was a strong one.
“Like a lot of married couples with kids, sex got lost along the way,” Charla recalls. “But its absence becomes a presence in the marriage, a silent tension hanging in the air. It certainly was in mine.
“My husband was constantly thinking to himself: ‘I wonder if today’s the day?’ And I was thinking: ‘I wonder if I can hold off till tomorrow?’
“There was always something in the way - a school report, a domestic chore which would make me dodge it. You start off as smug newly-weds who think you’re Romeo and Juliet for life, then you end up being just like everybody else.”
Her birthday gift was, at first, intended as a light-hearted remedy to a sex life that had dwindled. “Brad actually thought it was unromantic, that sex should be more spontaneous. I said to him “look at our lives now - nothing we do is spontaneous”. The point is you absolutely cannot depend on spontaneity to keep your sex life going when you’re in your 40s, married and with kids - it’s never going to happen.
“Of course, there were days when I didn’t want to do it - but then there were days when I didn’t want to do a lot of things, but I still did them because it oils the wheels. And what could be more important than oiling the wheels of your marriage? It doesn’t have to be the A-plus experience all the time - the main thing is that you are making an effort.”
Impressively, Charla and Brad averaged 28 times a month over the course of the year. Moreover, as she detailed in her memoir, as time went on Charla realised that there were unexpected benefits to this rejuvenated sex life. “We were much more connected on all levels, and not just in the bedroom,” she recalls. “I realised how much better your marriage is when you’re firing on all cylinders, and that includes intimacy. We were nicer to each other in general, more thoughtful, more mindful.”
As time went on, the idea for the book started to form. “I realised that an experience I thought was for me intensely personal was actually universal.”
Still, becoming the author of a sex book - albeit one which draws a discreet veil over the actual goings-on in the bedroom department - was not an obvious choice for a church-going Christian from a traditional background.
My parents were very shocked at first when I told them - my dad in particular,” Charla recalls. “They’re pretty conservative and it was difficult for them to come to terms with it. But after Dad read the book he said he understood what I was trying to do, although he did predict that I would have a tough time in terms of people’s reactions - and he was right about that.”
When the book was first released in America, it caused a storm of criticism in some quarters, with a slice of the feminist community in particular complaining that the concept had a ring of “surrendered wife” to it - the sexual equivalent of a handbook telling women to warm their husbands’ slippers in front of the fire to make their marriage work.
Charla maintains they were totally missing the point.
“I was aware of people feeling that, but that’s largely because they hadn’t actually read the book,” she says. “Brad had just as much to contribute in terms of making this experiment work as I did. It wasn’t like he was getting home and taking off his tie and receiving a service. Instead, what was happening was that we were both putting each other first, a sort of daily kindness that lifted up our marriage and our house.
“I get a lot of husbands coming up to me and saying: “I really need my wife to read your book as I think she could learn a thing or two.” I will always say: “Actually, I think you need to read the book.”
Some women, meanwhile, wrote to her to tell her the sex in their long-term relationship was so amazing they didn’t need her help, thank-you-very-much. “One part of me would think “Good for you”, the other would think: “I’m not sure I believe you,” she says.
In the main, however, the letters she got came from women telling her how much they recognised the failing in their own marriage in her writing, and thanked her for making them take a new look at them.
“I do think it’s very easy for women to say: “Men just need sex more, I just don’t need it as much.” For my own part, what I realised is that, actually, I do need that form of physical connection with my husband just as much as he does - but maybe it nourishes me in a different way.”
In fact, a number of her friends found their marriages changed rather dramatically as a result of reading Charla’s book. “Two of my girlfriends now have what they call 365 babies,” she reveals. “They read the book, they took it on board and they accidentally got pregnant. That cracks me up.”
In Charla’s case, “the gift” came to rather an abrupt end on July 4, 2007 - Independence Day in the US, ironically enough - and the day after Brad’s 41st birthday, when he woke up to find that for the first time in 365 days he could not guarantee he would be having sex that day.
“I literally did a little dance that morning,” Charla confesses. “But it wasn’t that I had been released, more that I had done it and achieved something wonderful. Still, I think Brad was a bit disappointed.”
Which, of course, begs the question: how much sex have they been having since then? “My mental goal is three times a week and if we net up twice that’s good,” she admits.
“But we have good months and bad months. The difference is we’re both very aware of it and we both work together to keep it high on the agenda. Brad put it this way - that sex every day is not a long-term sustainable model, but neither is sex hardly ever,” she says. “The key was to land somewhere in between.”
Charla is quick to emphasise that her marriage is by no means perfect. “We didn’t sail off into the sunset, and we don’t always get it right,” she says. “We still fight, we still get snitty with each other. But the difference is that we’re able to auto-correct much better. It’s like we’ve got a better set of tools to help us along the way.”
Still, it’s only fair to ask whether she’d do the 365 days thing again. “Certainly not,” she says.
Which is definitely something for the naysayers to hold on to.
* 365 Nights: A Memoir Of Intimacy by Charla Muller will be published in April by John Blake - Daily Mail