Dr Pam Spurr’s words cast a chilly rod of caution into any woman’s heart. As a 32-year-old single female, who is increasingly surrounded by married couples, they also ring horribly true.

Last month I met a friend, Jessica, and her husband in a swanky restaurant in Notting Hill, West London. Jessica is one of those girls who, at the ripe old age of 28, decided that she needed to find herself a husband. And that he needed to be rich. Being the stunning, leggy sort of arm-candy that millionaires favour, her task was accomplished within the year.

They were dining with another, equally rich, couple. “Ah! Here she is,” Jessica’s husband said to me, by way of greeting. “We have just been laying bets that you have had sex more recently than us.”

More striking than the husbands’ words was their wives’ response: laughter, followed by nonchalance. To them, sex was something that they saw as solely their prerogative. I wonder how long it will be before both men stray.

Another single friend relays a similar tale. Her friend Lucy admitted that as an exhausted new mother she became so fed up with her husband Tom “pawing” her that this is what she said to him: “I will have sex with you so long as I can read my book at the same time.”

Some book. Unbelievably, he agreed. Lucy and Tom have now sorted out their sex life and recalled the scenario together. Tom said: “I don’t think she realised how important sex was to me, and therefore to the success of our marriage. I could put up with anything – her looking awful, doubling in weight, becoming ill or depressed, but not that.” Stories such as these are not exactly the norm, but neither are they rare. Offhand, I can think of three girlfriends who do not have sex with their husbands or long-term partners more than once every six months, maximum. Interestingly, none of them have children.

There are also tales of the opposite extreme. Emily tells me that she realised her relationship was in dire straits when she started taking the Pill back to back, to avoid having her period at all. “He couldn’t take a knockback even for four days,” she says. “But it took me a while to accept that he was bad news.” Abi recalls that her ex-boyfriend used to weigh her every Monday, and refuse her sex unless she was under nine stone.

These are acute examples, of course, and few of us can relate to them. But some of us can perhaps empathise with another friend, Helen, when she tells me of her new illness: revulsion syndrome.

Helen remembers one weekend when she found herself telling her husband that they couldn’t have sex – because she had just made the bed.

“He’d had a bath and I had tidied the bedroom. He started to get fresh and out it came. The thing is, if he didn’t pester me so much I might be on for sex a lot more than I am.” Agree to sex more often and he may pester you less, Dr Spurr might say.

But it’s not all doom and gloom. Some friends seem to have got it right. Recently pregnant Laura told me that she had cracked it on her summer holiday. “I made sure that we had sex every day after our siesta, and it seemed to keep him happy.”

Perhaps I’m naive, but I hope that it may be possible to strike a happy medium. We are all aware of the exhaustion of modern life but, in the interests of keeping a marriage alive, can it really be that hard to say, with humour and affection, “OK then, darling, but make it quick”?

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