Christmas can be a pretty expensive time of the year, as you find yourself traipsing round the shops trying to find gifts for your entire family, your best mate, your secret Santa at work and your next-door neighbour's dog's auntie's cousin.
But a sex expert reckons the best gift you could give your other half is actually one that's completely free: a cheat pass.
Wait, what?
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Yup, Wednesday Martin believes that the ultimate present you could hand over to your partner is a hall pass - an agreement that one or both of you can sleep with someone else, without repercussions.
I mean, each to their own and all that, I guess.
Martin, who released a book called Untrue about 'why nearly everything we believe about women and lust and infidelity' is wrong, specifically reckons men should be giving their missus a free pass to cheat.
In an interview with the Telegraph last year, she said: "We now know long-term relationships are harder on female desire than they are on male desire.
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"Many experts now believe monogamy is a tighter fit for women than for men."
She added: "The real gift would be to give your spouse permission to have the conversation.
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"Why is it better to get a divorce and move on when you simply decide 'I don't fancy him any more', or the spark is gone... What a trail of destruction you might save yourself from creating if you said instead: is there something we can do here?"
Martin - a married mother-of-two - backed up her argument with findings from various studies, saying: "In one study [men's desire] tapered off slowly over seven years, whereas female desire plunged in the first one to four years."
She continued: "We might have said before 'Oh well, that's because women like sex less than men do, but now the new data are helping us understand it's not that women like sex less than men do, it's that men are better at wanting what they already have and women struggle more with the same old familiar partner over and over."
Martin also referenced a 2015 YouGov study, which found that one in five people had had an affair, and 33 percent of those asked had 'thought about it'.
The reasoning behind the affairs varied from 'I felt flattered by the attention', 'I felt emotionally deprived in my relationship' and 'I was dissatisfied with my sex life' through to 'I enjoyed the thrill of cheating' and 'I was unable to commit to one partner'.
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Explaining how she envisages the arrangement should work, Martin said: "So here's the deal: consensual non-monogamy, I don't think people in the mainstream know enough about it... but that suggestion stems from a YouGov study that shows one in five British adults said they had had an affair.
"That's an awful lot of people struggling with monogamy and believing their only option is to remain monogamous and unfulfilled or have an affair and pray it doesn't blow up your marriage.
"What if we looked at struggling with exclusivity after a number of years as simply the baseline, and gave people a whole range of solutions?"
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Featured Image Credit: PA
Topics: Christmas, World News, News, Dating
