In his youth, Leo Tolstoy was consumed with sex; it eventually resulted in his refusing to sleep in the same bed as his wife. Malcolm Muggeridge, an irrepressible roué in his youth, later in life wrote the essay, Down with Sex.

Today we have pills to uplift flagging appendages, pornography in every format to stimulate waning interest, children dressed as hookers, matrons undressed on calendars, alleged counsellors to advise on sexual positions, postures and predicaments, a sexual prophet embalmed in the wrinkled carcass of Hugh Hefner, sex toys, creams, licentious libido lotions, rubbers, diaphragms, morning after and before pills, gay sex education for five year-olds and – this:

Let’s talk about my sexless marriage

Four years into Diane’s marriage, her husband became “bothered” by the prospect of sleeping with her and moved into a room vacated by her grown daughter.

Fourteen years later, the Pennsylvania artist has still not had sex with her “emotionally closed off” husband, who has taken to masturbating to pornography in a separate building on their property.

“I can’t remember the last time I got a hug. It’s probably been a couple of years since I’ve even gotten any kind of a kiss,” says Diane, who did not want her full name used.

Marion Goertz, a registered sex therapist in Toronto, says that although 30 per cent of her female patients complain about low sexual desire and many of her male patients suffer from erectile dysfunction, “couples avoid being sexually intimate for reasons beyond the physical.

When people turn away from God in favour of transitory satisfaction, he eventually gives them what they want, usually in an unsatisfying form. It is a demonstration of William Blake’s Fearful Symmetry: a divine gift that has been humanly framed, sterilised and robbed of its intended purpose becomes empty, spent and finally withers away.