Lifestyle Zone

Charla Muller couldn’t think of what to give her husband for his 40th birthday. It was a special birthday, but nothing she came up with seemed particularly creative.

Then she had a flash of insight. As her gift, she promised her husband they would have sex every day for a year. 365 days of sex.

"This is something no one else would give him," said Muller in an interview. "It didn’t cost a lot of money, it was highly memorable. It met all the criteria for a really great gift."

At first he was delighted. Then he figured she wouldn’t follow through. But when it became clear that she was serious, off they went, having sex almost every day for a year.

The experience is chronicled in Muller’s book, "365 Nights." Coincidentally, the book is being released at nearly the same time as another one with the same subject matter. "Just Do It," by Douglas Brown, tells the story of Brown and his wife and their pledge to have sex 101 days in a row.

Both books seem to have hit a nerve and are selling well, and the couples are being adopted as media darlings and hitting the talk show circuit.

Psychotherapist Dr. Barton Goldsmith, author of "Emotional Fitness for Couples," said to reporters that the economic situation could be part of the reason for the books’ popularity.

"Recession is good for relationships," said Dr. Goldsmith. "People don't want to go out so they can cocoon, and sex can be fun for many couples. It beats the hell out of Monopoly. Reclaiming the spark of romance is always a timely subject."

While the Mullers embarked on their year of love as a birthday gift, the Browns decided to "just do it" because they were in the doldrums after having moved from Baltimore to Colorado.

Missing friends, family, and neighborhood, the couple thought up their idea as a way to get them out of their depression. "We were just kind of bummed out when Annie handed me this idea, and I said that it might be kind of fun and put some spark back in our lives," said "Just Do It" author Douglas Brown. "Baltimore was the kind of place that generated its own spark. We wanted to see if we could do the same in what we began to call our sensory-deprivation chamber."

That doesn’t say much for Stapleton, Colorado, where they had moved to.

Both books chronicle the challenges of sex every single day, whether they felt like it or not. Sick? Gotta have sex anyway. Mad? Too bad, time to have sex. Kids getting in the way? Hire a babysitter and go to it.

There were definitely obstacles. One day Doug Brown experience a bout of vertigo (dizziness and disorientation) and his wife was not going to take no for an answer. "I’m not a quitter," she told reporters. "The night he had vertigo, I said, ‘I’m sorry guy, but you’ve got to keep going.’"

For her part, Charla Muller says she hit a wall around month 10, and started referring to the "gift" as "my stupid idea," and "my cross to bear." But the Mullers, too, kept going, missing only a few days per month as husband Brad traveled for work. "When he was traveling, we tried to make up for it," said Charla.

Both books are selling very well, though "Just Do It" is doing somewhat better on bestseller lists, some say because the details of the 101-day sexathon are more graphic, and the reader feels like he or she "is part of a threesome."

Think you could do it? It might not solve all your problems, say psychologists and sex therapists. "There’s all sorts of reasons people lose interest in sex with their partner; disappointments, life cycles, financial issues. Just having [sex] isn’t going to resolve those."

But for the Mullers and the Browns, they say it definitely brought them closer. "[We had] this intense closeness," said Annie Brown of the 101-day experience. "We were so aware of wherever the other person was mentally and emotionally, and physically."

The Browns say they didn’t have sex for a month after the 101st day, but that their frequency these days is better than it was before the experiment.

The Mullers, too, say that sex is better these days, and they’re glad for their year-long tryst. "It made it much easier to be open to the idea, more spontaneous," says Charla Muller. "It was a really meaningful lesson."