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It remains unclear whether the frequency of marital coitus does in fact decline universally across the life course, what shape that decay normally takes, and what best accounts for it: increasing marriage duration, women’s age or age of their partners. Using cross-sectional Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) data of 91,744 non-abstaining women in their first marriage, a generalized linear model is used to determine if there is a consistent pattern in the life course pattern of degradation in the frequency of marital coitus. Datasets were drawn from nineteen countries in Asia, Africa and the Americas. Use of very large samples allows proper disentangling of the effects of women’s age, husband’s age and marital duration, and use of samples from multiple countries allows consideration of the influence of varied prevailing fertility regimes and fertility-related practices on life course trajectories. It is found that declining …