A Sexless Marriage Is Qualitatively, Not Quantitatively, Different From A Sexual Marriage

There is an idea that men are very shallow and leave their wives when their sex lives grow less exciting. This may be true for a very small subset of men, but the average man loves his wife and feels loyal to her, and would not do this no matter how boring the sex life became … given certain caveats I’ll discuss. However, many men do leave sexless marriages. Why is a sexless marriage so different from a marriage with boring sex? 

Before we begin, note that this applies to some women as well; however, this post will focus on men as they are the higher libido partners in most situations. As with all my posts, switch genders if applicable for your relationship dynamic!

First, we have to go back to a central precept of relationships: Sex is not about sex. Sex means love, connection, play, closeness, and acceptance. 

The women who think that a man’s desire for sex is “immature,” “just about getting off” or “just about a man wanting a hot, young woman” are entirely wrong. Many women say that their husbands “only want sex”, ignoring the fact that they barely have any sex at all, compared to the time spent in other marriage and family-related activities.

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When couples stop having sex entirely, marriages turn qualitatively different. There are very few sexless marriages that aren’t also touchless, or touchless except for a peck on the cheek. If the woman no longer wants sex at all, the man has a solo sex life, often involving a lot of porn use. I discuss often that porn is bad for marriage, but only in the case that there is a sexual marriage of some sort. 

When there is no sex going on at all at the wife’s behest, then porn turns into the man’s only partner.

A sexless marriage can be a partnership, a friendship, or a family relationship, but it does not usually feel to either partner to be a romantic relationship. This is very different from a marriage where sex is boring or routine. Everything can become boring or routine with enough iterations of it, no matter what. Certainly, you can try different things in bed, but there are only so many things one can do over decades of marriage. This is understandable by any person with objectivity and empathy, and this boredom does not make the average man leave his wife.

Note that men who struggle with sex addiction or narcissism are quite different in this regard. Also, men who were late bloomers and struggled with unresolved childhood trauma may not be able to understand that sex changes over time and the honeymoon stage ends. 

When people struggle with the idea that the old cannot be made new again, they are generally people who are disappointed and regretful about how little they experienced earlier in life. They generally feel that they didn’t get enough love and approval in their childhoods, then they didn’t get enough love and approval from women (sex is a proxy for this) as a young man, and now their wives are expected to act new in love and overly sexual every day to compensate for this core wound. This is an impossible ask, and these men would be better served engaging in deeper insight-oriented therapy.

The average man understands that there is a huge disconnect between a sexless marriage and a marriage that is boring sexually. For example, there are almost no men who will leave a marriage where there isn’t enough oral. Romance for women is like oral sex for men, and most women will also not leave their husbands for not being romantic enough. 

Asking for exciting sex on the regular within a long-term marriage of decades is like wanting every day of parenting your kids to be fulfilling and joyous. There is nothing that can keep people from habituating to long-term relationships, or any sort of ongoing or recurring situation. This is why exposure therapy works for anxiety.

A sexless marriage, versus one where sex isn’t as thrilling anymore (read: every long-term marriage at some juncture), is qualitatively distinct in a few ways. 

There is no physical touch, meaning that the man’s love language is dismissed in addition to his sex drive being dismissed. If he doesn’t have small kids anymore, this means he can get zero physical touch of any sort, which can lead to depression and anxiety from touch starvation. 

RELATED: How To Speak A Man's Physical Touch Love Language, According To 21 Men

The sexless marriage is usually an unaddressed “elephant in the room,” which makes the marriage feel like a sham and deeply retraumatizes anyone who grew up in a home with a secret, such as abuse or addiction. Sex becomes considered “dirty” or “gross,” which leads to a deep sense of shame in the man for a basic human drive and impacts his self-image and self-worth. And finally, the man starts to feel like a workhorse, who is required for work, money, and family obligations but is expected to have no needs at all.

Having a sexless marriage does not feel like a marriage at all to a person who has a sex drive. There is a huge difference between having weekly sex that brings you close but isn’t mindblowing and zero sex at all (or the clinical “sexless marriage” definition of less than ten times a year, often when the low libido partner is drinking). 

If you are the partner who doesn’t want sex, and you have been situating your sexless marriage on a spectrum and thinking it’s pretty similar to a marriage with boring sex or every-other-week sex … this is your wake-up call that this is wrong. 

It would be the same as never telling your child you love them, versus saying it every couple of days. Neither is ideal, but the first is emotionally neglectful and the second is within normal limits (for what it’s worth if you don’t tell this to your child every day, start today!).

If you struggle with communicating about sex in your marriage, or you want to resume a sex life but it feels impossible, therapy can help. Also, especially by a certain point, not everyone is meant to stay together in a lonely marriage. Therapy can also help you decide whether your relationship is worth working on.