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This coming August, my husband and I, both 62, will have been together for 35 years. We have not had sex for almost a third of them. Our reasons are as simple as they are complex. Simply put, I don’t want to, and he doesn’t want to enough.
Underneath our not wanting to are, of course, a whole lot of factors and dynamics. I grew up with a diet-obsessed mother and struggled with body dysmorphia and anorexia nervosa for years. Even now, the less I think about and look at my body, the better I feel. My husband grew up in a conservative religious household with a father who was both a church deacon and a serial adulterer. Thus, my husband’s greatest fear is that he might marry a woman who would cheat on him. For the two of us to find each other was like finding a safe harbor.
I have often believed we were the only sexless couple on Earth as I’ve watched the cuddling and hand-holding among friends. However, it turns out there are lots of us. As cited in this report in Psychology Today: “As many as one in seven married adults in the United States are in relationships with little to no sex.”
There is a rise in younger people who should be in their hormonal prime also sharing sex is sparse or not happening at all — as cited in this 2022 BBC report The Millennials in Sexless Marriages.
My husband and I were both therapists and believed we could resolve any difficulties that might arise in our relationship. But it took the help of outside therapists to understand what was driving “the sex issue” for each of us, and many years to come to a place of peace and resolution.
For me, sex was fraught from the beginning. At age 17, I left my miserable high school memories and my unhappily married parents and moved hundreds of miles away to start college. There I met Sam, another young freshman, to whom I was immediately attracted. We started dating, and soon, all he had to do was look at me just so, or sidle up to me where I could get a whiff of his Polo cologne, and we were off to the races.
But when my sister told my parents I was having sex, they were furious. My father accused me of being promiscuous, of letting Sam use me for “free milk,” without having to buy the cow. Scarred by parental lack of support, soon I sunk into a deep depression and insecurity about my body. I implemented a punishing diet, and within a year was anorexic. I lost my period, the entirety of my sex drive, and Sam.
I recovered from the anorexia, but it took many years. And, I discovered that all of my post-Sam relationships followed a predictable pattern: After an initial period of satisfying sex with a new partner, usually about four to six months, my interest would expire. While I did love the emotional intimacy sex brought on, at the same time that intimacy made me feel too exposed.
A lot of this had to do with still feeling bad about my own body, and not being able to “lose myself” in the experience. I knew that intimacy was supposed to beget intimacy, not quash it. But knowing this — and exploring it in therapy — didn’t change the way I felt. While sex was still sometimes enjoyable, it was, for the most part, a burden.
After the newness of our relationship had worn off and my husband and I had solidified a loving and lovely friendship, we continued to try to have sex. But it was never easy. I might be good for 15 or 20 minutes in the sack at best, after which I went dry, and my attention wandered.
My husband, on the other hand, desired — and required — longer sessions to complete the sexual act. In his previous relationship, he had trained himself to delay his own satisfaction in order to satisfy his girlfriend first. It was a kindness that, over time, affected his own natural sexual response. Already ambivalent about hopping into bed, I started to dread what I feared would be an extended session. So sex became less of an opportunity for intimacy and more of a slog to orgasm — and often not even a successful slog, for either of us.
Over the course of my adult life, I have read up on sexless marriage. Depending on which articles I read, I am at best the woman portrayed as being repressed, frigid, in denial about my own needs and/or not dealing with my core issues. At worst, I am reneging on my wedding vows by depriving my husband of a healthy sex life, and am blind to the future failure of my marriage.
It’s easy to feel ashamed, to feel like an anomaly because I don’t enjoy what for many other people is normal, fun and gratifying. But I cannot be what I am not, and what I come back to is this: my husband and I are happy and close, and have built a long life together rooted in respect and admiration. He’s handsome, hilarious, forgiving, creative, silly and thoughtful, and he is my favorite person in the world. He is the person I want to hang out with day after day, until the end of our days.
Would he like to be having sex? Sure. Enough to seek it elsewhere, with or without my knowledge? No. We’ve discussed this, and he has said that he doesn’t have the interest or energy to have sex for sex’s sake with someone he doesn’t care about. And when I ask if he is unhappy, he always says the same thing: He knew what he was signing up for when we got married — not sexlessness, but the life of fullness he knew we’d create.
What do you think? Can a marriage be successful without sex? Let us know in the comments below.
Margeaux Walter
Follow Article Topics: Relationships
