Sexless Marriage: Causes, Effects And What Actually Helps

If you have searched this, you are probably the partner who wants more sex, and you have been carrying it privately for a long time. That is who most of the writing on this topic is aimed at, and most of it treats the other person as the obstacle.

We are Richard and Helena Boyd and we have run a couples practice in Perth since 2005. This page covers what a sexless marriage actually is, what causes it, how it affects both people, and what helps. We work with the relational and body based side of this as somatic psychotherapists. Where the cause is medical or where formal sex therapy is needed, we say so and point you to the right place.

What Counts As A Sexless Marriage?

The widely quoted definition is sex fewer than 10 times per year. It is worth knowing where that came from, which is a self help book published in 2003, not a study.

You may also see it called a sex starved marriage, after the same book. The research definition is different again. The most cited paper on sexually inactive marriages used no sex in the month before the interview, meaning couples were counted as sexually active or not on a one month window. Some sex researchers use no sexual activity in a year. There is no agreed clinical definition, and marriage sexless or otherwise is not a diagnosis in any manual.

What that means practically is that the number matters far less than the distress. A low sex marriage where both people are content is not a problem needing fixing. The same sexual frequency where one or both partners feel rejected, lonely or resentful is worth attending to, whatever the count says. The clinical categories that do exist require distress, not a threshold.

How Common Is It?

More common than most couples assume, and the honest figures are lower than the ones you will read.

You will often see a claim that 20 per cent of long-term married couples are in a sexless marriage. We cannot find a primary source for it. What is properly sourced is that around 16 per cent of married people in one large survey reported no sexual activity in the previous month.

Australian data is more useful for context. Across the two national Australian Studies of Health and Relationships, average sexual frequency among people in heterosexual relationships fell from about 1.9 times a week for men and 1.8 for women, to 1.5 for both. That was measured more than a decade ago and nothing more recent exists nationally.

Sexual frequency has been declining across comparable countries, so if you feel your sex life is thinner than couples used to have, you are right, and so is nearly everyone else. Couples do not usually stop having sex in one decisive moment. It thins out over years and nobody names it.

What Causes A Sexless Marriage?

There is rarely one reason. In our rooms it is usually three or four things that arrived over several years, and most of them are not about attraction.

Medications are the most commonly missed. In a study of more than 1,000 people on antidepressants who were asked directly rather than left to raise it, 59 per cent reported sexual side effects. When people are not asked, reported rates drop to around one in ten, which is why so many couples never connect the two. Certain medications, medical conditions, chronic pain, thyroid problems and health issues affecting energy all affect libido.

Life stage does a great deal of work. Perimenopause and menopause change sexual desire and comfort. Prostate treatment and other health problems do the same for men.

After childbirth, sexual activity resumes far more slowly than the six week check implies. In a study of 1,507 Australian first time mothers, 41 per cent had resumed by six weeks, 78 per cent by twelve weeks and 94 per cent by six months.

Then the relational causes. Unresolved conflict is the big one, because resentment and sexual desire are hard to hold at once. Emotional disconnection, stress, exhaustion, shift work and FIFO rosters, self esteem and body image issues, mental health difficulties and past sexual trauma all feature.

Depression and anxiety play a huge role and are often treated without anyone asking about sexual intimacy at all. Mismatched libidos are so common in long relationships that researchers describe desire discrepancy as a feature of them rather than a fault.

Why Desire Works Differently Than You Think

This is the piece almost no page on this subject covers, and it changes how most couples understand their situation.

The assumption underneath a lot of distress is that desire should arrive on its own, unprompted, as a spontaneous urge. For many people it does not, and never has. Sexual desire often shows up responsively, meaning it appears after sexual arousal has already begun, in a context that feels safe and unpressured. That is not a lower sex drive or a lack of attraction. It is a different order of operations.

Once you see it, the usual dynamic makes more sense. The higher desire partner pursues, which raises the pressure. The lower desire partner now experiences every touch as a request that has to be answered, so ordinary physical affection disappears along with sex. Without unpressured touch, the conditions responsive desire needs are gone. The pursuit is sustaining the withdrawal, and neither person is doing anything wrong.

This is also why the partner who has stopped wanting sex is so rarely the villain of the story. From the inside it is usually not indifference. It is dread, guilt, and a body that has learned to brace. Research suggests desire responds to context far more than to willpower, which is why fear of the conversation makes it worse.

How A Sexless Marriage Affects Both Partners

The effects are real, and the way they are usually described is more alarming than the evidence supports.

For the higher desire partner, the damage is rarely about physical release. It is the meaning attached to it. Being turned down repeatedly reads as evidence of not being wanted, which is why self esteem takes the hit it does, and why so many people describe feeling like just roommates. Lack of sex tends to shrink affection generally, and that ripple effect through physical intimacy and ordinary warmth is what people actually grieve. Most describe wanting to feel emotionally connected far more than they describe wanting more sex.

For the lower desire partner, there is guilt, a sense of failing at something that should be natural, growing emotional distance from a spouse they still love, and often a private worry that something is wrong with them. Both of these are heavy, and only one of them usually gets voiced.

Two corrections worth having. A large study of more than 17,000 people found that once age and partnership status were accounted for, people who had not had sex reported very similar happiness to those who had.

And the longitudinal evidence that low sexual frequency causes marriages to end is weaker than expected. In the best available panel study it predicted breakdown among cohabiting couples but not among married ones. So sexlessness on its own does not reliably lead to divorce. The harm travels with the relationship distress and the sense of rejection, not with the frequency itself.

What Actually Helps

Practical, and in this order, because doing the last one first is what usually fails.

Start by separating touch from sex. Agree explicitly that non sexual physical affection is not a bid for more, and then actually keep to it. There is a real experimental literature showing affectionate touch improves relationship satisfaction and buffers stress during conflict. This step does more than any other to restore emotional closeness and emotional intimacy.

Talk about it outside the bedroom and outside the moment of refusal. Lead with how you feel rather than what your partner has failed to do, because accusation reliably produces defensiveness. Both people have deeper needs and unmet needs sitting under this that neither spouse has said out loud. A little self compassion helps here, on both sides.

Rule out the physical. A GP visit to review medications, hormones and health concerns is worth doing early and is skipped by most couples.

Reduce pressure deliberately. Sensate focus, a structured series of unpressured touching exercises, is the standard clinical tool here. It has never been tested on its own in a controlled trial, so treat it as a well reasoned clinical method rather than a proven one. The broader psychological treatments it belongs to do have good evidence, with a meta analysis of 20 randomised trials finding moderate improvement, and the strongest results for low sexual desire in women.

Finally, let go of the target. When researchers looked at sexual frequency and wellbeing across more than 30,000 people, greater well being rose with frequency only up to about once a week, and more sex than that added nothing. More is not the goal. Regular sex that both people want is.

When To Consider Whether The Relationship Works

Some couples arrive at a settlement and some arrive at a stalemate, and it is worth knowing which you have.

A genuinely consensual low sex or no sex relationship is a real and workable arrangement, and plenty of strong relationships run that way. What is different is one partner quietly capitulating while the other treats the matter as closed. That is not agreement, and it usually surfaces years later as contempt or an affair.

The questions worth sitting with are whether the subject can be discussed at all without it ending badly, whether anything has changed after you raised it, and whether either of you is willing to try professional support. If the answer to all three is no over a long period, that is information. We cover the decision itself in more detail in couples counselling or break up.

One line that needs saying plainly. Mismatched sexual desire is not the same as sexual pressure or coercion. If sex is being demanded, extracted or used as a condition, that is a different problem, and 1800RESPECT is available on 1800 737 732.

What This Looks Like In Practice

These are composite examples drawn from our couples work, with identifying details changed.

A couple in their forties had not had sex in two years and had also stopped hugging. Untangling those two things took three sessions and did most of the work. Once touch stopped meaning a request, the rest became discussable.

A man in his fifties was the lower desire partner and had never said so, because the cultural script does not allow for it. He had assumed it meant something was wrong with him. It was a blood pressure medication and eight years of poor sleep.

A couple in their thirties, eighteen months after a first baby, were both convinced the relationship had failed. Neither had been told that a return to sexual activity commonly takes months rather than weeks.

Frequently Asked Questions

The questions couples ask us most often about this.

Is A Sexless Marriage Normal?

Common, which is not quite the same thing. Long stretches without sex happen in most couples at some point, usually around new babies, illness, grief or heavy work periods. It becomes worth addressing when it has stopped being a phase, when one or both partners are distressed, or when it has taken affection down with it.

How Does A Sexless Marriage Affect Men?

Much as it affects women, which is not what the internet suggests. The research does not show men are harmed more. What is different is the script. Men are more likely to interpret it as a verdict on their worth, and men who are themselves the lower desire partner are far slower to seek professional help, because they have been told this is not supposed to happen to them. Roughly a quarter of Australian men have reported lacking interest in sex for at least a month in a year.

Can A Sexless Marriage Be Fixed?

Frequently, when both partners want to work on it and the pressure comes down first. What predicts a poor outcome is not how long it has been. It is when one partner has decided the other is the problem, or when the couple keeps trying to solve it by having more sex rather than by rebuilding the conditions for wanting it.

Should We See A Sex Therapist Or A Couples Therapist?

It depends where the difficulty sits. If the core issue is a sexual dysfunction, pain, arousal difficulty or a specific sexual concern, an accredited psychosexual therapist is the right call, and the Society of Australian Sexologists maintains a directory. If it sits in the relationship, in resentment, disconnection or the pursue and withdraw cycle, couples therapy is the better fit. In Perth, Sexual Health Quarters also offers counselling in this area.

Getting Help To Rebuild Intimacy

If you take one thing from this page, make it this. The problem in most sexless marriages is not that one partner stopped being attracted. It is that sex became the only place connection was measured, and then it became the place it was contested.

Many couples wait years before raising it, by which time the silence has become its own subject. That wait is understandable and it is expensive, because the patterns get more established and the meanings each of you has attached to them harden. Sexual connection between two people is rebuilt from physical connection, emotional connection and enough safety for desire to appear, and that is work you can do.

We work with couples on exactly this at our Inglewood rooms and online across Western Australia, evenings and Saturday mornings included, with no referral needed. Call us on 1300 956 227, book a session , or read more about our couples counselling and developing intimacy in relationships.