Episode 90: Your Sexless Marriage

Welcome to the Loving Truth podcast, where it's all about finding clarity, confidence, and peace in the face of marriage challenges. And now your host, relationship expert and certified master life coach, Sharon Pope. Hello, loves. This is Sharon Pope, and this is the loving truth. Today I want to talk to you about your sexless marriage. So let's begin with the story of a client of mine that I'll refer to as Marilyn.

So Marilyn had been married to her husband for 18 years, and she said, he's a good man, he's a good father, and they're good co parents. Like, they're really good at just dividing and conquering their lives, particularly as it relates to their two kids who are ages 14 and 16. She's been staring down the path of being an empty nester in a few years, and that thought is now terrifying to her.

At one point, that was a thought that gave her a real sense of freedom in her life, that once the kids are grown and she's done her job as a parent, that there was going to be so much more space for her and for her and her husband to be able to spend time together. But they've certainly grown apart over the last several years, and now they haven't had sex in six months.

And prior to that, they were only having sex maybe once every few months. So it had gradually tailed off to the point where now it's nothing. And she went through a phase where she was very much beating herself up and wondering, what's wrong with me? She was feeling really rejected by her husband. Like, why doesn't he care about the fact that we are not close anymore? Why isn't he noticing, he doing something?

And that made her feel rejected. But now she's gotten to a place of where she's just angry and resentful that they're so disconnected and that they're not having sex. And she knows that this isn't healthy, but she doesn't know what to do about it. She just wants him to do something about it to make it better, but not initiate because she doesn't actually feel like she wants to have sex with her husband, so she actually doesn't want him to initiate.

And she's wondering, why doesn't he care as much as I do about our sex life? So my hunch is that they both really do care about the fact that they're not close and that they're not connected and that they're not having sex, but neither of them know what to do. And then it just becomes easier to not initiate. And this is not going to get solved on its own.

Right? If we just stay in this place of we're not having sex, and I don't really want to have sex, this is not going to magically turn around. This is going to become much more of the same. And this is when days turn into weeks, weeks turn into months, and months very rapidly turn into years until you look back and go, we haven't had sex in years. And now the longer we go, the more difficult it feels to really go to that place again with your partner.

So couples don't usually go from having sex fairly regularly to a place of where they're not having sex at all. Right, that makes sense. It just sort of trails off and it gets further and further apart, the time in between when we're having sex. And usually we can write that off to different circumstances of our lives, like, well, the kids are young, or we're caring for our aging parents, or we're not sleeping very well, and so we don't feel good.

Or maybe there's an illness, one of us has an illness that we have to overcome because we're not physically feeling well. And it also can happen. Sexless marriages can occur just from that slow but steady disconnection that happens over time and or resentments that are building up whether they're spoken or unspoken. You don't have to be a couple that argues all the time. Actually, couples that argue all the time have a lot of fire in their relationship, and so they're probably a little bit more likely to be having sex even when they're arguing or not getting along, whereas other people or other couples who don't argue a lot and they sort of stuff down their disappointments inside the marriage in order to keep the peace.

That's where we just disconnect from each other. And we don't really talk about the hard things, even in an argumentative way. And so it just becomes easier to avoid it. And so neither of you begin initiating, and so nothing ever changes and nothing ever happens. And we grow further and further apart, and those resentments begin to stack up. You know, one month of not having sex, you might have a resentment about that.

And usually we blame our partners, but after a while, especially if you're initiating and getting rejected or feeling rejected or your partner's initiating, and it's kind of annoying you that they're initiating, right? Or maybe you don't like the way that they initiate. So these are all the dynamics around what happens in our sex lives as it relates to marriage. Now, something to keep in mind is that your marriage, your relationship, will need sex more frequently than waiting for the two of you to both be turned on simultaneously and want to have sex at the same time and in the same way.

Like, if we wait for those stars to align, it's just not going to happen very often. And particularly when you've gone on sort of a dry spell, it's not going to happen ever. So the relationship itself needs that physical connection in order for the two of you to remain connected. Because when you're not feeling really connected to your partner, particularly as a woman, it's difficult to then want to engage in sex because it can almost feel like a betrayal to yourself.

Right. I'm never going to tell a woman, like, you need to have sex because the marriage needs it or your husband needs it. No, I mean, that's not right. We'll talk about women's pleasure today a little bit, but the relationship itself needs it. And so sometimes we have to just see, are we open to the experience, even if we're not, like, lit up like a Christmas tree and feeling super frisky and amorous in that moment?

Are we open to connecting with our spouse in this way at this time? And if we're open to it and we know that usually on the other side of sex, it will feel better, then we can sort of step into it a little bit more readily. I always just liken it to needing to go to the gym. Like, when I. I know that I need to go to the gym, I know that when I come out of the gym, I'm going to feel better, but I don't always feel like it.

Right. And so sometimes you just have to show up when you don't really feel like it, but you don't ever want to betray yourself. Like, going to the gym is never going to feel like I'm betraying myself. But having sex when you're super disconnected in your marriage can certainly feel like a betrayal. So it's not. It's a very nuanced sort of thing that you've got to be able to manage internally for yourself.

Now, the other thing that I want to share is that no one told us when we got married that, look, your familiarity with one another is going to suppress your desire. I mean, I think all of us sort of heard that, well, once you get married, you're going to start having sex less and less. And there's some truth to that. But the truth to that is a result of the fact that no one told us that the more comfortable you become with one another.

And the more familiar you are with one another, the less you're going to desire one another. And you're probably going to get stuck in some ruts. Ruts like inviting one another to be intimate in the exact same way over and over and over again, or having sex in the exact same way, doing the exact same positions, doing the exact sort of routine to get into sex to where it becomes monotonous and boring.

And so now we don't desire sex because we don't enjoy the sex that we're having. Right? So I really wish someone would have said, look, it's natural for your desire to wane a little bit after ten years of marriage. Twelve years of marriage, 18 years of marriage, 20 years, whatever. Like, the longer you're together, it's going to take a little bit more effort in order to keep that desire alive.

But it's absolutely possible. You just have to pay attention to it and stop acting like you did when you were dating, that it was all magical and easy and you were both sort of in the mood pretty frequently and everything still seemed sort of exciting anew. And don't get trapped in the same sort of routines. Like, routine is not your friend as it relates to sex in a marriage.

We need to spice things up here and there. We need to just do things a little bit differently. We need some element of surprise and some element of spontaneity in order to keep us both interested in this. Right? I always say, like, no one wants to read the same book a hundred times. Like, even if you love the book, you might read the book twice, maybe three times, but you're not going to want to read the same book 100 times or 1000 times.

So we've both got to be willing to switch it up a little bit. Now, I told you that we were going to speak about women's pleasure. And I think that when it comes to your marriage and sex, not enough conversation is given to women and their sexual pleasure in this regard. I think that this is really the first time in history, really, that there's conversation happening in the relationship space about women enjoying sex.

Because I know in my mother's generation, and certainly in my grandmother's generation, it was sort of a duty that a woman had to do inside the marriage. Like, you want to be in a marriage and you want to be provided for and protected, then this is something that you have to do. And it was never something about that you would enjoy. But that conversation has changed, and I'm happy to see it.

I hope you're happy that we're starting to talk about it more now. There's good news and bad news with this. Okay. The good news is that, yes, you are supposed to enjoy your sex life. Here's the bad news. The bad news is that now, that requires something of. You see, the way most of us are approaching this is that I'm supposed to just look at my partner, like, glance in their direction, and then my clothes are going to want to pop off.

Like, that's the desire that I want. I want it to be effortless. And in marriage, nothing is effortless. Right? And we've got to stop expecting that it would be. And that it's the man's responsibility to make me feel both desired and desire to want to have sex. It's not all his responsibility. Just like we want an equal partner in terms of caring for the family and taking care of all the responsibilities around the home and inside of our careers and everything that we've built, we need an equal partner in the bedroom, too.

And so here's what that means. It means keeping desire alive, not just inside the relationship, but also inside of ourselves. Okay, here's what I mean by that. I love. You know, I love a good metaphor. So I like to use the metaphor related to a pot of boiling water, right? If you have two pots of boiling water sitting on the stovetop, and one has been on a very low simmer all day, so it's not boiling water yet.

It's just water. Water in a pot. And one has been on a slow simmer all day, and the other, we've not turned the burner on at all. It's just sitting there at room temperature because it's been sitting all day. Okay. And then you want to take these two pots to a boil, and you turn the. The stove top on at the exact same thing. Like, let's say you turn it on to a ten, you turn it all the way up on high.

Which one's going to start boiling faster? Of course, the pot that has been on a low simmer all day is going to come to a boil much more quickly than the pot that was at room temperature and had to go to a boil. So it's the same way with keeping that sort of fire ignited within ourselves, just on a little low flame, so that when the opportunity presents itself, I'm not trying to go from cold water to boil.

I'm just trying to go from warm and bubbly to boiling. It's a much easier jump to make. And so how do you do that, it can be just following your own passions, right? Living a more passionate life. Also staying connected to your body and noticing physical sensations. I think most of us, to be honest, are wandering this planet sort of dead from the neck down. Like, we're all in our head, we're all in our thoughts.

We believe every thought that comes to us. And we are not paying attention to what's happening in our physical body. And we've got to get more in touch with that. We've got to pay more attention to that. So that's another way to just sort of keep that pilot light lit. And then the ways that you can keep desire sort of alive. Or on a low simmer between you and your partner is just through touch.

Right. If the only time you two are touching each other is when sex is involved. Then what's going to ultimately end up happening is that every time your partner reaches for you, you're going to recoil. Because you're going to think in that moment, well, I'm not ready to have sex when he might just be being affectionate with you. So we've got to get back to a place of where just non sexual touch, just gentle, loving affection.

Becomes much more natural. Right. And that can be holding a hand. It can be touching an arm or a leg. While you're talking to someone or sitting next to someone. But this is what happens when you're sitting on opposite ends of the couch. And you never touch. And you don't pass each other in the kitchen with gentle, like, touching his back or touching her shoulder or something like that.

Just we lose that sense of touch sometimes. And that's where we've got to begin in order to bring this back. And will it feel awkward at first? Of course it will. Right. Anything that you have done before. And then you've not done for a long time is going to feel a bit awkward at first. But that's okay, right? Just like, I mean, I haven't been on roller blades in probably maybe five years or so.

And I bet if I put on roller blades today, I'd be a little wobbly, right? And I would have to really practice. It would take me a day or so. But then by, you know, several hours of, let's say, rollerblading, I would start to feel more comfortable. And probably by the second day, I would. I would feel a lot more comfortable than I did the first day. Because I've.

I've practiced it a bit. And then by the third time I put on the roller blades, I'd probably be zooming around without a helmet, without elbow pads and all that kind of craziness because I feel super confident. So this is normal, right? It's going to feel a bit awkward until it doesn't. And then that's when you can reach for maybe more, holding one another or cuddling with one another, and that's going to feel awkward until you've done it several times, and then it doesn't feel awkward anymore.

And then at that point, then you might be more open to being sexually intimate with your partner. But I think we've got to start slow. We've got to bring this lukewarm water up to a simmer before we reach for the boil. Now, the other thing, the other responsibility that's involved, if we want to enjoy our sex lives, then, ladies, we have to know ourselves. We have to know what feels good and what doesn't, what we like and what we don't.

And then we've got to be able to communicate that to our partners. Because much as we would love for them to be able to read us better than we read ourselves or know us and our bodies and our pleasure better than we know ourselves, that is never going to happen. Right. If you're in a heterosexual relationship, you cannot imagine, like, I guess you could imagine it, but you can't ever really know what your spouse's experience is when it comes to sex.

They've never been in a female body, just like you've never been in a male body, so you can't know. And so this is where I know it gets a little bit uncomfortable because we don't love to talk about the dynamics of sex, but we've got it. If we can't talk about it, we've got to be able to show them, because otherwise they're navigating in the dark, and we're setting them up to not be successful, and we're setting ourselves up for a sex life that isn't going to be fulfilling.

And then we're going to have the availability of sex in our marriage, but it's not going to be sex that we're going to want to have. And so, yes, as women, we should be enjoying sex, right? And I do believe that men have a role in that, of course, because it can't just be all about your pleasure. We have to start weaving women into that. If we want to keep having a healthy sex life, then you've both got to enjoy it.

You've both got to want it, because we are past the place in our society and our culture today where it's a duty. For women, it's no longer a duty. Okay, so if we're going to do this, then it has to be enjoyable. But that means we've both got to show up for it. So, yes, men do have a role in it, but they don't have the full role.

We also have a role, which means we've got to keep our own desire alive within ourselves. We've got to be willing to keep some desire and connection alive between our partner and ourselves. And then we've got to know ourselves and be willing to communicate about what brings us pleasure, what we enjoy and what we don't enjoy, what we're open to and what we're not open to. Okay, so if you are finding yourself in what you might consider a sexless marriage, and by the way, I don't subscribe to, like, if you're not having sex three days a week, you're in a sexless marriage.

I don't subscribe to that. Like, I think that it's really when we're off balance where one of us wants sex more than the other one does, that's when it creates a problem in the relationship. If you're not having sex and you're both fine with that, no problem. Right. And if you're both having, say, a lot of sex and you're both enjoying that, there's no problem. It's really when one of you doesn't want to have sex and the other one does that, now there's a problem, and it's no longer just like, well, men always want to have sex and women don't.

That's sort of some of the residue and residual stuff from previous generations. I think women today genuinely want to want to have sex, but they want to have sex that they can enjoy. And that requires something new from both of us, where a man now has to consider the woman, where maybe they didn't 20 years ago, 30 years ago, 40 years ago. And women, we have to take some accountability for ourselves, right?

And we've got to show up for ourselves and for our relationship and stop just assuming that there's this magical pixie dust, that if our partner was doing something different, that, you know, we would always desire sex. No, we wouldn't. No, we wouldn't. This is something that we have to make an effort for. We have to show up for it in order for it to be healthy, in order for it to feel good.

All right, so if you are feeling like you've been in a sexless marriage, then what I want you to know is this is not going to magically course correct, and there's probably underlying resentment on both sides. So it costs you nothing to sit down and have a conversation with your partner about how are you feeling about the fact that we're not having sex these days. How are you feeling about it, and how am I feeling about it?

Is this something that we want to fix? Is this something that we want to show up for? And are each of us willing to do something differently? I would invite you to be brave and have that conversation because the alternative is that this isn't going to end up in some kind of happy, magical ending. Okay. All right. I hope that that was helpful for you. Until next time, take really good care.

If you're listening to this podcast, because you're struggling to decide whether to stay or go in your marriage and you're serious about finding that answer, it's time to book a truth and clarity session with a member of my team. On the call, we'll discuss where you are in your marriage and explore if there's a fit for you and I to work together so you can make and execute the right decision for you and your marriage.

Go to clarityformymarriage.com to fill out an application. Now that's clarityformymarriage.com.