A good friend of mine recently stumbled upon a weblog in which the topic of the sexless marriage had been brought up in one woman’s recent posting. My friend was shocked to see that the entry had provoked pages upon pages of impassioned responses from women and men alike, most of whom appeared to be spilling the beans and sharing their painful story for the very first time.
Some were still married, others had separated or divorced. But the underlying themes were consistent across the board: It’s tough to admit that you’re in a sexless marriage, tough to fix it once it’s gone too far, and tough to recover from the damage it can cause to your own sense of sexual/sensual self-esteem. The silent curse of the sexless marriage is the dirty little secret kept by more people than any of us might imagine.
Legend has it that while most great loves start out all hot and heavy, a gradual waning of the passion quotient over time is a perfectly normal and expected reality. It’s true that hormones rage (or flicker) at differing intensities over the course of a lifetime, but when it comes to sex in a marriage, there’s more to it than that. For two people who have solemnly vowed to be one another’s one-and-only, forsaking all others, sex is the purest expression of exclusivity and intimacy. The blushing bride and groom say to one another, in essence, I will never be sexual with any other person besides you for the rest of my living days. From this day forward, I give my sexual self to you.
But then things get so busy and so complicated. There may be kids to feed, bills to pay, houses to maintain, lawns to mow. Over time and for a variety of reasons, the couple’s sense of interpersonal connectedness can begin to lose its steam. In a confused world where sex is both terribly overblown and terribly undervalued, many people in sexless marriages simply cut their losses, unquestioningly accepting the demise of their sex lives as inevitable and unimportant. But the distance caused by loss of intimacy can expand over time to a devastating chasm, threatening both the marriage and the well-being of the two individual souls teetering on the edges.
If you’re a woman who once promised your exclusive sexual attentions and vulnerabilities to your spouse, how does it effect you when the thrill is gone, so to speak? You may feel ashamed of having sexual desires that are unfulfilled, or for having lost your desire to be sexual with your partner. You may feel hopeless about the prospect of ever having a vibrant sex life again in this lifetime. You may feel unattractive, undesirable, and underappreciated. In the absence of sexual intimacy with your partner, it follows that a particularly negative crop of self-concepts can seize the opportunity to take root: depression, resignation, a sense of growing old before your time, a sense of having an unhappy secret you can’t share with anyone.
