When my co-author and I were doing research for The New I Do: Reshaping Marriage for Skeptics, Realists and Rebels, we asked a cohabiting couple to list all the reasons they wanted to wed. They basically agreed on most of the reasons except for one — the groom-to-be mentioned sex and the bride-to-be did not.
“You want to marry for … sex?” she asked, somewhat horrified.
As you can imagine, her response just about shut him down.
Except most of us actually do expect sex with some sort of regularity to be among the many perks of tying the knot — or entering any romantic relationship for that matter.
The problem seems to be defining “some sort of regularity.”
When does a marriage become a sexless marriage?
Defining a ‘sexless marriage’
According to one study, about 15 percent of married couples have not had sex with their spouse in the past six months to one year, which — viola — is considered a sexless marriage.
Now, no sex in six months, let alone a year, would absolutely not fly with me, and I’m single! Still, that might be just fine for some couples. Which is why I believe if we try to quantify what is too little sex, it just puts unnecessary shame, guilt and stress on people for whom sex is not all that.
That’s what divorce coach and mediator Mandy Walker and I discussed on her podcast, Conversations About Divorce. As I listened to it (slightly cringing at all my “ums”) I heard myself basically repeat myself about one thing — communication.
Couples need to talk about sex — not once, not twice, but continually as things change in their life, whether kids, work or financial stress, illness, aging — you name it. It’s an ongoing conversation because we have different sex drives and different sex drives at different times in our life. And it needs to be brought up early in the relationship.
Still, that may not solve the problem for couples right now who have been struggling for a long time with mismatched sexual desires. Evidenced by the thousands who Google “sexless marriage” every month and by the hundreds who have written to this blog and to The New I Do‘s blog, there are a lot of unhappy spouses who are not getting their sexual needs met.
What you really want to do is not get to that kind of situation.
‘The hopeless norm’
As sex coach Irene Fehr writes:
[A] sexless marriage doesn’t become so overnight. Mine didn’t. In fact, the sex itself is usually not the issue in a sexless marriage. Sex is a mirror of trust and vulnerability, expression and surrender in a relationship — or a lack thereof. It can help it grow or it can highlight all the weakness in its foundation and all the ways that partners lack trust in each other when it comes to talking about their sexual desires and what they need and want. A lack of sexual intimacy is often the result of a pernicious pattern of sexual disconnect that leads into patterns of pulling away in shame, rejection, and unrepaired hurt feelings, perpetuated long enough that it all becomes the hopeless ‘norm.’
Yep. Unless you are asexual, you don’t want to make “a lack of sexual intimacy” the norm. That’s going to take some questioning of your own beliefs and attitudes about sex, your body, desire, etc., before you can feel comfortable expressing them to your partner — and be open to hearing what your partner has to say. That becomes the beginning of the ongoing conversation.
If sex matters to you and you expect it in your romantic relationship — as our groom-to-be did — there’s only one way to know if you’re partner’s on the same page as you are.
Either that or you’ll be Googling “sexless marriage” one day, too.
Want to individualize your marriage? (Of course you do!) Then read The New I Do: Reshaping Marriage for Skeptics, Realists and Rebels (Seal Press). You can support your local indie bookstore (please do) or order it on Amazon.
Listen to “Conversations About Divorce” on Spreaker.
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