There’s a gross misconception about sexless marriages. Almost everyone I’ve ever talked to about it seems to think it’s mostly women who deny their partners sex for one reason or another. I’m here to tell you, that isn’t always the case.
I recently collaborated with Mysterious Witt, one of my good friends and a writer on Medium. If you’ve never read her work, I highly recommend it. She’s a former sex worker and like me, also lived through a sexless marriage. Her newsletter, The Sex Life of Witt, dives deep into how she pulled herself out of that marriage, but mostly, talks about her sexual awakening after the divorce.
Our conversation about my time in a sexless marriage can be found here (free link):
This wasn’t my first experience with a lack of sex in a relationship. My first marriage ran the gamut from marital rape to sexless. Sounds crazy, right? It was. My then husband would shame me, just like my third husband, when I dared ask for sex or acted like I enjoyed it. His answer for it was to either force me to perform acts I didn’t enjoy or to cut me off all together.
While I’m aware not all sexless marriages turn to violence and shame, they can be inherent to the problem. Regardless of the gender of the person denying sex to their partner, there’s some level of shame involved typically. In my most recent situation, my then husband was dealing with some body image issues stemming from his recent separation from the military. He’d spent four years being a lean, mean, killing machine and all of a sudden, he was no longer being expected to stay at a certain weight, eat a certain way, or maintain his physique in any way.
So, he started smoking weed on a daily basis and eating whatever he wanted when he got the munchies. He stopped exercising. He popped pills when he got anxious. Never stopping to consider his extreme change in lifestyle and habits were contributing to his anxiety and depression.
He gained around 20 pounds in a short period of time, which for most people isn’t a huge amount, but when you throw that on a small frame, especially one that’s never carried extra weight, you begin to see an issue.
I’ve never been skinny and I don’t body shame. It never bothered me from an attractiveness standpoint that my husband put on a few pounds. What bothered me was how he behaved because of it. I still found him attractive and still wanted to have sex with him, but instead of accepting that, he shamed me for it. I was ‘acting like a man’ because I was horny all the time. There must be ‘something wrong with me’ because I found him attractive, when he didn’t see himself that way.
If you read the piece by Mysterious, you’ll see we tried individual counseling, having conversations together, and more, but nothing seemed to help. Part of that was due to lack of open communication. He was being passive aggressive in letting me know certain things, and even openly aggressive in others. None of that is helpful.
I don’t believe all sexless marriages must end in divorce or breakups. It’s not inevitable, though it can definitely feel that way at times. I’ll let you in on a little secret. My current marriage, which for all intents and purposes is pretty fantastic 90 percent of the time, had its own moment of sexlessness.
We were never in danger of breaking up. Why? Because we were able to talk to one another about what was going on and work through the issues at hand. I’ll admit, had it happened earlier in our relationship, before we got to the point where we are now with open and honest communication, things may have gone differently. But the fact remains, rather than blame one another for a lack of intimacy, we changed the narrative so often present in these situations.
Getting back to intimacy that had nothing to do with sex helped us tremendously. And I’ll dive deeper into what that meant for us and can mean for you in next week’s newsletter. Stay tuned.