Sexless marriage: why it happens, how common it is and how to find your way back

If your marriage has gone quiet in bed, you have probably tried the obvious already: a weekend away, new underwear, one honest talk that ended in tears or in a shrug. Most of that aims at the symptom, and the symptom is rarely where the trouble started. A sexless marriage usually means two people whose desire stopped getting the conditions it needs, and conditions can be changed. Below you will see what counts as sexless, how common it is, why it happens to couples who still like each other, and where to begin this week.

What counts as a sexless marriage?

Researchers have drawn the line in different places, and the survey quoted most often counted couples who had not had sex in the month before they were asked. Many couples who search for this phrase are well past that. Two plainer questions matter more than the label: do you miss it, and does your partner? A couple who have sex twice a year and both feel fine about it are living a quiet, happy arrangement. A couple where one person lies awake counting the months is living in something else.

It is also far more common than the silence around it suggests. In that 1993 survey of 6,029 married Americans, sociologist Denise Donnelly found that 16 percent of the marriages had been sexually inactive in the month before the interview. So if you have been quietly assuming every other couple on your street is at it twice a week, you can let that go.

Desire shifts for almost everyone across a long marriage. The usual suspects arrive together: the stress that keeps a body in survival mode, the first years after a baby, perimenopause, a gap in how often you each want sex that nobody named, an argument that never quite finished, and the slow slide into routine that our piece on losing your sex drive in a long relationship follows step by step. Most couples find three or four of these stacked on top of each other.

Which ones are stacked on your marriage decides where to start. A couple flattened by two small children and no sleep needs something different from a couple who are rested, fond of each other and have simply stopped touching. Naming the things pressing on your marriage turns a vague ache into a short, workable list.

Naming the things pressing on your marriage turns a vague ache into a short, workable list.

Why your body stopped saying yes

Here is the part most advice skips. Desire in a long relationship depends on whether your body reads the moment as safe, rested and unhurried, and after years of early alarms, shared logistics and unfinished arguments, it often does not.

Desire runs on brakes as much as accelerators

Sex researchers describe desire as two systems working at once: an accelerator that responds to anything your brain reads as sexy, and a set of brakes that respond to anything it reads as a reason to hold back. Exhaustion, a messy kitchen, feeling watched, a comment from last Tuesday, all press the brakes. In most long marriages the accelerator is fine. The brakes are simply stacked high, which is why candles and lingerie so often change nothing. Our piece on mapping your own brakes and accelerators walks you through finding yours.

Wanting often arrives after you start

The second piece is timing. Sexual medicine researcher Rosemary Basson showed that for many women desire follows arousal: willingness comes first, the body warms up during unhurried touch, and the wanting shows up partway through. Waiting to feel like it before anything begins means waiting for a signal a responsive body rarely sends first. We explain this pattern in what responsive desire actually is.

Your desire is still there. It needs conditions it can say yes to.

Temple exists partly because of that gap. I wanted somewhere women could first learn how their own desire works and only then try new things, so Foundation, our first course, opens with settling the nervous system and treats it as a small daily practice.

Put those two pieces together and the picture of a sexless marriage changes. Most of the time desire is still there, held down by too many brakes at once. Ease a few of the things holding desire back, take it slowly, and wanting usually returns.

Ease a few of the things holding desire back, take it slowly, and wanting usually returns.

How a sexless relationship takes hold without anyone deciding it

Nobody decides to stop having sex. A tired week becomes a tired month, and somewhere in there each of you writes a private story about what the silence means. One of you concludes you are no longer wanted. The other concludes the fault is theirs and reaches for the phone instead. Neither story gets said out loud, so neither gets corrected, and the bed becomes the one room in the house where you are both careful.

Relationship researchers John and Julie Gottman call the small reaches for attention during a day bids: a comment about the news, a hand held out, a sigh you hope your partner will ask about. In a study of newlyweds the Gottmans began in 1986 and followed for six years, the couples who stayed together had responded to each other's bids about 86 percent of the time, against 33 percent for the couples who divorced. That matters for a sexless marriage because sex is usually the last bid to go, after dozens of smaller ones have been missed.

The therapist Esther Perel, whose book Mating in Captivity looks at couples who love each other yet stop having sex, makes a harder point: the things that make a marriage feel safe, predictability, closeness, knowing each other inside out, can also flatten desire, which needs a little distance and a little surprise. A couple can run a home together beautifully and still not have flirted with each other in years.

What helps is plainer than it sounds. Say the fact out loud, as a shared fact: "I think we have stopped having sex and I miss us." Keep touch and sex in separate boxes for a while, so a hand on a back can just be a hand on a back. Ask what each of you misses most, which is often closeness and being chosen. Temple's Exploration and Liberation courses go further into this, from how to talk about sex without a fight to touch with no agenda and asking for what you want. We recommend starting with Foundation, since almost everyone grows from it, and every expert-led video lesson and guided video exercise takes 10 to 15 minutes, so it fits into an ordinary evening.

If you are the one whose desire went quiet, your partner has very likely written the story that they are no longer wanted, and they will keep believing it until you say the real reason out loud. If you are the one still reaching, ask before you conclude. The answer is usually about sleep, stress or a body that feels like a to-do list.

When to walk away from a sexless marriage, and when to stay

Whether a sexless marriage is worth staying in comes down to respect and willingness, and how often you have sex says little on its own. Contempt, where one of you rolls their eyes at the other's needs, is the one to watch: it is one of the Gottmans' four warning signs, known as the Four Horsemen, and a relationship therapist writing in the Guardian calls it the hardest of the four to work with. A flat refusal to talk about it at all, for years, is another. Sex used as a reward or a punishment is a third. The disappearance of every kind of affection, so there is no hug at the door, is the fourth.

If none of those are present and what remains is two tired people who still like each other, you have far more to work with than the word sexless suggests, and most couples in that position can rebuild closeness with honest talk, lower-pressure touch and, where it helps, a therapist. One question worth sitting with: do you still want to want each other?

Small ways to bring touch back this month

A few things your bodies can say yes to, repeated until they stop feeling strange, do more than any plan with a spreadsheet.

Touch that asks for nothing: A hand on the neck while the kettle boils, feet touching on the sofa, a long hug at the door. A review of affectionate-touch research links this kind of everyday contact to calmer stress responses and closer relationships. If your desire tends to show up after you start, this kind of touch is where it gets going, and it only works when both of you know it is never an invitation to sex. Give it two weeks before you judge it.

One protected evening a week: A 2016 study of 30,645 people by psychologist Amy Muise and colleagues found that for people in relationships well-being rose with sexual frequency up to about once a week and leveled off after that. So the goal is one good evening: phones in a drawer by nine, dinner you did not eat standing up, and enough time that nothing has to happen. Make it fun, cook together with music on, or walk somewhere new.

One honest sentence: "I miss falling asleep touching you" is what the Gottmans call a softened start-up, and it lands differently from "we never have sex anymore". In a 1999 study of 124 newlywed couples by Sybil Carrère and John Gottman, the first three minutes of an argument predicted which couples would still be married six years later. Say it in daylight, in the car or on a walk, where nobody has to hold eye contact, and let the answer be whatever it is.

If you want a map of where you both stand right now, the Dead Bedroom Test asks about eight ordinary moments and shows whether you are still lovers, drifting, roommates or shut down. Take it separately, then look at the results together. Silence around a sex gap wears a marriage down faster than the gap ever could. A shared result is an easy place to break it.

Silence around a sex gap wears a marriage down faster than the gap ever could.

When to see a doctor, and what to ask for

Sometimes the brakes are chemical, and no amount of date nights will out-argue them. Thyroid conditions, the hormone shifts of perimenopause (the years before periods stop, when estrogen and testosterone drift down), the months after a baby, and some antidepressants can all lower desire. The Menopause Society lists vaginal dryness and pain as common and treatable, and pain is always a reason to see a doctor. Ask for a thyroid check and a full hormone panel, mention every medication you take, and say the word desire out loud, because many doctors will not raise it first. If a medical cause turns up, treating it often does more than a year of trying harder.

For the mental side, the best-studied approach without medication is mindfulness: in a trial led by Lori Brotto, many of the women with long-standing low desire who did four group sessions reported improvements in desire and satisfaction. Temple offers mental and somatic support alongside medical care, and the two work well together.

For a long stretch I was where you might be now, without the words for what was going on inside me and with a conversation I kept avoiding. For us it began with my husband getting brave and starting one that was simply about understanding each other better, and it showed me that intimacy begins somewhere other than pressure or performance. Sometimes intimacy starts the moment one of you dares to say "I miss us" while the other feels safe enough to stay.

What can you do when nothing seems to shift?

Temple's Foundation course, 23 expert-led video lessons and 15 guided video exercises, helps women understand how their desire works and lift what holds it back: see the curriculum.

A couples therapist or a sexologist (a trained specialist in sexual health who works with exactly these patterns) is a good next step if the two of you cannot get the conversation started alone, and your doctor is the right first call if pain, a medication or a hormone shift is in the picture.

Hand this to your partner if the subject has been sitting between you for months. Letting an article go first is sometimes the kindest way to start.