The Thing Behind The Thing: Sexless Marriages
There is more nuance here than maybe people let on.
It’s always been amazing to me how sex literally creates you, and how important semi-regular sex is within a long-term relationship, and yet (not all, but most) people are completely loathe to openly discuss what’s happening with that aspect of their lives. People tend to say it’s “gauche” or “not professional” or “not something I’m comfortable sharing” or “not lady-like,” or a variety of other reasons/factors. All the reasons for not discussing it are valid, of course — if you don’t want to discuss sex, don’t discuss it. No one should force you to. But it also creates a lot of confusion and chaos for people as they become adults and parents and age into being elderly. Because it’s not often discussed, and because when people do discuss it they’re prone to lying about it, many end up depressed and not knowing where they stand.
To talk about “sexless marriages,” you need to first think about how often couples should (that word is doing a lot of heavy lifting) have sex per week. The “data,” such as it is, on that is pretty all over the place, but generally it seems the goal for “healthy” (again, heavy lifting) marriages is 2–4 times per week.
This varies by a tremendous amount of factors, including:
Age
Time together
# of kids and ages
Health issues
Ability to secure privacy
Intensity of jobs
“Desire discrepancy” (more in a second)
The general definition of “sexless marriage” is 10 times per year or less, so roughly about .8 times per month. Weirdly, a lot of the people experiencing this are young, whereas you’d assume youth are having more sex:
Some recent statistics tell a similar story: a 2021 survey of adults ages 18 to 45 across the US, conducted by the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University and sex-retailer Lovehoney, showed that among married adults, millennials were the most likely to “report problems with sexual desire in the past year”. The survey showed 25.8% of married millennials reported this problem, while only 10.5% of married Gen Z and 21.2% of married Gen X adults reported the same.
Interestingly, I’ve covered off on this too.
Now we need to understand why this is happening. Let’s list some of the core reasons that get brought up:
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