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The Reasons Behind Sexless Marriages

It’s actually slightly more nuanced than we think.

Ted Bauer
6 min readJan 17, 2023

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…

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Ted Bauer
Ted Bauer

Written by Ted Bauer

I write about a lot of different topics, from work to masculinity to relationships and social dynamics, I.e. modern friendship. Pleasure to be here.

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