Sexless marriage: what should a man do?

A sexless marriage is generally regarded as one in which the frequency of sex is once a month or less.

Now the first point to make here is that this is primarily an issue for men rather than women. This is because men on average have a stronger sex drive than women, as has been shown by a large number of studies. Because women are free to refuse sex if they don’t feel like it, this means that the man in the majority of marriages will not be having sex as often as he would ideally like. Now of course there will also be some relationships in which the woman is the one with the stronger sex drive, but the research implies that these will be a minority. In addition, the frequency of sex in a proportion of marriages will be rare or non-existent which can be regarded as sexless marriages.

For any men who care about sex (which will be the vast majority) and are not yet married, the take-away message here is to avoid getting into a situation where you are effectively a prisoner in a sexless marriage. The most obvious way of doing this is simply to avoid getting married in the first place. At this point after all, there is simply nothing of value you get by being married that you can’t also get without  going to the trouble and expense. However if for whatever reason you’re determined to get married anyway, are there any precautions you can take to avoid this grim situation? What you need to do is before you get married, agree with your partner how often you’ll have sex. I’d suggest every day unless both partners decide they don’t want to. Now this obviously means that one spouse will often need to have sex even if they’re “not in the mood”, but making accommodations like this is an essential part of a committed relationship. Otherwise the lower-libido partner gets to both have their cake and eat it, in that they have sex just as often as they want but deny their partner the same opportunity.

However this advice is clearly a bit too late if you’re already stuck in a sexless marriage, so what should you do at this point? Well the first step is simply to tell your spouse that having your sex life shut down indefinitely is not acceptable to you and then ask her whether she has any suggestions to resolve this issue. If she does, you owe it to both yourself and her to give them a try if they have any chance of success, whatever they may be. If either they don’t work out or she just doesn’t have anything to suggest in the first place, you then tell her that as she is unwilling/unable to address the problem, you’re going to go elsewhere and leave it at that. Note that there’s no need for you to pursue a divorce or even separate, this is something you leave for her to think about. This assumes of course that other than sex, you’re generally happy with the marriage. It’s actually very likely that she’ll opt to do nothing provided you’re discreet and don’t rub her nose in it, which of course you shouldn’t do.