‘I live in a sexless marriage’ a hot topic of discussion online

Maryanne lived in a sexless marriage for 12 years and by the end of it she started to think that if her doctor told her that she had six months to live, that would be all right.

“I felt like the ugliest, most unattractive, worthless person,” says Maryanne, an artist and mother of two from the U.S. who asked to remain anonymous.

“I got to the point that I did not feel like a sexual being. I just buried those emotions so deeply inside of me that I was not a woman. I thought of myself as a person who paints and gardens and raises children and cooks and cleans.”

Lack of interest in sex is as high as 30 per cent of women and 15 per cent of men, according to one U.S. study, says Wendy Trainor, a Toronto marriage and family therapist and registered sex therapist. But in her professional experience, when sex ceases in a marriage, it is most often due to the man.

Not always, of course — there is no shortage of husbands being turned down. Either way, if it persists for months or years, someone is left feeling bereft.

“To be consistently rejected sexually strikes at the core of our being,” Trainor says. “We question our attractiveness and it affects our self-esteem. It is difficult not to take it personally.”

Trainor points to a 2003 Canadian Sexual Satisfaction Survey of 4,539 men aged 40 and older, which found that 34 per cent had erectile dysfunction. Half had not discussed it with their doctors. Among those who did and were prescribed sildenafil (sold as Viagra), only 41 per cent were satisfied with the medication.

Depression can also interfere with sexual desire. So can alcohol consumption, smoking, stress, fatigue, diabetes, kidney disease and medications including beta-blockers, antidepressants and tranquilizers. Painful sexual intercourse, resulting from conditions like vaginismus, is sometimes the issue.

Culture matters. A 48-year-old Toronto man, currently in a sexless marriage, says he didn’t have sex until he married for the first time at 26. He grew up in a small town in a family of Russian-Jewish intellectuals in the USSR.

Twenty years later, now living in Canada and on the verge of ending his second marriage, his elderly mother has told him: “No sense to look for a new partner when you are 48. Please accept your abstinence.” He also asked to remain anonymous.

Sometimes there are relationship issues, festering resentments and anger. Sometimes a couple just can’t communicate their desires to each other.

“There is a myth in our society that men should know how to turn their partner on,” says Trainor.

But a man may not want to take direction from his partner. Over time women in such relationships can grow to feel resentful that their sexual needs are not being met. They give up and begin avoiding sex.

“On the other hand, the man may be encouraging his partner to be forthcoming about what she wants and she may think it is his responsibility to figure it out. This puts a lot of pressure on her partner,” says Trainor.

Sexual problems are compounded by the fact couples often can’t imagine talking to someone else about their sexual issues.

Maryanne says that although her husband was passionate while they were dating, after they married he insisted on twin beds. Over time, he began making cruel comments about her body.

After 20 years of marriage he moved out of the master bedroom. Maryanne was in her mid-40s when her 12-year marital sexual drought began.

“It’s not that he can’t physically perform the sexual act. He is interested more in pornography,” says Maryanne, now 60.

She is five years older than her husband, and she brought two children into the marriage. They have no children together.

A year ago, Maryanne met someone online who had the same problem in his marriage. They fell in love. She and her husband are filing for divorce.

“He looks upon me more as a mother figure. I’m the person that figures out how to do things, how to take care of problems, a mother-sister figure. I didn’t get married for that, obviously,” says Maryanne.

“The children were out of the house, it could have been a lovely time for us. It turned into this emotional wasteland.”

Maryanne, posting as “Dartist,” first told her story on the message board “I live in a sexless marriage,” at www.experienceproject.com. With 10,000 members and 6,000 stories posted, it is one of the site’s biggest and most active boards, says Arsineh Ghazarian, community manager for The Experience Project, which is based in San Francisco.

A few members of “I live in a sexless marriage” say they prefer lives without sex. One poster feels too old and fat for it. “Not having a relationship or sex can make life less complicated.”

But many more people are posting to the site because they feel dead, their souls feel dead or they wish they were dead.

Men whose wives deny them sex post that they feel emasculated. One man claims to have emasculated himself by taking drugs that suppress his sexual desires.

“And with it, finally, comes peace,” he writes. He’s been married 19 years, and he’s had sex with his wife three times in last five years. They have two great kids. He writes that he will never leave.

It’s a common sentiment. Posters write that they have too much invested in the relationship. They both love the kids. They’re trapped by circumstance, finances, love, inertia or guilt.

Steve8992 writes that some men in his situation are trapped by their own integrity.

“They made a solemn vow to always go to their wife to get their physical needs met. They know that there will be severe consequences for breaking that vow — yet they must resort to what they feel is ‘begging’ for sex,” he writes.

Posters hope against hope, going without sex for years, even decades. One woman posts about going 10 years without sex. Another, 19 years.

“How do you know the situation won’t get better?” one asks.

In fact, sometimes it does get better, according to LostLeila. She began posting in 2008 because she hadn’t had sex with her husband for 10 years. He was addicted to porn. He went to strip bars where he got lap dances. He went to massage parlours that offered sexual services.

On the rare occasions that he showed interest in her, she admits she rebuffed him. She was repulsed by his habits.

Two years later, she writes that everything has changed. He read her posts about their marriage. They sought counselling. He acknowledged that he had an addiction to porn and stopped making it the focus of his life. He started participating in family life more.

Now, she writes, they are physically intimate again.

Contacted through Ghazarian, LostLeila declined to be identified or interviewed.

Trainor says that overcoming a sexless marriage is challenging work. People must be committed to the process and will probably need to do individual therapy as well as couple work. The sooner the better.

“When there is genuine caring and a commitment to work things out, the prognosis is much better than when there has been a lot of animosity and pain after years of avoiding the problem,” she says.



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