Restoring Intimacy in a Sexless Marriage
Understanding the Communication Breakdown Loop in Long-Term Relationships
C,J,Taylor This article is part of the Sex, Desire and Attraction in Marriage series. Low libido in a long-term marriage is one of those things that manages to be extremely common and yet almost universally experienced as a private failure. The person with lower desire tends to feel broken, guilty, or vaguely defective — as though something is … Read more
This article is part of the Sex, Desire and Attraction in Marriage series. Attraction is more fragile than most people realise while it’s still intact. It doesn’t need a catastrophic event to disappear. It erodes through small, repeated experiences — through the way two people speak to each other, through what gets prioritised and what gets dropped, … Read more
This article is part of the Sex, Desire and Attraction in Marriage series. It’s a question that comes up constantly in conversations about struggling marriages, and it tends to split people fairly cleanly. Some people — often, though not always, women — will say emotional intimacy is the foundation, that without feeling genuinely close and understood, the … Read more
This article is part of the Sex, Desire and Attraction in Marriage series. The honest answer is yes. But the more useful answer — the one that actually helps — is that it depends on what you mean by “back,” and whether what you’re trying to return to is even the right destination. That might sound evasive, … Read more
This article is part of the Sex, Desire and Attraction in Marriage series. There’s a particular shame that comes with losing desire for someone you love. It doesn’t announce itself that way — it usually arrives as confusion first, then worry, then a quiet kind of grief. You look at your partner and you feel real affection … Read more
This article is part of the Relationship Psychology and Patterns series. When people describe their sexless marriage to someone else — a therapist, a close friend, occasionally an internet stranger at two in the morning — they almost always frame it as a mystery. Something happened. Something changed. We used to be fine and then we weren’t, … Read more
This article is part of the Relationship Psychology and Patterns series. Ask most couples in a disconnected marriage whether they communicate, and the answer is almost always yes. Of course they talk. They talk constantly — about the kids, the calendar, what needs doing at the weekend, whether someone remembered to call the plumber. There’s no shortage … Read more
This article is part of the Relationship Psychology and Patterns series. There’s a particular argument that plays out in disconnected marriages so reliably you could almost set it to a script. One person is trying to talk — about the distance, about the lack of closeness, about the fact that things don’t feel right anymore. The other … Read more
This article is part of the Relationship Psychology and Patterns series. Most couples who end up in a deeply disconnected place — emotionally distant, physically cold, going through the motions of a shared life without much actual contact — didn’t decide to get there. They didn’t choose distance. What they did, usually without realising it, was respond. … Read more
This article is part of the Relationship Psychology and Patterns series. One of the most common things people say when they’re trying to make sense of a sexless or disconnected marriage is some version of: we used to be so close. We used to want each other. Something happened, and I don’t know what. And the confusion … Read more