Restoring Intimacy in a Sexless Marriage
Understanding the Communication Breakdown Loop in Long-Term Relationships
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