Sexless marriages aren’t usually the result of a single cause, but rather a cumulative combination of factors that, over time, distance partners and diminish intimacy between them.
Most sexless marriage partners wonder how it came to this. If your own marriage meets the criteria, you can read our definition of What is a sexless marriage?.
Most sexless marriages weren’t sexless from the start. Instead, they become so gradually, over many years, as emotional habits and the communication between partners shift the relationship.
Most sexless marriages can be prevented simply by trying to understand the many factors that contribute to intimacy loss, so couples don’t get further away from each other, and the relationship can eventually recover. Understanding these patterns is just the first step to a healthy, sexual relationship. This guide is the third section of our comprehensive guide to understanding sexless marriages.
What Is a Sexless Marriage Definition?
To best define sexless marriage, it is helpful to get to the common definition used by therapists and relationship experts. Many researchers refer to marriage in which sex happens fewer than 10 times a year as a sexless marriage.
Some long-term marriages naturally see less sex over time, with couples reaching sexless status with sex happening as infrequently as only a few times a year. Others, however, feel that there are too many pressures and problems for there to be sex as often as partners need it. Numbers aren’t always what matters though, for some couples the idea that their sex life is not what they want for themselves can bring them distress even if they say that the lack of sex isn’t affecting them.
The Gradual Nature of Intimacy Decline
One of the things that make it hard to pinpoint a cause of sexless marriage is that it isn’t a result of a single sudden incident. Intimacy between spouses naturally starts to decrease at some point in most marriages, or relationships with very committed spouses, for various reasons.
It is very difficult, because intimacy between partners decreases in various ways over time, due to life changes that begin to influence relationships from the outside in, with communication and emotional ties being the first to be negatively impacted. Lack of sexual intimacy often arises from more complex emotional factors than solely physical attraction or desire.
Stress and Modern Life Pressures
With over 50% of US couples in long-term, committed marriages reporting satisfaction with their marriage, what makes the difference between relationships that become sexless and those that remain sexual? These often arise due to various factors that can impact intimacy. There are many things that cause relationships to decline in intimacy, from lack of physical affection and attention to life stress and unmet needs.
Causes of Sexless Marriage include:
Lack of emotional distance
In most couples, when partners begin to become emotionally distant, sex between them will begin to decline. In long-term relationships, communication patterns between partners usually begin to diminish with less verbal connection occurring overall. This reduces the emotional closeness between partners, making sex less common. Over time, small communication misunderstandings or emotional distance between spouses result in more separation from partners. This lack of emotional connection typically translates into less sexual connection between spouses.
Overworked Couples
When partners are overworked with careers, raising children, and other responsibilities, they may lack the time or energy for sexual intimacy. People with extremely busy, stress-filled careers have little desire left for anything in the evening besides rest. Work stress may cause the partners to grow apart and communicate more through emails or texts than through words face to face. This decreased communication then translates to sex less often and lower overall satisfaction in the marriage.
Lack of Communication
Problems in marriage usually center around two things: how communication has declined, and how well it is being handled. When one partner feels he or she has stopped communicating or expressing needs, the other may feel disconnected. Communication breakdown between partners is the most common cause of marriage and relationship issues. When a marriage is affected by this, the romantic and sexual aspect is one of the first areas to experience consequences because there has been such a loss of communication from and toward that area. When partners no longer feel comfortable expressing needs, it can impact sex life to no end.
Routine and Boredom
When two partners become too comfortable together, they tend to stick to routines and lose their sense of novelty and desire to discover things with one another. This stagnation can lead to a decline in intimacy within the marriage, as partners settle into a groove and no longer pursue each other romantically or intimately. For many, lack of sexual desire for a partner may come up when something has begun to feel routine rather than special, leading partners to feel bored.
Health Issues
Certain medical and health issues can also play a role in the diminishing desire for sex in marriage. For women, such conditions as childbirth, menopause, infections and diseases have been known to reduce sexual interest. In addition to such ailments in women, disease and medical issues such as heart conditions, prostate problems, or fatigue can also decrease men’s sexual desire.
Lack of Mutual Interest
Both spouses must have the same desire for sex in their relationship for it to exist within the marriage. However, even the most connected couples can have different sexual needs, but when one partner loses sexual desire and the other spouse doesn’t know how to address this without bringing up potential issues that could cause more disconnection between spouses, sex between spouses begins to fade in. While both partners desire a sexless marriage more as the emotional gap grows between them, couples that aren’t talking about it can still have their issues amplified and sexual desire remain low.
Loss of Attraction
The gradual reduction of sex and intimacy between spouses typically stems from one or both partners feeling as though there is a diminished sense of attraction between them, regardless of physical desire. Over the years, when one partner feels the attraction for him or her has diminished on the other partner’s part, the two spouses are likely to drift emotionally and romantically, and intimacy will dwindle from their sex life.
Feeling Rejected or Undesired
Many times partners who were once deeply in love can drift apart and feel they have lost attraction, only to then have their spouses not want to participate in sex, which can result in the spouse beginning to feel rejected and unloved by their partner’s disinterest. When the disinterest begins to cause partners to feel they are undesired by their spouse, the partner can begin to lose confidence, as if it is their own fault that they are no longer desired, even if they were never truly undesired in the first place. Instead, most partners are feeling neglected, or that they need connection that the spouses’ other relationships are not providing them; therefore, sex will become less frequent and spouses won’t want to touch partners they feel have lost interest in them.
When the Sexless Marriage Becomes Problematic
There comes a point when all long-term marriages must address the gradual decline of intimacy if there is such a decline. Spouses will know it’s time to act when sexual partners may feel disappointed or heartbroken over the issue, but have done little to address it directly.
As more years of marriage go by without intimacy between spouses, there will be a gap growing between spouses that has to be filled before they truly lose all connection with one another.
Will A Sexless Marriage Become a Healthy Marriage Again?
Even though sexless marriage often carries a stigma, it is never to late to begin the road back to a better sex life and closer relationship with a spouse.
For many couples who take the time to understand the underlying causes that have impacted intimacy between them, reconnection of emotional bonds with a spouse can provide the desired sexual intimacy between partners again, along with the rest of what that partnership may have become so distant from before the discussion happened.
Couples who want to explore practical steps toward rebuilding connection can read our guide to How to Rebuild Intimacy in a Sexless Marriage.
Understanding the Communication Patterns Behind Sexless Marriages
The gradual progression of how couples’ communication declines between each other also explains many sexual issues partners encounter, especially if neither spouse takes responsibility for it.
Each partner begins to pull away in their own direction, each feeling like the other is distant, and each wanting the other to be closer but not realizing it is the communication between partners that is being lost. Understanding how to restore sexual connection in the relationship after understanding what the issues were is often a large part of fixing a sexless marriage.
Related Articles
In many relationships intimacy fades gradually through communication patterns and emotional changes. These guides explore the definition, warning signs, and potential impact of sexless marriages.
• What Is Considered a Sexless Marriage
• Signs a Marriage Is Becoming Sexless
• Sexless Marriage Effects: Understanding the Emotional and Relationship Impact
• How to Rebuild Intimacy in a Sexless Marriage
In Conclusion
The loss of intimacy in a marriage seldom occurs in an abrupt way. When intimacies begin to diminish in a marriage, it typically does so progressively through a shifting pattern of emotional, mental, and lifestyle adjustments made within the couple’s relationship over a period of time.
Factors such as communication, the existence of stress, emotional distance, lifestyle and established routine and ongoing conflict, all play roles in how and why couples come together in the first place and in how they continue or cease to do so over time.
The recognition and exploration of these concepts is not meant to attribute fault to either individual partner but rather to provide an illustration as to how and why romantic connections evolve in the way that they do, and to explore the mechanisms by which intimacy within a relationship can be recreated and nurtured.
About C.J. Taylor
C.J. Taylor created Restoring Intimacy to help people make sense of a specific kind of relationship challenge—where love and commitment are still present, but closeness has become uncertain or inconsistent.
Their work focuses on the patterns that develop quietly over time, often without either partner fully understanding why things feel different.
By combining personal insight with structured study of relationship dynamics, they offer a calm, practical way to understand and rebuild connection.
Start here: If you’re unsure what changed in your relationship, begin with Understanding the Communication Breakdown Loop—a simple framework that explains how intimacy gradually breaks down.