Sexless Couples

How to fix a sexless marriage can be a difficult thing to do if you feel lost, frustrated and angry. I know I felt this way during this period with my wife and finding a path through these emotions to find a solutions to my sexless relationship took time and energy and learning about many things: Love, men, women, marriage and mainly about myself and how to dealt with problems.

I just wanted to compile some thoughts on sexless marriage help for those stuck in the same situation that can be applied to men or women. After this there may be more intricate details on how to handle wives or girlfriends compared to how a female needs to handle their husband or boyfriend.

A complete guide that greatly helped me and Nancy overcome our sexless marriages and helped me write this post can be found here.

Blame

Self blame and blame on your partner are two of the most harmful aspects of a sexless relationship. Some people hold all of their blame just for themselves and believe that the entire affair is their own fault while others. Others put all their frustration and anger into a campaign of blame against their partner while others still can see saw back and forth between the two.

My own experience was largely in blaming my wife. Something i now regret a great deal because firstly the blame was NOT all hers and I had things to answer for but also because blame is never productive and never solves anything!

Freeing yourself of the chains or resentment, self loathing and blaming is a major part of returning to a better relationship and openning up both partners hearts to a loving intimate and passionate relationship once again.

Communication Vs Action

I am a firm believer in good communication between husband and wife. I was even when my marriage was barren and loveless but I did not know how to actually apply this to the situation at hand. Kate Dixon’s Get him/her in the mood helped me to understand what i was doing wrong and how to change my approach towards my sexless wife for the better.

I learned a few things:

• When communicating NEVER make the conversation about your own sexual frustrations.
• Never whine, never be belligerent, never beg and never include any resentment or blame in your tone.
• Always be calm and make the conversation about your spouse.
• Do not attack the question of sex directly or you will get push back. Instead try to uncover the reasons behind the lack of libido and passion.

The other thing I learned on how to fix a sexless marriage was that communication and talking it over were not always the best sexless marriage help and that actions can speak louder than words and open up new avenues of conversation and healing.

• Look to improving yourself first before trying to solve your partners issues.
• Work to resolve little niggles and resentments in your marriage.
• Start increasing your intimacy slowly. Small touches here and there, a lingering gaze, a tender kiss – not too long but not just a peck.
• Do not rush into any sexual opening. Forcing yourself on your partner man or woman will set back all your efforts … remember slow and steady wins the race.

Once I started to apply some of these simple rules I was amazed at how quickly my marriage started to change! It was slow to start but the improvements could be seen every day. Life became easier, the companionship of my wife became bearable, then pleasant and then intimate.

Not only this, but after just a few weeks of improvements I discovered things about my wife i never new. Reasons why she was so shy on sex and ways to help her overcome these things. I also learned more on how to be a better husband, partner and lover in just a few short weeks compared to the all the 22 year marriage we had before.

More on how this was possible.

Now these tips to fix a sexless marriage can be applied to men or women as the same basic concepts can be used to end the problems and then kick start the passion once again. However there are of course a number of differences between how men and women who are lacking in the libido department.

This means that for many things you need to take a different approach to make sure you are pressing the right buttons with your spouse and also adjusting your own behavior to make them more comfortable and more aroused.

However the differences between men and women in terms of sexuality could fill a library so I will not go into that here. However I do highly recommend this guide I have been mentioning by Kate Dixon which comes in two flavors. One for men in a sexless relationship and one for women struggling with their husbands lack of sexual interest.

Sexless Marriage Help by Kate Dixon

~ Tony

Living with my sexless husband was not a happy thing. We became bitter and argumentative and the intimacy and sex just dried up after about 3 years of marriage to become something we did maybe once every 3 months or so. Even then the sex was not good, it was passionless and dull and so technically it was a sexless marriage and almost loveless marriage.

I was lonely, so damned lonely i felt isolated in my own house even though it was just a 2 bedroom apartment. However what I did to try to fix this sexless relationship initially was not good. I am a bit of a panicker you see. When something is wrong I go into a frenzy trying to make it better but often don’t put enough thought into it.

“Ready Fire Aim” my father used to say in reference to my uncanny ability to act before knowing HOW to act!

I went with my initial instincts that I must not be as attractive as I once was and went mad dieting, spending money on new clothes, gym memberships and so forth. I did get in shape but this did not seem to help, in fact it became worse!

I tried then of course to be as seductive as possible. I did every naughty trick in the book i knew to try to turn him on. This worked sometimes but the sex was always lackluster as his heart never seemed to really be in it. I was furious and decided it was not me … it was him.

This of course got me panicked again! It was not my fault then it must ALL be his fault was my way of thinking and that he needed to man up and take control. I started becoming a control freak to somehow goad him into being a man instead of some sexless lump. It was a period i am now thoroughly ashamed of and it led in the end to HIM asking ME for a divorce!

I hope it never goes that far for whoever is reading this. However it did finally open up an avenue of communication that we were both terrible at. While we talked before we never really listened or understood each other in our relationship, life, work and very importantly in bed. It seemed most of the problems stemmed from his extreme inability to communicate his real feelings coupled with an enormous amount of stress which I added to. Many other small things were in there as well but all my poorly aimed strategies

So the moral of this story i guess is to take AIM before firing to find a solution to a sexless husband and a sexless marriage because action without knowledge and planning frequently falls flat on its face. Also make sure you really communicate before you rush to the part about sex because while men may always appear to be up for it if you treat them like a piece of meat without showing them the proper respect for their manhood they switch off just like a woman does when she is not romanced by a guy.

I highly recommend reading “Get him in the mood” which is a downloadable e-book for more on this.

~ Nancy

Having a sexless wife is a crushing blow to any guys manhood. Swaying between feeling that you are somehow to blame to the other end of the spectrum where you blame them for deliberately holding out as some sort of long standing punishment for perceived wrongs. In any case, a sexless marriage where the wife refuses sex and never initiates sex frustrating and self perpetuating.

A vicious cycle can emerge here that hinders what you really need to do to fix your sexless marriage.

• Wife refuses to make love
• Husband becomes resentful
• Husband takes out resentment in petty ways on his wife
• Wife becomes resentful of husbands actions
• Communication and intimacy break down and more resentment and barriers continue to be erected.

More on this cycle and how to break it here

It is amazing how quickly the real issues can be buried beneath a pile of anger and inconsiderate actions. I believed for instance that if my wife no longer was interested in making me feel good I would refuse to do anything that made her feel good. My limited romantic nature completely dried up and I became more self focused and less interested in doing many of the small things that she used to take for granted.

This of course is very stupid because she never saw this as revenge for her low libido but simply thought I was being rude and inconsiderate thus building the wall of resentment that stifled all intimacy and made us a completely sexless couple for over a year!

Only now standing at the edge of that pit we dug can i see the folly. When you are there it is more difficult to fathom just how wrong both of us were for our actions.

My advice is that if you are living with a sexless wife then as hard as it may be YOU need to be the one that makes the effort and the sacrifices to find a solution. You must be the one who takes a positive step. YOU must be the one who realizes that change comes first from within and then you can bring your wife out of her sexless marriage mentality.

From here communication can flow, the layers of invisible boundaries you have built together and be broken down and you can start applying the romance and begin again essentially to bring back the passion.

~ Tony

Knowing how to cope in a sexless marriage can be a tough thing to learn as the stress, rejection and unhappiness can really get to you. However good coping strategies are essential especially if you are going to try to fix a sexless marriage because that can be a whole new level of problems you need to overcome!

I know my coping strategies after a year or so with sex maybe only every couple of months were very bad. I became angry, erratic and poured all of my frustrated energy into activities that really did not help and many of them i never finished either. In fact, I still need to finish learning to paint and kickbox! … not at the same time though

After a time from my own experiences and talking to some other men and women in similar situations online a came up with a few strategies that helped me cope with a sexless marriage. Here are some quick tips.

• Affirmations - Some people scoff at these but i think they work wonders! Basically it is a way of repeating phrases and ideas to yourself over and over to retrain your brain to think in a different more positive way. I knew I needed to be more positive on a lot of fronts and this helped me to think in a new life and cope better. This book helped me understand affirmations better.
• Journal – I had not kept a diary or journal since i was a teenager but this was another coping strategy that made coping with a sexless marriage a bit easier. The reason was that i felt ashamed to speak to many people about this situation as a woman and was bad at expressing my feelings to myself even. Writing down what i was feeling and things that were happening allowed me to delve a bit deeper into my own mental issues and straighten them out. It was a kind of relief to write down some things i could never say aloud and have it as a real record. Later it even helped me to fix my sexless marriage though it would not be wise to show this to your partner for the most part!
• Increase Intimacy – I do not mean sexual intimacy here. I mean the small things that I had been neglecting as much as my husband had. Just adding a few more gently touches, an extra few kisses, a random hug every now and then. Eye contact! A Smile! These things did not solve everything straight away but it was a case of karma where if you give unconditionally it is rewarded and the intimacy returned to a certain level making the everyday living a bit 4asier and giving a platform to tackle the bigger issues.

So if you are struggling and want to know how to cope in a sexless marriage try these tips and they may help you to get into a better state of mind. From there you CAN stop living in a sexless relationship and bring back the passion and intimacy that has been missing. I know because i have been there so hang in and know the future can be better!

~ Nancy

A lack of intimacy in marriage does not just start and end with sexual frustration and a cold marital bed. There are also many other far reaching consequences to your ongoing relationship and also your health.

Intimacy does not always mean sexual intimacy I must also add but for most people without sex intimacy becomes much harder to achieve, much less passionate when it does happen and that intimacy starts to fade to nothingness over time. Think how often you simply touch each other or gaze at each other and compare that to periods of higher sexual activity and you will find they are intertwined and linked to sexual fulfillment with each other which is the ultimate intimate bond.

However, back to the point at hand.

From my talks with other sexless husbands and sexless wives in marriages without intimacy and sex there are a number of problems that arise form this that goes beyond the stupid stereotype of the Husband “not getting any” which is often seen as something comedic when it is really tragic.

• More Arguments - Arguments and friction become a much more common occurrence when intimacy in yoru marriage is lacking. A missing bond of empathy that is formed from being as close as you can be and caring about the other persons desires tends to make both people in a marriage grumpier and less willing to make concessions when discussing things.
• Less Desire to Help – This can go even further when resentment from either partner starts to infiltrate their thinking. Those feeling neglected think they should withhold some other forms of help from their wife or husband and the one who is rejecting their spouse often stops trying to help because they feel pressured.
• Divorce - As you can see from the previous points this is not a healthy relationship. I could list numerous other relationship problems but the main points of resentment and lack of connection are covered and this can lead to a complete disintegration of a marriage from lack of intimacy. I know and I was quite near this myself but luckily managed to pull back from the brink.
• Stress – This is something I personally believe is a huge health problem and psychological problem. The stress of feeling isolated and uncared for and unloved again is sometimes shown as the butt of jokes but in reality this can lead to many health problems. Stress lowers your immune system making it easier to become ill and long periods of stress can lead to many mental issues which can just feed back into a loveless marriage making it even worse.
• Depression – Though I never felt I became clinically depressed i have spoken to men who felt so trapped and terrible from their loss of intimacy they had sunk to terrible lows where they had lost jobs, taken up drinking or drugs and one had openly discussed suicide with me which I am thankful to say never happened but the prospect was very scary to hear.

While not all sexless marriages go through all of these things you can see the slow and steady decline that can happen to many men and women who invest so much into a marriage and then have their marriage fall apart around them. While this may feel like a depressing thing to write about my aim was to bring attention perhaps to those who are just noticing a lack of intimacy in their marriage to bring a long term view to their problems not to depress …. but to motivate.

This is because i firmly believe that every sexless marriage can be saved and the passion and closeness can be rediscovered if you take the time to do it. This requires sacrifice and change and the patience of a saint but the results are more worth it than you can sometimes imagine when you are stuck in such a situation.

At whatever stage you may be at in your relationship without intimacy please remember there is no hole so deep you cannot climb out of but if you do not arrest your fall it can get a lot worse.

For more recommended reading on this subject I suggest you click here for a complete guide to recovering intimacy

~ Tony

I once had no sex in marriage for a good two years of my life. No intimacy in marriage and no passion at all and through it all i kept thinking what did I do! How have I changed to make my husband stop desiring me!

Blame, blame and more blame I heaped onto myself and became miserable and self conscious and had extremely low self esteem. I can see now that this made the problem worse though but it did not start like that.

However when I was looking into why my marriage and sex life was falling apart I took my good friend Tony’s advice and did a bit of soul searching before I even got to what my Husbands problems were.

It took some time and some tears in fact but i found two things in myself that I loathed and I could see were making the problem worse.

1. Self Blame

My lack of confidence and my constant terror of any little imperfections in my body. I blamed myself for being fat, I blamed myself for being ugly, I blamed myself for not being perfect enough.

2. Nagging

Strange that someone who was blaming herself for a sexless marriage would also nag the hell out of her husband but I did! I became so critical of myself I think i became critical of everything. I felt I was trying so hard and he was doing nothing at all in his job, his appearance and what he did around he house. The thing is I really didn’t CARE that much but I was just so angry and hurt at being rejected in bed that just I lashed out.

As you can see neither of these things are sexy or desirable traits. I assumed a lot of things about my partners thoughts and it made me a persona that I realize now was not an object of desire and sexuality.

This does not mean that these things caused our sexless relationship but they certainly made things worse and once I knew that some real communication between me and my hubbie could flow which finally fixed our sexless marriage.

So i guess what i am trying to say is: Do not blame yourself, do not get angry at your partner … become a lovable person and you have taken the first step … click here to discover how i learned this

~ Nancy

Then rift that occurs between once happy sexual people to become sexless couples is not an easy path to track most of the time. In fact most sexless couples do not quite remember when things started to turn so finding a single event, a single cause of a sexless relationship can be an impossible task.

Instead this sad decline is usually a complex tangle of the struggles of life, age, lack of effort and missed opportunities. However I do feel a little hesitant to summarize sexless marriages as such because every case is a different and has it own nuances that lead to the loss of passion, frustration and even shame that comes from the loss of sexual encounters between two loved ones.

This does not mean we should give up looking for an understanding the causes of this problem however as that is vital to mending a fractured relationship!

What it does mean is that if you are in a sexless relationship and looking for the reasons you will need to delve a lot deeper than the surface to find not only what is behind your partners lack of interest be it hidden resentments, physical problems, psychological issues and others. You must also find the reason BEHIND the reason not only in your partner but also looking inward at yourself.

It takes two to tango as they say and while it is obviously not your fault and you should never blame yourself for a sexless union being introspective completes the jigsaw of its missing pieces and allows you to step back and see everything in all its complexity and without bias.

This is the only way you can then move forward and fix your sexless marriage with the knowledge of how and why at your command.

~ Tony