Yes, you CAN sexless revive a marriage

... and, as a major new book reveals, the answer doesn’t just lie in the bedroom

AS A medical doctor with more than 35 years of practice and a special expertise in age-related hormones, I can tell you that a day doesn’t go by without a patient telling me that he or she no longer finds their partner sexually desirable.

Individual sexuality takes shape and changes over the course of the various ages and phases of life, and is deeply connected to intimacy.

After decades of marriage, a large majority of couples find themselves living like brothers and sisters in pretty much asexual relationships. It’s a lot more common than you think.

Many couples at this point in life have made a huge investment of time and emotion in their marriages. They’ve had children, lived together for more than 20 years, and they identify themselves through the marriage and family they created with this partner.

To the outside world, they often put on a show that things are good and they are happy, yet in private, with no one to impress or lie to, the picture may not always be so rosy.

Some couples are in cold-war mode, in which they barely speak. Some spouses argue constantly and can hardly stand each other’s company. And of course they are almost never intimate.

All too often, these couples have silently agreed to stay together for a multitude of reasons other than what really matters: the intimate emotional connection they once shared.

Money is the most common factor. Often the individuals in the couple can’t afford to live separately. The next most common reason I hear for a couple staying together at this point in life is children or grandchildren, and other family members.

They worry that relatives will be shocked, hurt, or angry if they divorce and both partners are usually afraid of losing connection with the children, who often take sides when a break-up occurs. And

sometimes, they’re simply too embarrassed to admit to their friends and colleagues that there is nothing left to keep them together. Despite the fact that divorce is becoming increasingly common, it still carries the stigma of failure.

As people enter the winter of their sexuality — menopause, andropause (the male menopause), and a loss of visibility and status in a culture obsessed with youth — most are left sad and afraid of getting old alone.

But you don’t have to give up on your marriage, or stay trapped in a lifeless shell of your former union, just because the sexual passion has diminished. Instead, all couples can take action to bring the intimacy back to their relationships.

Take my patient Priscilla. She came to see me when she was feeling utterly miserable. A stay-at-home mother, she put on weight after her children left home and felt lonely and depressed. Menopause didn’t help matters. Her husband Joe had always worked long hours as an accountant; she found herself drinking more, and their sex life had disappeared.

One day Priscilla came to see me in a panic. ‘I’m sure that Joe is having an affair with his secretary,’ she said, sobbing.

When I asked her how she knew that, Priscilla told me: ‘He never notices me and comes home from work later than ever.’

I reminded her that she wasn’t telling me anything new about Joe. He always came home late, and he didn’t pay much attention to her even before the children had left. This was the pattern of their relationship.

Priscilla thought it through and decided that I might be right, but the sudden possibility that Joe might have been cheating gave her the motivation to wake up and change her life. She not only wanted a real relationship with her husband, she wanted to have a passionate sexual love affair with him.

So Priscilla changed her approach. She started spending more time with Joe. She began to meet him for lunch, joined a local gym, and over a period of three months lost a stone and a half. Most importantly, she started talking to her husband and spending time with him.

AT FIRST, Joe was taken aback by the change in Priscilla. He had no idea how to relate to her. Suddenly, his wife was a different person. She dressed better and came up with lots of fun things for them to do together. He began to respond in kind.

It didn’t take long for him to start bringing her flowers every week, something he hadn’t done since they were newlyweds. She wrote him little notes and left them on his computer. In response, he started texting her love messages.

When Priscilla suggested they go away for a weekend, Joe agreed. There was more great sex between them in that one weekend than there had been in ten years. The passion, and with it the intimacy, was back.

They had conquered their empty-nest syndrome and came out the other side with a worthwhile, intimate and loving relationship — and sex to boot.

Of course, sex isn’t the answer for everyone. For many, after a certain age, it isn’t even something to be desired.

Many people tell me they want companionship, and that sex is no longer an important ingredient in their marriage as they age. That doesn’t always mean a marriage is doomed.

Sometimes things work out simply because the two people become best friends and share life experiences; they travel, work, raise a family together, experience losses and successes, and, of course, share holidays, family and friends.

For them passion may no longer be a priority — and that is fine, if both parties agree. My patient Harry is a typical example. Married for 33 years, he and his wife June have a daughter living back at home after leaving university, and they are also taking care of his wife’s elderly parents.

He and June both still work and feel stressed all the time.

‘I still love June deeply, but the weight on her shoulders has taken a huge toll,’ he says.

‘When we get a moment to come up for air and go to see a film or out to dinner, we really enjoy each other’s company. But when I look at her, I see an old, tired woman, even though she’s only 55. I hate myself for being so superficial, but it’s true.

‘I know that I’m no catch either, but I was always the one to initiate sex in our relationship, and lately I’m not interested because I just don’t feel as attracted to her as I used to. It’s not like I’m going to run out and find a 25-year-old mistress — I don’t want that either.

‘I just wonder if this is simply the end of the road for us as a sexual couple. And maybe that’s just fine. Too bad no one talks about it or tells us not to worry about it, that we are normal.’

HARRY and June have achieved true intimacy without sexual passion. But for many other couples, the rift runs deeper still.

In these cases, the marriage becomes an arrangement that may work for one or both partners so that they can maintain a facade to the outside world. It’s a way of saving face, and it is what my patient Jane chose.

‘Sex wasn’t the biggest part of our marriage even when we were young,’ Jane told me. ‘Neither of us had a big sex drive. Still, it was good and we made an emotional and verbal commitment to spend the rest of our lives together in front of our families and friends.

‘We married at 25, and now it’s almost 30 years later. We raised the children together. Paul is a good father, and he usually made it home for dinner, and was interested in everything the children did. I worked in an

‘He started buying her flowers. She wrote him little notes. He sent her love texts. The passion — and with it the intimacy — was back’