Yes, you CAN revive a sexless 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 40 per cent of marriages end in divorce, 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 had 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. And 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 on the other side with a worthwhile intimate and loving relationship — and sex to boot.
But 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 the 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, and 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.
‘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 of the partners so that they can maintain a facade to the outside world. It’s just 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 office and made friends and always felt my life was fine.
‘A few years ago, I began to suspect that Paul was cheating on me. He didn’t even try to hide it. When he went on business trips, he would add on a few days or even a week. Somehow, all his business trips started at weekends.
‘He almost always worked late. For my part, I knew things were stale, and the idea of sex with him had become a total turn-off to me over time. So my solution to knowing he was having sex elsewhere was to ignore it.
‘In fact, it was a relief that he didn’t want to have sex with me and wasn’t asking for it. It was an easy out, and I didn’t feel it was my fault. I’m now in my 50s, I’m menopausal, and the children have gone. I will never leave Paul and I hope he won’t leave me either. As long as he doesn’t fall for one of his flings, I’m okay.’
The number of women who
‘He started buying her flowers. She wrote him little notes. He sent her love texts. The passion — and with it the intimacy — was back’
talk to me so casually about this type of marital arrangement is surprising. Why do so many women feel it’s okay to accept a loveless, disconnected relationship?
Most people just stay together because they are afraid to be alone. Dating in later life can seem a grim prospect, and the thought of sex with a new man, taking off your clothes and letting a stranger see your ageing body, is frightening to most women.
This was certainly the reason another of my patients, Stephanie, has decided to stay with her husband.
‘This is not what I imagined my life would be like when we promised to love each other “until death do us part,”’ she told me.
The sex they’d enjoyed when they first married was something she’d assumed she could always count on. But three children and three decades later, at 57 she’d discovered she wasn’t attracted to her husband any more.
She certainly wasn’t going to leave him, though — she was too well aware that divorced men of her own age were all going out with women 30 years younger, and she feared no one would be interested in her: ‘If I leave Adam I will be alone — guaranteed!’ Men too, can lose interest in the physical side of a marriage. Want to know why your formerly energetic and sexually obsessed husband is grumpy and lethargic? It’s probably because he’s afraid of talking about his flagging sex drive, so he would rather keep his nose in a book or slump in front of the TV or just get cross with you.
His low testosterone makes him feel old, afraid that his good times are all behind him.
The result is that he’s unhappy and sexually absent. Psychologically, men in andropause complain of depression, anxiety, irritability, insomnia, loss of memory, and reduced mental function. And they are unlikely to talk about sex, because they can no longer perform the way they did in their 30s.
As a result, many men think it’s best to just avoid the topic — and intimacy — altogether, which of course only serves to make marriages fall apart faster.
From the medical perspective, low testosterone is also associated with increased risk of heart disease and even Alzheimer’s.
My patient Jason was a typical example. He and his wife Marie had always had a good sex life, but when he hit 60 he found he was having difficulty sustaining sex or even having intercourse at all.
‘At first we tried to ignore it. But after a few months of frustration and embarrassment, I started thinking that maybe it had something to do with the medication I took for my high blood pressure.
‘My doctor said there was no way that would cause my problem. He said it was my age and prescribed Viagra and later daily Cialis [another treatment for erectile disfunction]. We tried both, but I really hated them. The drugs took all the fun and spontaneity out of our sex life.
‘I started to get angry, which only lowered my libido even further. I couldn’t talk about it with my friends. Trust me, men only talk about sex when they’re having a lot of it and can brag about it. Not one of my friends ever talked about not being able to perform.
‘The doctor I saw was useless; he told me there was nothing else I could do but take the drugs — or consider injections into the penis!
‘One day, I was on a plane and picked up one of those magazines from the back of the seat. It had an article about a medical clinic that catered to problems just like mine. It was a godsend. I made an appointment the next week.
‘The doctor did blood and other tests and told me I needed to take testosterone hormone pills. Within a day after getting my first shot, I felt like my old self again.
‘Now, a year later, the problem with sex is just a bad memory. Marie and I have great sex again, and I feel 35.’
WHILe treatments, and renewed attention to intimacy, can spark sexual passion anew in many cases, if we genuinely feel the sexual part of our marriage is over, maybe it’s time to admit the truth and redefine companionship as the relationship’s new normal.
Or maybe it is time to admit you want something different. ultimately you have to decide what matters most to you — it’s your life, after all. You can choose honesty, communication, and a real intimate relationship or you can choose to let go of sex and work on creating intimacy from your joint history and friendship.
Redefining marriage at different stages is the key to success. If in our 50s and 60s we use the same definition we used when we were 20, we’ll fall short and feel dissatisfied and bored, and we’ll start looking around for a better deal outside the marriage.
Instead, I urge you to try working from inside to shore up the institution of marriage that you created and have spent decades on — and rather than demolish it, nourish it instead. Work on being closer to your partner, being present and tender with them, and the intimacy will follow.
ADAPTED from The Intimacy Solution: Life Lessons in Sex & Love by DR ERIKA SCHWARTZ, published by Permuted Press at £12.99. Copyright © Erika Schwartz 2018. To buy this book for £10.39 (20 per cent discount) call 0844 571 0640 or go to mailshop.co.uk/books. Offer valid until 20/09/2018, p&p is free on orders over £15.