Sex wasn’t the only thing absent in Ulrika’s marriage

How sad to read Ulrika Jonsson’s confession about the distressing lack of sex in her marriage.

I felt a pang of deep sympathy when she admitted that she and her estranged husband had sex just once in eight years.

When it comes to intimacy, comparisons really are invidious, not least because other people are having a lot less sex than we think.

An estimated 20 per cent of marriages are deemed

“celibate”, which is to say the partners have sex eight times a year or fewer.

That’s great if it’s by de facto mutual agreement, because you are too cream-crackered to manage more than a chaste

Terry & June kiss on the cheek. But a chronic mismatch of libidos is the most painful, lonely burden to bear. Actually, there is something worse than the humiliation of rejection – and that is the silence that accompanies it.

Former television presenter Jonsson, 52 – who has four children by four fathers – married her third husband, Brian Monet, in 2008.

They have a son and after his birth, sex slipped off the agenda, as it so often does. Except in Jonsson’s case it never returned.

She still doesn’t know why. Despite couples therapy and her efforts to understand, her husband, she says, didn’t – perhaps couldn’t – tell her.

We’ve long since dispelled the myth that men are permanently primed for sex. But that doesn’t make involuntary celibacy any easier to discuss.

It’s perfectly normal for one partner to occasionally feel more amorous than the other. But when avoidance of sex becomes the norm, it establishes a hugely damaging

pursuer-distancer cycle.

It’s impossible not to feel bruised when a husband moves away in bed. It’s equally difficult to feel turned on by a wife’s tearful reproach.

Jonsson says she was tempted to ask her husband’s permission to have an affair. Reading between the lines, was what she craved affection? Did she find herself starved of attention and love?

With sexual intimacy, it’s a case of use it or lose it. Sometimes, the spark can be reignited. Sometimes not.

The only way to achieve clarity is through a different sort of intercourse – talking. I have a suspicion that Ulrika’s marriage woes may have stemmed less from the lack of sex than the absence of honesty.