How to Deal With a Sexless Marriage

Suffer, cheat or divorce are your options — unless you open up

You want sex, your partner doesn’t — and hasn’t wanted it in a while. Now what?

Maybe you’ll see a marriage therapist, who’ll have a range of ideas to get the spark back, from scheduling sex to talking about your fantasies. Hopefully, the spouse with the MIA libido will see a specialist to see if there’s an underlying medical problem.

Still, if you’re like most long-time sex-starved people, you’ll just go on suffering, especially if you have young children at home. Maybe you’ll have an affair. And maybe you’ll split.

Because really, what other options do you have?

You could open up your relationship — that’s generally not an answer you’ll hear from a marriage therapist, although I’m not sure why it wouldn’t be on the table. If you aren’t interested in having sex with your partner, does that mean they should be OK with that? Is there nothing you would be willing to do to make sure their needs are met (because you love them, right)? Or, does it not matter to you?

And that’s a real problem for a lot — perhaps as many as 80 percent — of couples.

Philosophy professor and author Mark D. White wondered about this in some Psychology Today posts a few years ago. While there are all sorts of discussions about marital sex or lack of sex, he notes, we rarely, if ever talk, about the ethics of a spouse refusing to have sex with the other for years.

It’s understandable — sex must be consented to, and thus we are loath to say a husband or wife “owes” the other sex. Yet most people expect a healthy sex life when they say “I do.”

So, he asks, what can you do when your partner doesn’t meet your sexual needs?

“Assuming that the sexual issues themselves cannot be solved and that the frustrated partner is not willing to deny his or her needs, then the partners have to acknowledge that one of them can no longer get his or her basic needs satisfied within the relationship — and something has to change. Either the relationship has to end, or the understanding within the relationship has to change to allow the frustrated partner to seek sexual fulfillment…