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…