Most married men experience periodic fluctuations in sexual satisfaction, but differences in sexual preferences between marriage partners and performance anxiety can both evolve into prolonged periods of distressing near sexless marriage.
Near Sexless Marriage
For any man, realizing you are living in a near sexless marriage can be shocking and disorienting. For a Christian man, living in a near sexless marriage can precipitate a spiritual crisis.
A near sexless marriage can threaten the concept of sacred marriage, can prompt distressing divorce thoughts, and can motivate destructive psychosexual coping and religious coping—including a transformation in core religious beliefs about marriage, divorce, sex, the authority of scripture, and the consistency of church teachings.
If marital sexual behavior is generally a taboo topic in the church, sexless marriage is radioactive. Ministers, elders, and pastoral counselors are typically not equipped to address this relationship problem. Men are usually unwilling to seek support from friends, family, or the church because sexless marriage is culturally stigmatized. A man not having consistent, robust sex violates our male cultural scripts, making men feel like an isolated exception and making most Christian men feel abandoned by the church to suffer alone.
Recently, the silence surrounding near sexless Christian marriage ended. Fifty men from all regions of the United States between the ages of 30 and 80 volunteered to participate in a study and describe this experience in their own words, often speaking about this experience for the first time in their lives. Their motivation was to bring the issue of near sexless marriage out of the shadows in order to help their brothers who are suffering, especially young men who cannot understand what is happening and feel they have no one to turn to for advice.
The button below enables you to download a copy of the study report, which describes the experiences of religiously conservative married men from the Churches of Christ who are struggling with the emotional and spiritual distress connected with living in a near sexless marriage. The men who participated in this study discuss the experience of living in a near sexless Christian marriage, pornography, sexual fantasy, masturbation, affairs, and religious coping (among other things). Most importantly, 24% of the men in this study turned around their relationships after years of living in a near sexless marriage, and they describe how they did it.
This study was significant because it is the first published qualitative study of men struggling with a near sexless marriage for relationship and emotional reasons. The words of the men in this report could change your life. Further, the insights from this report should enlighten Christian wives, pastoral counselors, and church leaders.
Low Sexual Desire
Near sexless marriage can emerge for a variety of specific reasons, but the over-arching reason is a difference in sexual preferences between spouses. Common differences include desired frequency of sex, desired types of sexual behavior, and desired levels of emotional engagement. For a man in a long-term monogamous marriage, unresolved differences in sexual preferences can produce arousal problems over time, primarily erectile and orgasmic difficulties. These difficulties are often misinterpreted by both the man and his wife and can eventually evolve into sexual avoidance, which leads to sexless marriage.
For men coping with preference differences, sexual avoidance is often linked to repeated rejection of their sexual advances. Rejection can occur for a variety of reasons, but most men interpret rejection as “my wife has lost interest in sex.” After repeated rejection over a period of time, a man may stop approaching his wife for sex because the anticipated rejection “isn’t worth it.” These men typically decide to wait for their wives to initiate sex when the wife is “in the mood.” The wife seldom initiates sex, and the man is unwilling to initiate due to the demoralization of repeated rejection. In this situation, the man wants to have sex with his wife, but he does not want to deal with more painful rejection. The man has unwittingly developed low motivation to pursue sex with his wife.
Ask yourself the following question: On a scale of 1 to 5, how would you describe your motivation to ask you wife for sex at this point in time? A 1 means “It’s not worth the effort and disappointment,” and 5 means “It’s totally worth it because it could pay off with exciting sex and a satisfying orgasm.”
If your answer is a 1 or lower, you are likely experiencing low sexual desire.
A man’s lack of motivation to pursue sex in the face of likely rejection disproves common myths about male sexuality. Contrary to popular myth, men are not sexual machines, ready for sex at any time and able to perform flawlessly every time. Male sexual desire is multi-faceted and complex. To achieve and maintain sexual arousal, men need to feel sexually desired by their wives. When men in long-term marriages do not feel sexually desired, they may lose their motivation to pursue sex with their wives or find themselves experiencing erectile or orgasmic difficulties when they engage in rare sexual encounters.
Spectatoring
Performance anxiety is another common reason for near sexless marriage. As men age, our bodies do not physiologically perform sexually the way they did when we were younger. Erections are not automatic and are more difficult to sustain. Ejaculation is not as impressive. In recent years, an epidemic of erectile problems during partnered sex has spread among young men, primarily because partnered sex may not have the same levels of erotic stimulation offered by porn. In both scenarios, the issue relates to erotic stimuli. For young men, the ability to escalate arousal by rapidly switching between increasingly novel erotic images dulls the effectiveness of stimuli connected with a consistent partner and sexual environment. For older men, routine sex is often the issue—intercourse in the missionary position at a predictable time of day in a predictable setting with minimal foreplay, creativity, or partner enthusiasm.
When a man experiences erectile difficulty during sex with his wife and has to mentally struggle to maintain his erection to orgasm or he experiences orgasmic failure, he can begin to lose confidence in his body. As a man loses confidence in his ability to perform consistently when needed, he feels vulnerable, exposed to embarrassment, and less masculine. These concerns prompt him to tune into his body’s performance during sex, and he starts mentally monitoring his erection and ejaculatory sensations. He begins spectatoring—consciously monitoring his body’s performance.
As a man begins to mentally focus on vulnerabilities with his body, he stops perceiving the erotic stimuli of the moment with his wife. In effect, he becomes distracted and focused on non-erotic stimuli. With this change in focus, he experiences even more difficulty maintaining his erection, which produces even more anxiety and self-monitoring. Unfortunately, a wife may mistakenly interpret her husband’s arousal difficulties as linked to her body or his attraction to her. As a result, she may withdraw sexually or emotionally. The cascading effect of this anxiety about performance and the couple’s misinterpretation of the situation can eventually lead to sexual avoidance, which can lead to near sexless marriage.
Low Sexual Desire and Spectatoring
The men in our study of near sexless marriage had a lot to say about lack of sexual motivation and spectatoring. As our study shows, men do not understand the complexity of their own arousal process.
Men do not realize they conflate emotional intimacy with sex until they have lived in a near sexless marriage for a period of time. Eventually, they realize they are suffering from a lack of emotional intimacy—not a lack of sex.
Men do not realize they have been culturally conditioned to believe intercourse equals “sex.” They do not realize intercourse is male-focused and performance-focused until they discover they cannot maintain an erection to orgasm during partnered sex.
Men do not understand “sex” is about mutual pleasure, and mutual pleasure is what many women desire from sex. Men do not know how to flip the sexual script from a focus on intercourse to alternative sexual behaviors that promote mutual pleasure.
Most of this lack of understanding is largely attributable to the cultural myths about male sexuality that both men and women automatically believe. These myths have the effect of stifling an open discussion of the man’s arousal difficulties, and that lack of sexual communication between spouses can lead to near sexless marriage.
The men in our study shared many critical points that contributed to their arousal difficulties, including:
Men need to feel sexually desired by their wives. Men believe their wives show desire by expressions of affection, any form of physical touch, initiation of sexual touch, and emotional engagement during sexual touching. Many men in our study have not been touched or kissed by their wives in years.
Men need some form of sexual variation in their sexual relationships. Variation includes time of day, location, attire, accessories, and an attitude of playfulness. And, yes, variation includes different sexual behaviors and sexual positions. For many men in our study, mutual sexual fun ended during their newlywed years.
Men need foreplay, especially older men. Some study participants reported less than 5 minutes of foreplay, and some reported their wives expected immediate performance. Men who had some kind of sexual accommodation with their wives frequently reported their wives limited sexual touching and did not want to be aroused during their encounters.
Finally, men need their wives to feel sexual empathy for the man’s difficulties and be willing to work as a sexual team to experiment with pleasure-based behaviors that both spouses will find emotionally satisfying.
Religious Learnings
For religiously conservative Christians, our recent study of near sexless marriage revealed a shocking truth—the belief that a sexual “duty” is imposed on spouses by 1 Corinthians 7 actually undermines sexual satisfaction in Christian marriages. This widely held interpretation of “spousal sexual duties” undermines transparent sexual communication, actively works against sexual empathy, and prevents the sexual teamwork required to resolve arousal problems for both the man and the woman. As a result, a duty interpretation of 1 Corinthians 7 can actually intensify and prolong feelings of spiritual crisis, emotional isolation, and hopelessness in Christian men.
Not only does this widely held interpretation promote arousal problems, it often leads to scriptural counter-attacks or warfare between spouses, which can lead to relationship dissatisfaction. As a result, a duty interpretation of 1 Corinthians 7 is probably wrong since the Holy Spirit would never have intended a passage about sexual partnership in marriage to actually undermine marriage. The Holy Spirit probably intended this passage to promote sexual empathy between spouses and sexual teamwork, not a feeling or expectation of duty.
In addition, men reported agape love is not enough to replace eros love in marriage. God’s design of marriage as involving emotional and sexual exclusivity means God intended eros love to be an inseparable part of sacred marriage for Christian couples. Men cannot use agape to cover their need for eros, and wives cannot give agape as a substitute for eros.
Resources
Our recent study on near sexless marriage is probably one of the most useful resources available to Christian men, couples, and pastoral counselors concerned about this psycho-spiritual relationship problem. However, for a more extensive technical discussion of male sexual desire, religious coping, and psychosexual coping (including the use of pornography, sexual fantasy, and masturbation by Christian men), request a copy of Dr.Yeats’ full doctoral project via gary@cofcmen.com.
For men and their wives wanting to understand how cultural myths about male sexuality negatively impact male arousal and promote performance anxiety that worsens erectile and orgasmic difficulties during partnered sex, see McCarthy, B. W., & Metz, M. E. (2008). Men’s sexual health: Fitness for satisfying sex. Routledge.
For young men wanting to understand how pornographic stimuli and masturbation can rewire the brain’s natural arousal patterns and create erectile problems during partnered sex, see Wilson, G. (2014). Your brain on porn: Internet pornography and the science of addiction. Commonwealth Publishing.
For counselors desiring a more technical psychological discussion of male sexual desire difficulties and current treatment options, see Metz, M. E., Epstein, N. B., & McCarthy, B. (2018). Cognitive-behavioral therapy for sexual dysfunction. Routledge.