Ways a Sexless Marriage Takes a Toll on YouStudies suggest that at least 15 percent of married couples are in a sexless marriage. A sexless marriage is defined as couples who have not been intimate in 6 to 12 months. So what happens to your marriage when you and your spouse are no longer intimate together?
Either you are unhappy with your partner and do not feel comfortable sharing a sex life. Or you are happy together and wonder where your sexual disconnection comes from. Either way, the lack of intimacy can be painful and frustrating both mentally and physically.
Solutions To Save A No-Sex Marriage
ways a sexless marriage can affect you
Here are 5 ways that a sexless marriage can affect both your mental health and your relationship, along with tips on what to do when you and your spouse are no longer together.
1. Temptations increase
Needless to say, when you're not being intimate with your partner, you're missing out on an important bond. Your emotional and physical needs are not being met. This can cause you to question your commitment to fidelity.
When your partner no longer wants to be intimate with you, it can make you feel incredibly lonely and depressed. This leaves you vulnerable to having an extramarital affair, which will complicate your marriage and likely hurt all parties involved.
2. Reduces emotional intimacy
In a sample study conducted by the Flourishing Families Project, 355 couples discussed emotional and sexual intimacy in relation to relationship satisfaction. The results showed that a satisfying sex life significantly predicted an increase in emotional intimacy between couples.
Emotional intimacy is very important to the relationship. It brings you together as a couple and makes sex more enjoyable. It even contributes to the success of your marital friendship. It is what encourages you to be close to your spouse and to share things with him or her.
3. Destroys trust
It has been shown that oxytocin released during physical moments, and especially after orgasm, increases confidence between couples. This is important because trust is what helps us feel connected to our spouses. It allows us to feel comfortable and secure in our relationships.
The relationship between trust and intimacy makes sense when you consider that during sex you give your partner the freedom and consent to explore your body and give you pleasure. It is a deeply personal experience that you share with your partner. When this experience is lacking, your trust in your partner may diminish.
If your partner has lost interest in sex, he or she may also begin to question his or her loyalty to you. You may wonder if they are not interested in maintaining a healthy sex life with you because they are pursuing their desires with someone else. Such thinking can damage a marriage.
4. Ruins your self-esteem
When you are intimate with your spouse, it feels amazing. You feel sexy and desired by your partner. This gives you a nice ego boost. However, when there is no such intimacy, it can cause your self-esteem to plummet. You may begin to think that you are ugly, undesirable, or that your spouse is no longer attracted to you. This can cause your mental health to suffer.
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Questioning your self-esteem can trigger a depression.
Once depressed, you will begin to feel unmotivated, helpless, lose interest in activities, may begin to dislike yourself, feel fatigued, irritable, and may even begin to choose reckless behavior.
5. It is embarrassing
You go out with your friends and someone makes a "How wild is your sex life" test as a silly joke. Everyone starts discussing their hottest encounters or telling stories about how they slipped away in an intimate moment while the kids were away. They leave you there so you don't get scared of the upcoming roundtable discussion.
Not having a healthy sex life with your partner hurts. Because research shows that sex makes you feel socially included, the reality of your intimate life can be embarrassing. This is true even if no one knows what is going on behind closed doors.
You may begin to wonder what is going on with your spouse. You may begin to think that your relationship is not normal, especially if it is your husband who has lost interest in sex.
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