A sexless marriage is more common than most people think, and it’s almost always fixable if both partners are willing to work on it. Between 2010 and 2024, only 49% of married adults ages 18 to 64 reported having sex once a week or more, down from 59% in the decade prior. The decline is real, but it doesn’t mean the relationship is over. Getting the spark back requires understanding what killed it, rebuilding the emotional and physical connection in stages, and sometimes getting professional or medical help along the way.
Why Sex Drops Off in Long-Term Relationships
Sexual desire in a marriage is shaped by three layers of influence: what’s happening inside each person individually, what’s happening between the two of you, and broader pressures from the world around you. On the individual side, the most common culprits are stress, hormonal shifts, low self-esteem, and simply feeling less physically attracted to a partner over time. These aren’t character flaws. They’re predictable biological and psychological responses to life getting busier and bodies changing.
Between partners, the length of the relationship itself plays a role. The brain’s reward system is wired to respond strongly to novelty and unpredictability. As a relationship becomes more routine, those sharp spikes of excitement naturally decrease. Many couples notice less automatic desire, more irritation over small things, and a decline in sexual curiosity. That’s not a sign the love is gone. It’s a sign the chemistry of early romance has shifted into something quieter, and it needs active attention to stay alive.
Communication problems, unresolved resentment, and emotional distance are the interpersonal factors that most reliably kill desire. If you feel unheard, criticized, or emotionally disconnected from your partner during the day, your body is unlikely to want closeness at night. Gendered expectations also play a part: assumptions about who should initiate, how often sex “should” happen, and what counts as a valid reason to say no can create silent standoffs that last for months or years.
The Cost of Doing Nothing
Sexual dissatisfaction isn’t just uncomfortable. It’s destabilizing. Research links it to 50 to 60 percent of divorces and roughly 40 percent of extramarital affairs. When physical intimacy drops away, couples tend to experience more conflict, and both partners are at higher risk for anxiety and depression. The emotional and sexual dimensions of a marriage are deeply intertwined: losing one erodes the other, creating a cycle where distance feeds more distance.
That cycle is why acting sooner matters. The longer a sexless pattern persists, the more normal it starts to feel, and the harder it becomes to break.
Start With Touch, Not Sex
If it’s been weeks or months since you’ve been intimate, jumping straight to sex can feel forced and pressured for both of you. A more effective starting point is non-sexual physical touch: holding hands, sitting close on the couch, a long hug, a back rub with no expectation of it leading anywhere.
This isn’t just feel-good advice. Physical affection triggers the release of oxytocin, a hormone central to pair bonding. Research on couples shows that those who engage in more affectionate touch, positive eye contact, and emotional matching have measurably higher oxytocin levels. The relationship between touch and oxytocin works as a feedback loop: more contact increases the body’s sensitivity to the bonding hormone, which in turn makes closeness feel more natural and rewarding. Couples who scored higher on what researchers call “interactive reciprocity” (a combination of affectionate touch, positive emotion, and genuine engagement with each other) showed significantly elevated oxytocin at initial assessments.
The practical takeaway is simple. Before you try to fix the sex, fix the touching. Make physical affection a daily habit with zero sexual pressure attached. Over days and weeks, this rebuilds the biological foundation that desire needs to return.
Rebuild Emotional Connection First
For many couples in a sexless marriage, the real problem isn’t physical. It’s that they’ve become roommates who manage logistics together but have stopped truly connecting. Reversing this requires deliberate conversation habits.
One approach backed by decades of relationship research is what the Gottman Institute calls the stress-reducing conversation. It’s a daily check-in, ideally 20 minutes, where each partner talks about something stressful from outside the relationship: work, a frustrating phone call, a difficult interaction with a friend. The listener’s only job is to take their partner’s side, listen to understand rather than solve the problem, and communicate that they’re on the same team. This single habit has a surprisingly strong effect on overall relationship satisfaction because it reinforces the feeling that your partner is your ally, not another source of stress.
Other habits that help include asking open-ended questions about your partner’s inner world (their worries, hopes, what they’re thinking about), responding positively when your partner reaches out for attention even in small ways, and validating their emotions before offering your perspective. These aren’t dramatic gestures. They’re small, consistent deposits into the emotional bank account that makes physical vulnerability possible again.
Introduce Novelty Together
The same brain chemical that made the early days of your relationship electric, dopamine, is highly sensitive to new and unpredictable experiences. As a relationship settles into routine, dopamine activity naturally decreases. You can deliberately reactivate it by doing things together that are new, slightly challenging, or outside your usual patterns.
This could mean taking a class together, traveling somewhere unfamiliar, trying a new sport, or even just breaking your evening routine by going to a different restaurant or cooking something neither of you has attempted before. The goal isn’t the activity itself. It’s the shared experience of novelty, which triggers the reward pathways in your brain and can spill over into how you see your partner. Studies consistently find that couples who regularly share new experiences report higher relationship and sexual satisfaction.
Inside the bedroom, novelty matters too. If your sexual routine had become predictable before it stopped entirely, consider having an honest conversation about curiosity, fantasies, or things you’d be open to trying. Approach this with genuine openness rather than pressure.
Rule Out Medical Causes
Sometimes low desire has a straightforward biological explanation that no amount of conversation or date nights will fix on its own. Hormonal changes are the most common medical factor, particularly during and after menopause in women and with declining testosterone in men.
For women going through menopause, symptoms like vaginal dryness and hot flashes can make sex uncomfortable or unappealing. Hormone replacement therapy addresses these symptoms, and when it isn’t enough to restore desire on its own, testosterone supplementation is an option. Clinical guidelines support considering testosterone for menopausal women with persistently low desire when estrogen therapy alone hasn’t helped. A trial typically runs for six months, and if there’s no improvement in that window, it’s usually discontinued.
For men, low testosterone can reduce both desire and energy. Thyroid disorders, certain antidepressants (particularly SSRIs), blood pressure medications, chronic pain, and sleep disorders can also suppress libido in both sexes. If your desire dropped suddenly or coincided with a new medication or health change, a conversation with your doctor about bloodwork and medication review is a reasonable first step.
When to Consider Sex Therapy
If you’ve addressed the emotional connection, ruled out medical causes, and are still stuck, working with a sex therapist can help. These are licensed therapists with specialized training in sexual function and intimacy. Sessions typically involve both partners and focus on communication patterns, underlying anxieties about sex, and structured exercises to practice at home.
Success rates are moderate but meaningful. In one prospective study of 60 couples seeking therapy for low desire, about 57 percent had a positive outcome. That’s not a guarantee, but it’s better odds than continuing to avoid the problem. The couples who tend to benefit most are those where both partners are motivated to participate, the relationship is otherwise stable, and there isn’t significant unresolved resentment or betrayal that needs to be addressed in individual or couples therapy first.
Sex therapy works best as one piece of a larger effort, not a standalone fix. The couples who see results are usually also doing the daily work of rebuilding touch, emotional connection, and shared experiences outside the therapist’s office.
What a Realistic Timeline Looks Like
Most couples don’t go from sexless to satisfied in a week. A more realistic trajectory involves a few weeks of rebuilding non-sexual touch and emotional habits, followed by a gradual reintroduction of sexual contact that starts with low-pressure physical closeness (making out, sensual touch) before progressing to intercourse. Trying to rush the process usually backfires because it recreates the pressure that contributed to avoidance in the first place.
Expect setbacks. One partner may feel ready before the other. Old resentments may surface during the process. Desire may return unevenly, with some weeks feeling promising and others feeling flat. This is normal. The goal isn’t to return to the frequency of your first year together. It’s to create a sexual connection that feels wanted, not obligatory, and that both of you can sustain over time.