Roughly one in five married couples has sex fewer than ten times a year, the threshold researchers commonly use to define a sexless marriage. If you’re in one, you already know the loneliness, frustration, and self-doubt that can come with it. The good news is that a sexless marriage doesn’t have to mean a loveless or hopeless one. Whether the goal is reigniting your sex life or finding peace within the relationship as it is, there are concrete steps that help.
Why It’s Happening More Often
You’re not alone in this, and you’re not imagining a broader trend. Between 1996 and 2008, 59% of married adults ages 18 to 64 reported having sex at least once a week. From 2010 to 2024, that number dropped to 49%, according to data from the General Social Survey analyzed by the Institute for Family Studies. The causes are layered: more screen time, longer work hours, rising rates of anxiety and depression, and a culture that often treats sex as an afterthought once the early chemistry fades.
Rule Out Medical Causes First
Before assuming the problem is purely emotional or relational, it’s worth checking whether something physical is suppressing desire. A long list of conditions can quietly tank libido: diabetes, chronic pain, underactive thyroid, high blood pressure, heart disease, and elevated prolactin levels, among others. Medications are another common culprit. Antidepressants, blood pressure drugs, and antipsychotics are well-known libido suppressors. Hormonal birth control, including the pill, the patch, the ring, the implant, and the injection, can also reduce desire significantly.
If low desire is the core issue for one partner, treatment options exist. For premenopausal women, two FDA-approved medications target low sexual desire specifically: one is a daily pill that adjusts brain chemistry related to mood and drive, and the other is a self-administered injection taken before anticipated sexual activity. In late 2025, the FDA also expanded approval of the daily pill to postmenopausal women under 65. For men, the options are different but similarly worth exploring with a doctor. The point is that what feels like a relationship problem sometimes has a straightforward medical solution.
Start With the Conversation, Not the Bedroom
The most effective thing you can do is also the hardest: talk about it openly, without blame. Research on sexual desire discrepancy in couples consistently finds that communication is the single most useful strategy, not because it magically fixes the gap, but because it removes the toxic layer of misunderstanding that builds on top of it.
One partner’s “not tonight” often gets interpreted as “I don’t want you,” when the actual reason might be exhaustion, stress, body image issues, or even timing. As one participant in a study published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior put it: “Most of my desire situations have been figured out with talking, and are usually just a misunderstanding of signals.” Another described how her partner made a point of saying that his lack of desire in a given moment wasn’t a reflection of his desire for her overall. That distinction matters enormously to the person on the receiving end of rejection.
A few approaches that couples in these studies found helpful:
- Name the pattern without assigning fault. Try something like “I’ve noticed we haven’t been connecting physically, and I miss it. Can we talk about what’s going on for both of us?” This opens a door rather than launching an accusation.
- Explore the why together. Sometimes desire differences come down to something as simple as time of day, energy levels, or how the evening unfolds. One couple found that planning a low-key evening together, with dinner, a show, and an early bedtime, created space for intimacy that spontaneous attempts never did.
- Schedule it. It sounds unromantic, but multiple couples reported that making an “appointment” for intimacy actually reduced pressure and gave both partners something to look forward to rather than dread.
- Reassure constantly. The higher-desire partner needs to hear that the gap isn’t about them. The lower-desire partner needs to hear that they aren’t broken. Both messages require repeating more than once.
Rebuild Emotional Intimacy Outside the Bedroom
Sex often disappears from a marriage not because desire died, but because the emotional connection underneath it eroded first. Couples who feel like roommates rarely feel like lovers. Rebuilding that foundation doesn’t require grand gestures. It requires attention.
The Gottman Institute, one of the most respected relationship research organizations, emphasizes what they call “turning toward” your partner. This means responding positively when your partner makes small bids for connection: a comment about their day, a joke, a request to look at something. These micro-moments are easy to dismiss, especially when you’re feeling resentful about the state of your sex life. But consistently turning toward each other is what keeps the friendship alive, and friendship is the infrastructure that sexual desire runs on.
Other practices that strengthen the bond: regular check-ins where you talk specifically about how the relationship feels (not just logistics), stress-reducing conversations where you listen to each other’s external frustrations without trying to fix them, and what Gottman researchers call “love maps,” which is simply staying curious about your partner’s inner world. What are they worried about right now? What are they excited about? When you stop knowing the answers to those questions, you’ve drifted further apart than you realize.
Expand Your Definition of Physical Intimacy
When sex becomes a loaded topic, all physical touch can start to feel like a negotiation. The higher-desire partner reaches for contact hoping it leads somewhere. The lower-desire partner pulls away, afraid that any touch will be interpreted as an invitation. Eventually, both stop touching entirely, and the marriage loses not just sex but all physical warmth.
Breaking this cycle means deliberately separating affectionate touch from sexual touch. Holding hands, sitting close on the couch, a long hug in the kitchen, a back rub with no expectations attached. These aren’t consolation prizes. Physical closeness triggers the release of oxytocin, the bonding hormone, and maintains a sense of connection even during periods when sex isn’t happening. The key is that both partners understand and agree that this touch is its own reward, not a stepping stone.
Some couples find it useful to set explicit ground rules: “For the next month, we’re going to focus on nonsexual touch only.” This can paradoxically reduce the pressure enough that desire starts to return on its own, because the lower-desire partner no longer feels hunted and the higher-desire partner gets to experience closeness without the sting of rejection.
Get Professional Help Early
Couples wait an average of six years after problems begin before seeking therapy. By that point, resentment has often calcified into something much harder to work with. A therapist who specializes in sex and intimacy can do things a self-help article can’t: identify patterns you’re both too close to see, provide a safe container for conversations that go sideways at home, and offer targeted exercises tailored to your specific dynamic.
Sex therapy, despite the name, is mostly talk-based. A good therapist will help you explore what sex means to each of you, what your histories with intimacy look like, and where the emotional blocks are. They may also assign structured homework, often starting with nonsexual touch exercises designed to rebuild comfort and trust gradually. If the issue is primarily medical, they’ll refer you to the right specialist.
When Acceptance Is the Path Forward
Sometimes, after honest conversations, medical evaluations, and therapy, the sexual gap remains. One partner’s desire is genuinely lower, or a health condition makes sex painful or impossible, or the mismatch simply persists. At that point, the question shifts from “how do I fix this” to “how do I make peace with this.”
This is where many people get stuck, because acceptance can feel like surrender. But there’s a meaningful difference between giving up and choosing to focus on what the relationship does offer rather than what it doesn’t. A marriage can be deeply fulfilling, genuinely warm, and worth staying in even without regular sex, if both partners are honest about the situation and committed to meeting each other’s emotional needs in other ways.
What tends to poison a sexless marriage isn’t the absence of sex itself. It’s the silence around it, the unspoken resentment, the feeling of being invisible. If you can name the reality together, grieve what’s missing without blaming each other, and actively invest in the parts of your relationship that do work, the marriage has a real chance of not just surviving but feeling good. Picking up new shared activities, prioritizing time together, and maintaining physical affection all become more important when sex isn’t part of the equation.
The hardest part of surviving a sexless marriage is resisting the urge to let it define the entire relationship. It’s one dimension of a partnership that has many others. The couples who navigate this well are the ones who refuse to stop talking about it, refuse to stop touching, and refuse to let the absence of one thing erase everything else they’ve built.