A Total Disconnect: The Sexless Marriage vs. The Extramarital Affair
Why is this issue so hard for people to get their heads around?
Please note:
Look, I based this on the therapist’s podcast, OK, and this was what it was about.
I’m sorry.
I really, really hope any thinking person would assume that somewhere there are marriages where the roles are reversed. It’s only common sense.
P.S., it’s also in the podcast. It’s a good podcast. You should go listen.
I don’t always agree with Samantha Rodman Whiten (“Dr. Psych Mom”) — just, oh, only about 99% of the time. She’s the new relationship guru, spreading across the internet like wildfire.
Which is why I find what she has to say about the sexless marriage so interesting.
Write about infidelity, and you would be hard put to believe there are any sexless marriages anywhere. The living instant a mistress to a married man says or posts something like, “They weren’t having any sex,” here come a million people to testify that The Man Must Be Lying.
Well, I’m sorry to tell you this, but sexless marriages are definitely a thing. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have stories like this one and this one and this one, and we certainly wouldn’t have entire forums like this one. Where the people in them routinely debate whether or not they should “outsource” the sex they are no longer having with their spouses.
Now, along comes Dr. Rodman Whiten to tell us that “There Is No Way To Love Or Respect Your Husband While Dismissing His Desire For Sex.”
We erstwhile mistresses have been saying this for a long time. I’m glad therapy finally caught up. But, who cares what we scarlet women think? Let’s listen to Dr. RW.
Among the points she makes:
Nobody’s being loving if they dismiss something that’s important to their partner.
For many people, giving and receiving affection is the main point of being here alive on the planet. Just as many women wouldn’t feel their life was complete without kids, many men don’t feel as if life has any point if they are not close to a woman they are having sex with.
Basically, what you are saying to your husband when you withhold kissing, hugging, and sex in a marriage is, “I deny you the most basic human need for touch, and you’re so worthless or low self-esteem or stupid that you can’t leave.”
Being in a sexless marriage is so bad that the idea that a man would stay in it can’t say anything good about him. The kind of man we think of as a strong, healthy, successful male isn’t going to live decades in a marriage and never have sex because the woman says, “Well, I don’t like to.”
This is analogous to a woman staying in an abusive relationship.
Women who justify their refusal to have sex by counting all the other ways they are a good wife are ignoring the fact that giving and showing affection for the husband is 90% of the job. If you are not affectionate, you’ve pretty much erased all your other “pluses.”
Can you be a good caretaker for a baby without ever picking up the baby? The issue is pretty much the same.
Is a man a good husband if he’s an alcoholic or a person who smiles at everyone else but you? Same thing.
Men don’t feel good about themselves as men unless they have an intimate, loving, sexual relationship with a woman. If they don’t, they feel like shit no matter what else they have going on for them.
If you’re married and sure you don’t ever want to have sex again, the only ethical things to do are, a.) Get help for your problems around sex, b.) Open the marriage and allow your husband to be physically intimate with someone else, or c.) divorce.
Men stay in sexless marriages out of low self-worth.
Any man or woman who is being denied affection in their marriage is at risk for falling in love with someone else.
Hm. Let’s look at that last line one more time, shall we?
Any man or woman who is being denied affection in their marriage is at risk for falling in love with someone else.
Kind of sounds reasonable, doesn’t it??
Yet, let the person in question actually fall in love with someone else, or, god forbid, have sex with someone else …
… and automatically they become more hated than the latest school shooter while we stamp our little feet in anger and declare that We don’t care what the spouse in question did or did not do, they are now blameless and the total victim of this horrible, heinous, black-hearted, evil, evil cheater!
Now, how is that?
If the total withholding of affection and sex in a marriage makes people very vulnerable to an affair, then what is this outright hatred when a certain number of those very people … actually succumb to an affair?
I’m not kidding. There are those on this very platform who believe that cheating ought to be punishable by law, even by a jail term if necessary!
On the one hand, our society glorifies sex. On every billboard is a smiling, thin, scantily-clad twenty-year-old girl, shamelessly exploiting our desire for sex while Madison Avenue laughs all the way to the bank.
We believe sex and sexual desirability is so important that women who don’t have that look anymore, be they fat or just older (Need I say it? Madonna?) should simply disappear from public view.
They aren’t sexy anymore!
But the same woman can close her legs permanently in marriage and her husband is supposed to become a monk.
And if he doesn’t want to become a monk and divorces her, our hatred and scorn are in direct proportion to the number of decades the couple was married (“Oh, that poor, poor wife!”), yet if he “does the right thing” and stays married to her but discreetly outsources sex elsewhere, why, that is absolutely unforgivable!
Something has to give here, people. Because these two schools of thought cannot coexist.
Either people should just be chained in marriage to one another forever and ever, no matter the private suffering, and just endure a life that makes them feel like shit (and remember, those aren’t my words), or we really do believe that when a marriage makes people feel like crap, they should be free to leave.
Because one school of thought is going to cause people to have affairs, as they writhe miserably in chains society is going to throw stones at them for throwing off.
The other school of thought, were it more widely adopted, might obviate the need for prostitutes and mistresses as people are allowed to leave a marriage without social condemnation.
If you don’t want to hug, kiss, or sleep with the man you’re married to, why should you care if he leaves? Oh, what’s that? The home, the kids, the finances? Honey, you’re just using him, anyway. You think your wedding ring bought you a workhorse. Do you really love a man you won’t have sex with?
And when we recognize that a painful marriage puts people at risk for an affair … why be so hard on those selfsame people when they respond to that painful marriage, by having an affair?
People are miserable, and they do not believe they can divorce.
It’s gonna happen.
Only about 1-5% of the population identify as asexual, so let’s not pretend that the sexlessness in marriages is some biological mystery. The most likely reason women stop wanting sex isn’t some innate disinterest—it’s fucking exhaustion. Try acting as your spouse’s mother, caregiver, therapist, life planner, and housekeeper while also shouldering the majority of childcare, all while he contributes minimally (if at all), and see how ‘in the mood’ you feel. Funny how men who actually share the load don’t seem to have wives avoiding them like the plague.
If a man ignores emotional and domestic labor, most women will experience reduced desire. Working full-time plus The Second Shift at home makes for exhaustion at bedtime. Let's ask WHY so many women don't want sex with their husbands. Maybe he's not very satisfying. The average sex act lasts less than 10 minutes. Maybe, like my ex, he likes to make it hurt.
Comparing a loss of desire to being an abuser erases the thousands of women KILLED each year by intimate partners.