The Decline of Intimacy in Marriage
You must have heard the old penny jar metaphor? The old folk tale that suggests that if a married couple were to put a penny in a jar for every sexual encounter during the first year of marriage, then remove a penny for every encounter thereafter, the jar will never become empty. Everyone, including the groom laughs when this joke is trotted out during wedding speeches of course, but it doesn’t take many years for the laughter to turn to despair when he realises there’s more truth to this old tale than he anticipated. And there is truth to it.
A 2019 study found that indeed, married women’s sexual desire on average declines more steeply over time than men’s, which on average did not decline at all. And the decline relates to desire for sex with anyone, not just with one’s spouse. So, it’s not personal! The study also found that the decline in female sexual desire also predicted a reduction in both partners’ marital satisfaction.(1)
So, in this article we’re going to work out why so many women stop wanting sex with their husbands so soon after the honeymoon, but also more importantly, what you, as a couple can do about it.
The reasons so many wives go off sex is obviously complex and nuanced, so it’s not going to possible to give a definitive answer in a short article. But I’m confident that I can shed some light on a few things that might give both of you some understanding and some much needed hope.
Oh, and spoiler alert in case you don’t have much time:
Firstly, to push back against some of the comments I keep seeing on my YouTube videos, a woman’s drop in sex drive after pair bonding isn’t deliberate and it’s not her fault. Women don’t get schooled in sexual manipulation any more than men do in emotional ambivalence. There are severely personality disordered outliers of course, but this is not the norm.
Secondly, it is fully possible to successfully manage mismatched libidos in marriage, which is perfectly normal (2), but it requires patience, interest, empathy and loving support by both spouses. So this article is for both of you.
So let’s look into the research around early relationship sexual desire in women.
Early Relationship Sexual Desire in Women
Most healthy women in their 20s to mid 30s will have a reasonably high spontaneous desire for sex. Meaning they will be motivated to actively seek out sexual experiences. In fact, it’s thought that women’s sex drive goes up steadily, peaking in their mid-30s, as fertility starts to go down. (3) Also, a woman’s testosterone levels, which are positively correlated with spontaneous sexual desire (4), also tend to peak during her mid to late twenties. (3) Furthermore, women’s sexual desire tends to increase even more during courtship and the early honeymoon phase of a committed relationship. (1) This is, in part because both partners will tend to be on their best behaviour, being highly affectionate, generous, and loving towards one another. And this behaviour floods their bodies with the hormone oxytocin, which plays a crucial role in facilitating bonding, trust and relationship formation. (5)
So, given all these compounding factors, the likelihood is that during the initial phase of a relationship, a woman will be as keen to have sex with her man as he is with her. At this point, neither of them can imagine anything other than a lifetime of abundant, spontaneous and passionate love making.
Sound familiar?
Well, as we’ll see, and as you might have experienced, this heightened state of sexual desire is sadly only a temporary state for many women and their hopeful partners. Things start to change emotionally, behaviourally and hormonally shortly after committed pair bonding has been established… or in other words, after the wedding.
Low Female Sexual Desire After Pair Bonding
Once the honeymoon phase has passed, the intense emotional responses start to settle as hormone levels shift. Dopamine and norepinephrine levels, which are responsible for the early euphoria, normalise as oxytocin and vasopressin levels rise, promoting a calmer but less exciting attachment. (6)
As a couple get more comfortable with each other, they also tend to show each other sides of themselves that they might have so far kept quiet. Novelty becomes familiarity, passion stands aside for new responsibilities and neither feel like such a high priority to the other anymore. They might begin to wonder if the person they married might not be the embodiment of perfection they first thought them to be.
This is typically all going on as the first children come on to the scene of course, adding more stress and responsibility to their lives whilst stripping whatever time they had for each other down to fleeting moments or administrative negotiations.
Furthermore, a 2012 study found a trend towards lower testosterone levels among married women & mothers compared to unmarried or childless women. (7) This is presumed to be nature’s way of switching a woman’s attention from mating to parenting.
So, by now the wife is likely exhausted, her body is forever changed and her hormones have declared she is to nest and nurture rather than procreate, so sex will understandably be the last thing on her mind. Her husband, however, will almost certainly still be as interested in sex with her as the day they met.
When this natural and normal mismatch in desire emerges, friction and suffering will inevitably occur if this delicate situation isn’t handled maturely and empathically by both spouses. For example, he might interpret her lower sexual desire as evidence that she doesn’t love him or find him attractive anymore. Thus, he might be tempted to withdraw emotionally, which she in turn might interpret as evidence that he doesn’t care about her as much as he used to. Without understanding what’s really going on, they both dig their heels in. She continues to withdraw sexually and he continues to withdraw emotionally. A great relational chasm takes shape. Resentments build, as do insecurities. Conflicts become more frequent, and marital satisfaction plummets.
This could go on, and often does, for the rest of their married lives together.
OK, so that’s enough doom and gloom. Let me introduce you to the light at the end of the tunnel.
Resurrecting Sex After Marriage
There is a solution. It doesn’t have to be this way. There are plenty of things both spouses can do to understand what’s going on and work together to resolve the situation. It doesn’t matter how long you’ve been together or how long this has been a problem in your marriage; the solution is exactly the same.
The following five steps don’t need to be followed in order, but they’re all essential. It really all comes down to making a decision. It’s about kicking any ‘fuck you’ energy either of you harbour about your sex life, into the stratosphere.
1 – Acknowledging It’s No one’s Fault
A crucial part of the solution, and I hope I’ve illustrated this clearly enough, is for both spouses to acknowledge that neither partner has actually done anything wrong. A wife’s loss of sexual desire isn’t her fault, it’s not intentional and in fact it’s perfectly normal and healthy from an evolutionary perspective. It doesn’t mean she doesn’t love or care about her husband. Her body is instructing her to settle down, focus on the security of her environment and tend to her maternal responsibilities as her number one priority.
Meanwhile, the husbands unwavering desire for sex is in no way unhealthy or unusual. In fact, I’d be more concerned about a relatively young man’s lack of libido than its presence. His body is telling him to procreate whilst he can, and on an emotional level, he has a profound need to connect with his wife and feel accepted by her in this way. So, please, both of you let that sink in, meditate on it if you must. It’s not her fault. It’s not his fault. It’s natural and normal. Neither of you are doing or feeling anything unusual. No relational crimes have been committed.
In many cases this means acknowledging with empathy and maturity that a wife’s spontaneous desire for sex might be lower than her husbands for the rest of their marriage. It does not mean however that an exciting and mutually fulfilling sex life is off the cards. Quite the opposite in fact, something much deeper and more beautiful can be born of it. A phoenix from the ashes!
2 – Accepting that Sex is Not Optional
Human beings are sexual by nature. A woman who refuses to let go of, but rather embraces her sexuality as part of her identity, is a woman who is fully alive. Choosing to remain sexual is a decision founded in self-care, and it is a form of self-love. A man in partnership with a woman like this is also far more likely to feel more fulfilled and more at peace in his life. Conversely, a man who is unable to enjoy this sexual connection with his wife, will experience a steady deterioration in his health, happiness and well-being.(8)
As a side note, a time-lag analyses in the 2019 study showed that a wife’s loss of desire preceded marital dissatisfaction.(1) Early levels of marital dissatisfaction did not predict how rapidly wives lost interest in sex, but marital dissatisfaction does indeed reduce desire.(9)
So, the effect of a wife’s low sexual desire is bidirectional: Women with low sexual desire often struggle with problems in their relationships, and women struggling in their relationships often find that they lose interest in having sex with their partner. The takeaway here is that if sex is off the table, both partners will be harmed, and their feelings of marital satisfaction will take a nosedive. Their lives together will be fraught with tension, and by extension so too will the lives of their children. Children are, after all also benefactors of vibrant, whole, and fulfilled parents at the head of a mostly harmonious and happy home.
This will mean that rather than waiting, perhaps indefinitely, for your wife’s desire for sex to spontaneously erupt, your sex life will need to become intentional. It will need to become an aspect of your marriage that is openly discussed, negotiated and approached with interest, like any other area of your lives’ that you wish to be successful. This will involve letting go of any resistance and considering a life of loving surrender to your own inherent and deeply rooted sexuality. It will mean choosing to make sex a priority in your life and in your marriage.
3 – Deepening Your Friendship
The next step is to stop seeing this situation as hopeless. It isn’t. It is simply a new circumstance which you both must learn to manage. So, it’s time to grow up, develop, adapt and improvise.
Do not give in to anger, negativity or despair. Pressure, shaming or coercion won’t work either. The kind of sex that’s had under these circumstances isn’t the kind of sex anyone with any self-respect would want anyway. So, your priority here must be to deepen your friendship. Hold hands, join forces and work together.
Say to each other “This doesn’t feel the same, we’re not the same people. This is a new situation and a new chapter for us as a couple; we have new roles and responsibilities, but we must make it work. I love you, I’m committed to spending the rest of my life with you and I want us both to thrive along the way, so let’s work this out.”
With this spirit of companionship, you are far more likely to be successful in creating something new and beautiful. As friends and allies you can work together to bring sexiness well and truly back to the forefront of your marriage. But you must be a team.
4 – Self-Care & Nurturing Sexiness
If the wife has had children, her body might not feel like hers in the way it did when she was younger. The transition from the young free and independent girl she was to exhausted mother is hard on a woman’s body, mind, spirit and sense of herself sexually. On top of this, there are more bills, more chores, less time and less freedom. She might have become all ‘mum’ and thus she may barely remember the girl she was when you met.
With this all-consuming sense of responsibility for the new life she has brought into the world, also comes a level of neurosis, which is kryptonite to sexual desire. If her whole existence is about childrearing, then this state of perpetual anxiety, if not mitigated, will threaten to shut her down sexually. So, she will need space and stimulation to find and recover herself.
Her husband can encourage her to discover or rediscover a pursuit she loves, to take care of her body and her mind, and to reconnect with her feminine spirit. He can reassure her that she is still beautiful, more beautiful even. He can help her by paying attention to her, reminding her of her value, and telling her how much he appreciates and loves her. He can create space for her, romance her, take her on dates and put into words what she means to him.
5 – Establishing a Sexual Mindset
Spontaneous female desire is not a prerequisite for a fulfilling marital sex life, but a sex positive mindset is.
In my case I liken this to exercise for the sake of my own health and fitness. Many moons ago, at the beginning of my journey with exercise, I never felt a burning desire to exert myself at all if I’m honest. However, I learned to put my shoes on and get out the door regardless. Over time I came to know that once I’ve warmed up and got a couple of miles under my belt I’ll feel like I’m flying. The rush of air over my body, the dopamine in my blood, the sense of aliveness and connection to my body, and to nature, remind me once again that this part of life is essential.
The point is, I’ve made a decision to be a physically fit person, so I run, bike or hike almost every day. Not because I’m desperate to exercise per se, but rather because I know it’s good for me, and I know that that once I get going, I almost always have a good time. It’s action prior to motivation. It’s also worth pointing out that the more I do it, the more motivated I feel to do it more.
And so it goes with sex and marital health.
Make a concerted decision to identify as a sexual couple. Take a leap of faith and prioritise it. Think about it. Make time for it. Put structures in place to facilitate it.
First you’ll need to remove anything from your lives or your relationship that put the sexual brakes on. Whether that’s non-essential medications, addictions, bad food, media, negativity, dishonesty – anything that gets in the way of sex needs to go.
Next is to add things to your life that contribute to a general feeling of sexiness.
So, self-care, health, exercise, sleep, diet and mental well-being all need to be on point.
Go through your closet and throw out anything that doesn’t make you feel sexy and replace them with clothes that do. Plan regular date nights where you agree to stop off on the way home and do something steamy in the car. Schedule sex if you need to. I know that might not sound appealing to everyone, but if you’ve got tight schedules and kids hanging off your legs all day long then I promise, scheduled sex will be far better than no sex.
These are just general ideas, not prescriptions. Get creative. You’ll need to come up with things that work for you both as individuals. Things you are both actually willing to do. The point is, what I’m suggesting here is that you both dare not to fall out of love.
It might be helpful here, for me to share a little of my own experience which I hope will inspire you and reassure you that (a) What I’m talking about here does actually work and (b) I don’t preach anything on this blog that I’m not willing to practise myself.
My personal journey with sex after becoming a mum was a textbook example of what I’ve described here. I just didn’t feel like doing it anymore. I’d given so much of my body, mind and soul to motherhood that I was genuinely struggling to give elsewhere. And the thought of being considered ‘sexy’ by anyone, let alone myself was, to me at least, quite frankly ridiculous.
I was lost, riddled with anxiety, and weighed down by the enormity of raising a child with little to no outside help. My youthful sparkle, positivity, and naturally strong drive for life dimmed to a fraction of its previous self. Sex was difficult to say the least. My husband was understandably devastated and we argued, a lot. It got so bad at times that we talked about separation and we were both generally quite miserable.
Eventually it became clear to me however that something had to be done, that we could not continue to live like this, and I certainly never wanted to feel like I was failing as a wife or as a mother. After countless, brutally honest conversations we devised a simple, mutual declaration:
“It’s you and me, forever, no mater what. So let’s make it work.”
I stopped working for a couple of years to focus on the loss of self I had experienced since becoming a mother.
And, I hope this isn’t a necessary step for you, but I realised that I had to face my childhood trauma head on. I went through it all in video taped police interviews. I sat on the hills and wept for the abandoned child within me. I removed toxic family members from my life. I focussed on healing somatically by consciously moving my attention from my head, back to my body.
My husband bought me a road bike and I cycled tens of thousands of miles on country roads, mostly alone. I developed a profound love of my body and of myself which I do not believe could have been achieved through talking alone. Out of head, into body. A sacred homecoming. My husband and I started doing sexy photoshoots. We devoted hours to them. He helped me understand for the the first time in my life that I am beautiful. We put sex at the very heart of our marriage where it remains to this day.
Sex is Part of Our Nature
Once I came to understand that sex was an essential part of my nature, that it is something that benefits my health, my husbands health, the health of our marriage and therefore the health of our family. I let go of any resistance I had towards it and I am forever grateful that I did. Russell and I are the best of friends and true lovers. I have no doubt our love life breathes power and energy into every other aspect of our lives. The tension is gone. Sex has become elevating and energising. There is more trust, more laughter, more connection and more joy.
Choosing to have no or little to no sex in marriage is like taking a wrecking ball to the whole enterprise. If my own story had not convinced me of that, then the countless couples I meet who aren’t having sex certainly would have.
If you want your relationship to thrive and to be filled with pleasure, feelings of contentment and satisfaction, then you simply cannot give up on sex. So do whatever you have to do to keep that part of yourself and your relationship well and truly alive.
I’ll leave you with this excerpt from Captain Corelli’s Mandolin which I think beautifully sums up what I’ve been trying to communicate with this article.
“Love is a temporary madness; it erupts like volcanoes and then subsides. And when it subsides you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots have so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. Because this is what love is. Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the promulgation of eternal passion. That is just being in love, which any fool can do. Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident. Those that truly love have roots that grow towards each other underground, and when all the pretty blossoms have fallen from their branches, they find that they are one tree and not two.”
Thanks for reading, I’ll see you next week.
References:
(1) McNulty, J.K., Maxwell, J.A., Meltzer, A.L., & Baumeister, R.F. (2019). Sex-differentiated changes in sexual desire predict marital dissatisfaction. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 48, 2473-2489.
(2) University of Washington Medical School, UW Medicine (2023) Is your sex drive normal? Probably.
(3) Wieczorek LL, Chivers M, Koehn MA, DeBruine LM, Jones BC. (2022) Age effects on women’s and men’s dyadic and solitary sexual desire. Archives of Sexual Behaviour. 2022 Nov;51(8):3765-89.
(4) Parish SJ, Simon JA, Davis SR, Giraldi A, Goldstein I, Goldstein SW, et al. (2021) International Society for the Study of Women’s Sexual Health Clinical Practice Guideline for the Use of Systemic Testosterone for Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder in Women. J Womens Health (Larchmt). 2021 Apr;30(4):474-491. doi:10.1089/jwh.2021.29037
(5) Inna Schneiderman, Orna Zagoory-Sharon, James F Leckman, Ruth Feldman (2012) Oxytocin during the initial stages of romantic attachment: Relations to couples’ interactive reciprocity Psychoneuroendocrinology. 2012 Jan 26;37(8):1277–1285
(6) Bianca P Acevedo, Michael J Poulin, Nancy L Collins, Lucy L Brown (2020) After the Honeymoon: Neural and Genetic Correlates of Romantic Love in Newlywed Marriages 2020 May 7;11:634. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.0063
(7) Emily S Barrett, Van Tran, Sally Thurston, Grazyna Jasienska, Anne-Sofie Furberg, Peter T Ellison, Inger Thune (2012)Thune Marriage and motherhood are associated with lower testosterone concentrations in women Horm Behav. 2012 Nov 1;63(1):72–79
(8) Srikanta Banerjee, Peter Anderson, W. Sumner Davis (2024) Connection Between Depression, Sexual Frequency, and All-cause Mortality: Findings from a Nationally Representative doi:10.1177/26318318241256455
(9) Van Lankveld JJDM, Dewitte M, Verboon P, van Hooren SAH. (2021) Associations of intimacy, partner responsiveness, and attachment-related emotional needs with sexual desire. Front Psychol. 2021;12:665967. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2021.665967
