What A Sexless Marriage REALLY Does To A Man (And How To Resolve It)

Is a sexless marriage and relationship really that bad for men? I see this online all the time. I get messages from men who say, I'm in a sexless marriage. We haven't had sex in three years. We haven't had sex in six months. You know, I've been in this relationship for a couple years now, and it's turned sexless. The truth is that being in a sexless relationship can have a very negative impact on men. You see, a sexless marriage or relationship isn't just about the lack of intimacy. It's about the absence of connection and what that absence of connection actually does to the mind and the body and the sense of self inside of that man. You see, when a man lives without any type of physical connection, his nervous system and his brain will start to treat his partner and the relationship of like a threat. It is incongruent with the function of how that man perceives the relationship to be right. The the function of the relationship. What will start to happen is that stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline will begin to flood his body while bonding chemicals, the chemicals like oxytocin that will help him to connect with his partner, that the chemicals that actually helped him to connect and fall in love in the first place, they will begin to dwindle and turn off. So his brain will start to rewire itself. A man's brain will start to rewire itself when sex is not present, preparing him not just for the rejection of his wife or his girlfriend or partner, but from life itself. He will start to feel like he's having to brace for rejection, for failure in so many different parts of his life. And what started in the bedroom, at home, in the relationship will begin to corrode his confidence, his sense of self, trust, and even that man's ability to feel worthy as a man and know that he can contribute something meaningful. Now, before I go any further, I have to address something, because anytime that I've talked about sexless marriages, inevitably there are comments that say it's not my job to just give men sex. It's just because we're in a relationship doesn't mean he's entitled to it. This video is not about some ethical or moral conversation about whether or not you should be having sex in your relationship. This is a video about the impact of a sexless marriage on a man and possibly some solutions to end that sexless marriage. I have worked with many couples over the years that have been in a sexless marriage anywhere from eight years, all the way down to eight Months. And it can be quite taxing on both people in the relationship, but it can cause extreme stress and duress on the man. So let's explore why rejection for men can hurt like a physical wound. Science has actually shown that rejection, rejection registers in the brain just like a physical pain. And the truth is that in most relationships, not every single one, but in many, many relationships, the sexual rejection that's happening is oftentimes the sexual rejection of the man's advances. Every no. From his partner feels like not just a disappointment, but a real measurable pain, something that is physical. And every single time he gets rejected, cortisol spikes, he gets stressed out. And soon that man begins to tag. Not just sex or hugs or kisses, but even simple touches sitting next to each other will start to register and get labeled as dangerous, as a threat. And. And a man can start to find himself in a place of apathy because of this. His nervous system will learn. Reaching out for physical connection equals pain. Right? I get rejected more often than not. I even have had clients. And this is a common thing. It's not just like one client. I've had many clients that have said the following. I've kept a chart of how many times I've tried to initiate sex I over the last year with the amount of rejections I have experienced and the reasons for the rejection. And it is astounding. One man found that over the course of the year, he only had sex two or three times, but was rejected almost 200 times. And he said the impact of that on him was absolutely devastating. Every single rejection cut. And eventually when he came to work with me, he was on the brink of wanting to ask for a divorce because he was so tired and so checked out from any type of physical, physical connection within the relationship. Now the next thing that starts to happen in a sexless relationship is a kind of hormonal crash. There's a kind of hormonal crash. So this is where it starts to get a little worse. So, and this isn't to scare you, this is just talking to you about the biology and the neuroscience behind what happens. So as more and more rejection stacks up, what you'll start to see is testosterone beginning to decrease. Oxytocin and vasopressin, the very chemicals that fuel love, that fuel connection, that fuel intimacy and protection. These things begin to dry up. They begin to reduce the. The release inside of a man's body. His sleep will suffer, his stress will start to skyrocket, and even his metabolism, how much he's eating, can begin to shift. And for many men, this is where things like weight gain can set in. They'll have insulin resistance that can start to set in and just a kind of chronic fatigue. This isn't just in their head, right? His biology will literally start to work against him and will start to work against the intimacy. And this is one of the biggest challenges that couples have when starting to reconnect is that the man's biology, his psychology, his emotional body, has begun to withdraw from the person that he's with. And not only has begun to withdraw, but has begun to see them as hostile, has begun to see them as a threat or dangerous. Because the brain and the body have associated them with chronic rejection, with hurt, with pain, with disappointment, not with love and connection. The psychological damage, on the other hand, on a bit of a primal level, I guess you could say, women have really. Women are really, in relationships, that the gatekeepers of sex and intimacy. Okay, Women are the gatekeepers of sex and intimacy. And generally speaking, men are the gatekeepers of commitment. And this is the dance that's always happening when dating starts, right? Is women are saying, they're dictating, they're determining when and if sex and intimacy is going to happen. And a lot of the times, men are the ones that are dictating whether or not commitment and longevity is going to happen. And when a woman that a man has vowed to love, he's committed to her, he said, yes, I want to do this life with you. I want to have a relationship with you. And that woman begins to turn herself off. Or something has happened in the relationship and she's retreated, or the sex that she started that she wanted to have in the beginning of the relationship she's no longer into, or she just starts to conceive consistently, say, no. The message isn't just not tonight that that man receives psychologically. The message is, you are unworthy, you're undesirable. There's something wrong with you. You're failing as a man. Now this, in some relationships, is even more poignant because for some women, they will either directly or indirectly withhold sexual connection based on how they perceive their male partner to be showing up as a partner, as a husband, as a boyfriend. And so for some women, what will start to happen is, I don't like, you know, that you didn't do certain chores around the house. And so I'm going to withhold sex. And so sex starts to become this kind of bargaining tool or bargaining chip that says when you behave properly, then intimacy happens. And when you Don't. Intimacy doesn't happen. And this can really erode trust and connection in the relationship. This message of no consistently and continually at all, of his rejection, at all of his advances, the constant rejection will begin to shatter his sense of confidence, his sense of masculinity, his of sense, and his belief in his own worth and value. Because what's happened is he has committed himself into that relationship, and his sense of identity and self have been tied to whether or not his female partner, his woman, or partners in general is happy enough to be sexually intimate with him. And this can begin to erode not only his sense of self and his sense of confidence, but. But it can begin to feel like he is being punished for his behavior, for his inability to show up as a partner, et cetera. The next thing that I want to talk about are the signs of emotional withdrawal. Okay, if this is happening in your relationship, it's very common that what started it was a bit of emotional disconnect, that there was emotional disconnection, that you and your partner were not on the same page. You and your wife or your girlfriend or your partner were not on the same page. And for the people who are with these men, what you will notice are a few things. Okay, number one, when sexual disconnection has happened, when the sexual relationship has happened, there are a few warning signs that you need to start to look for that the relationship is really in danger. Number one is that that man starts to pull away physically and emotionally. And so what can happen in this is a bit of a tit for tat, right? Where the man is like, okay, you're not connecting with me sexually. This is very important to me in the relationship. I really, you know, I'm not getting this anywhere else. I can't go look for it anywhere else. I can't go hunt for it anywhere else. You're my primary source of sexual satisfaction and fulfillment. Fulfillment. And, you know, especially if you're in a monogamous relationship, I've agreed to that commitment. And part of that agreement. And we as men are oftentimes very logical and very rational. It's like, we have agreed to be monogamous, and we have agreed to be honest with you, with each other. And part of that agreement is that we have agreed to be sexually intimate with each other. And so for a man, it's like, well, if I can't be sexually intimate with you and. And I can't go see it from anywhere else, and you're withholding this thing that I deeply desire, then sometimes what can happen is a bit of a tit for tat where the man starts to say, well, then I'm going to not connect with you emotionally. I'm going to pull away, I'm going to shut down. I'm not going to bother trying to connect with you physically or sexually, but I'm also not going to give you what you want emotionally. And so there can be this huge withdrawing. So affection starts to disappear, flirting starts to disappear. The happiness and the joy starts to disappear. And he can kind of turn into a bit of a curmudgeon, right? He's cranky all the time.

Protection. The protection instinct will also start to fade. So he'll start to make decisions and choices that maybe don't protect the relationship. You might notice him liking certain Instagram posts of women or acting out in certain ways. Or you might notice that he's allowing certain behavior in the relationship that he wouldn't have before. He stops initiating, stops trying to create sexual connection and intimacy. Not because he doesn't care, but mostly because he is anticipating the rejection. And this is a very simple numbers game for a lot of men, the experience, and not just a lot of men, it's neurologically and physiologically, it's a numbers game. If you stick your hand into a box and eight or nine times out of ten you get pain instead of pleasure, eventually you're going to learn, don't stick your hand into the box. And that analogy that I just used was unintentional. The pun is unintentional.

Oh, man. Okay. I realized as I was talking about sticking your hand into a box that that's probably going to be misconstrued by some of you out there, but enjoy the 15 year old humor. But if you continue to do a behavior where eight or nine times out of ten, you, you feel pain as a result of it, and not joy and not connection and not intimacy and not pleasure, which is really what the desire is. You, you're going to stop doing that. And when you stop doing that, what ensues is resentment is animosity, right? And what can happen for a lot of men when they move into this space of resentment and animosity is they start to keep score. They start to become more transactional, right? It's like, all right, I'll take out the garbage, but you need to do this. Or they retreat into fantasies. They start to dissociate from the relationship. They, they move into distractions just to survive the sexual intimacy, physical and emotional starvation. Because that's really what is transpiring inside of that man's body, he feels emotionally starved. The truth, and I've worked with tens of thousands of men and thousands of couples. Now, the truth that so many men have told me is that the place where they feel the most emotionally connected is during sexual intimacy. For better or worse, Whether you think that's good or bad, the truth is that the majority of men, where they feel the strongest emotional connection to their significant other is before sex, the act of flirting and creating arousal and polarity during it, and then sometimes after. And so when that happens, what he's really. When all that's taken away, he starts to feel starved. He starts to feel starved in the relationship. And resentment will eventually turn into contempt. And that contempt, according to the Gottmans, and they've talked a lot about this, contempt is the most corrosive thing for intimacy and relationship. Right. The real danger begins to happen when that resentment has built up into a type of content, into a type of, I can't stand you, I don't even like you. The feeling that that person is beneath you is worthless.

That contempt, when it starts to build and take hold, is. Is really the collapse of the relationship. This is when a man's kindness begins to disappear. This is when repair between the two people becomes nearly impossible. But if there is a spark of love in connection and a desire to change, a desire to move through it, which many men hold, this is the surprising thing. I've worked with so many men who are in a sexless relationship, and so often those men want to work through it. They want to work through it. A lot of the times when I've worked with couples that are in sexless marriages now I realize that a lot of the couples that I work with, it's because the men are coming to work with me. So there's a bit of a bias in the type of couples that I'm working with, because usually the men are bringing the relationship in. It is largely not the man that doesn't want to work through things. It is the woman that is sometimes really blocked on, wanting to move through the sexual disconnection. So here's what you, as a couple have to understand about moving through this sexless period in your relationship. Number one, your relationship is not broken or dysfunctional because this is happening. Okay, Big thing I want to stress. So many people look at the state of their relationship, the state of their marriage, and they say, well, because it's sexless, it must mean that we're broken. There's something damaged about us or about the relationship that is not the case. It is quite common for a couple to go through some type of period of sexlessness or an extreme reduced amount of sexual connection. It can ebb and flow. And for some couples it's going to be more extreme where, you know, they're going to go through a period of two years where maybe sex happens once or it just hasn't happened. And then they'll come back in and be able to repair and sort through what created the disconnection in the first place. And then sex can be much more regular. But non consexual sexlessness is a big issue. And what I mean by that is that for many couples, one person has not agreed to be in a sexless relationship. One person has taken sex off the table. They have said, I'm going to, you know, weaponize sex, I'm going to use it as a punishment, I'm going to withhold it. Or they're going through something you genuinely challenging, whether they're, you know, going through some type of trauma work or something has come up, or something has happened, their relationship to their body has shifted and changed and suddenly there is a non consensual sexlessness that has shown up. And this is where one partner wants intimacy, but the other partner is refusing intimacy. And this creates this starvation that we were talking about. It can create the, the contempt, the animosity. And so we really have to look at why is this non consensual sexlessness happening? What is actually causing that sexlessness to happen? Because the truth is that it can be deeply frustrating to be the person who is on the receiving end of the sexlessness in the marriage or the relationship and wanting sex and intimacy to happen. So just like forcing sex is abuse, right? There's a word for that. So is starving your partner of sex when you have agreed to be in a sexual. In, in a sexual relationship. This is the thing that is often not talked about, right? Forcing sex to happen in the context of a relationship, that's abuse. Withholding it, weaponizing it, taking it off the table. When you have agreed to a sex filled monogamous relationship and that's been a part of the agreement the entire time, that is simply a different form of abuse, right? We would call that neglect. So here's the key. Emotional safety. If you want to repair, if you want to get through it, emotional safety has to come first. And this is so challenging for many couples because when I've worked with a lot of couples and they're in this space, again, depending on where the person is. Depending on where the man is in terms of feeling emotionally starved, physically starved, sexually starved, depending on whether he swung out into extreme contempt, emotional safety can feel very challenging because that man will not trust his partner, right? What he has received is you are not trustworthy of bringing my emotional vulnerabilities to my sexual vulnerabilities, my physical vulnerabilities. So restoring connection isn't just about jumping through all of these hoops. It's not about sort of ticking all these boxes off the list or waiting for months and months and months for something magical to happen. And it's really about one step at a time, making the doing the work to rebuild trust, to rebuild closeness in small, consistent steps, which I'm going to break down for you. But the one thing I want to say before I even get to those actionable steps is you have to address the resentment. You have to address the resentment and you have to go through a, a sort of repair process that addresses the resentment. And my strong recommendation for you is that you find somebody to work with as a couple where you can work through the resentments or you have a process that you can work through together. Maybe I'll create a separate video that, that gets deep into that process. But you have to address the resentment or the contempt that has built up in order to start to develop the emotional safety again for sex and intimacy to be possible. So here are a few steps for you to start to rebuild intimacy if you have found yourself in a sexless relationship. Number one, start to rebuild that emotional connection, that emotional safety. Begin to talk about things that you enjoy, start to open up again, begin to reconnect and begin to undo the, the association that closeness of any kind with this other person equals pain, equals rejection. And that can be super simple, right? You can schedule a time on a daily basis where you're just going to say, okay, for 10, 15 minutes, we're just going to share with one another about how we're genuinely doing or what's going on in our lives. And it can be a very simple conversation. Again, depending on how bad the trust has been ruptured and depending on how much resentment has started to build up, you're going to want to make this first step quite simple. You're not going to want to get into the deep weeds of repairing the relationship or talking about sex. You want to take all of that off the table. The core of this connection is all about reestablishing safety, reestablishing emotional safety. It might even be about re establishing physical safety. So What I've had some couples do is they have a allotted time every single day where they're going to sit facing one another so that there's eye contact, focus in on breathing, maybe have some type of physical contact, holding one another's hands, putting hands on knees, that type of stuff. You have to talk about what's comfortable for each of you and then beginning to open up and talk about some of the things that you have been experiencing or going through that, that you've honestly just been withholding from that other person. And the format of this is pretty simple. One person talks and shares for a few minutes. You can use prompts like something I want you to know is, and the other person just listens and says, thank you, thank you for sharing. That's it. It's not a time for disagreeing. It's not a time for checking their person or challenging them or correcting them. It's not a time for any of that. It's just a time for emotional, physical and verbal safety to start to take place again so that intimacy can begin to be rebuilt. The second step that you're going to want to take is practicing. Practicing what I call non demanding connection or expectationless desire. Okay, expectationless desire again for you as a man or you know, for, if you're with a man and sex, sex has not been on the table in the relationship for you. What's going to have happened is anytime that you have an expectation that sex is going to potentially happen or physical connection, there's going to be a lot of pressure on it because this has not been consistent in the relationship and there's a lot of pain surrounding intimacy, surrounding physical and sexual intimacy. So you're going to want to practice expectation less desire, meaning that you're going to bring physical connection back into the fold. You're going to start to bring some of your desire and your arousal to one another without the expectation that it has to lead to, to sex or lead to some type of outcome. This can be holding hands, hugs, making out. I mean, I've given couples, you know, when the two of you come home, hug for 30 to 60 seconds, make out for 30 to 60 seconds. Do something to just re acclimate your bodies back together, right? Share some moments of connection and physicality when without the pressure that it needs to go somewhere. So for some of you, you might want to set a time period where you just practice this, but this is really about getting your bodies to trust one another again without the pressure of like, oh, it's going to lead to sex right now. Because when we have been in a state of starvation, what happens is we want to over consume, right? I just did a 72 hour water fast a couple weeks ago. It was amazing. But after I came out of the water fast because I hadn't had food in three days, my body was like, I want to eat everything in sight. And so if you have felt sexually starved.

What can happen very, very frequently that can interrupt the reconnection process is you will want to over consume, right? You're either going to be super, super pensive and apprehensive and like, I don't know and I don't trust you and I don't even really want to engage with this and you're kind of pushing that other person away because you felt so starved for such a long time. Or all of this arousal, all of this desire is going to be coming up and it's going to pressurize the system. So you're going to want to practice this expectationless desire. I'm just going to bring my desire to you without the expectation that it's going somewhere. I'm going to bring my arousal to you without the expectation it's going to go somewhere. We're going to hold hands and hug and make out without any expectations that it needs to go anywhere. And this can be very, very helpful for recreating some sexual and physical trust. Last piece is that you and your partner begin to co create, recreate the vision for your sex life. Talk about what you want it to look like, sound like, feel like, how do you want to feel when it's happening? How do you want to feel in the lead up to it? Really start to create a vision for what the two of you want. Because what can happen when sexless marriages and relationships go on is that our brains become conditioned to fixate on all of the stuff that we do not want. All the little micro behaviors and the little comments or the little body movements. Our brains literally start to hyper fixate on. Does this person, is this person going to reject me and shut me down? Instead of that, you need to have a new pathway, a new vision that the two of you are agreeing, are consenting on, working towards and you both need to agree to it. So start to co create the vision of what your sex life is going to look like. That might mean that you need to schedule in time for intimacy, whatever that intimacy might be. It can be sex, it can be, you know, playing around, I was going to say hands and mouths and get really, you know, off kilter for you, but start to build in these rituals or these habits of closeness so that your body and your brain can begin to relearn that it is safe to bring your arousal, to bring your desire to your partner, and vice versa. That it's safe for them to receive your desire and to receive your arousal. So to wrap this all up, sexless relationships don't just harm the passion in the relationship. They can really dismantle and diminish a man's biology, his sense of confidence, and they can really undermine his foundation of who he is, along with the foundation of the relationship. But if both partners are really willing to rebuild that trust, to rebuild that safety, to move through the resentment with respect, with safety, intimacy can return stronger than ever before. I promise you what I've seen with a lot of couples who are in sexless dynamics, they are in a sexless dynamic because of something specific in both people and the relationship that needs to be resolved, that needs to be addressed. And nine times out of 10, when, when the couple is willing to confront the thing that led to the sexless marriage or the sexless relationship in the first place, what oftentimes happens on the other side is incredible, incredible sexual intimacy and connection. So this is probably an episode that you want to listen to with your partner. So man it forward, send this to your partner, listen to it, or watch it with them and start to work through some of these pieces. It might be a good discussion point to begin the process of reconciliation, to move through some of the resentment or some of the disconnection that has happened between you and them. As always, until next week, this is Connor Beaton signing off. See you next time.