Why Men Stay in Sexless Marriages with Avoidant Partners

Anxiety or overall anxiousness about a relationship, anxious attachment, usually coincides with passivity about the relationship. They are proactive in some ways, but when things really get difficult and dramatic and tough, anxiety, you know, inducing, a lot of men become very, very passive and just let things happen, such as our friend here who just entered today's Dear DSO submission. And you can submit your own story or question to deardso.com. That's drdso.com. Fill out the form. If your, if your question or your story is a good one, I will create a video out of it for the whole world to see or for the podcast listeners to listen to on the Dad Starting Over podcast available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you may listen to your podcasts. And if you're watching this on YouTube, Facebook, X, wherever it may be, do me a solid if you could please click on like, click on share, click on subscribe, follow, however it works, click the little bell. Leave a comment. All these things really help me out a great deal. Thank you so very much. Now on to today's submission, which comes from DAC. DAC, I'm just going to call you DAC. It sounds like that stands for something here. I'm not sure what. And the subject line is Sexless for 8 Years. He says, I'm in a sexless marriage with a 3-year-old child. Okay. I don't think— okay, you may want to reword that a little bit here. I think what you're trying to say is that you're in a sexless marriage with a woman and you two together have a 3-year-old child. Words, the grammar, it's— anyway, he says, like, he says, like most of my relationships, we started with frequent daily sex for the first 6 years before we married. Wow. That's a honeymoon stage, folks. He says, after a year, sex went down to almost nothing. And she also pulled back on normal gestures of intimacy. Avoidant 101. The honeymoon stage subsides, you move in together, you cohabitate, things become real, and all the sexy disappears. Sound familiar? If so, you're probably anxious dude, avoidant woman. But I continue on. I did bring this up so that we can discuss what the issues are, but she never really told me anything other than she has lost her connection to me without a background explanation. Number one piece of evidence for a very passive man. Wife, what's going on with the two of us? I've lost connection to you. All right, what's for dinner? No, you have to like, how so? What's going on? What are you thinking? Is this something you think we can, you know, achieve and reconnect? Something I did? Something going on in your life? Let's explore this further, wife. We can't just drop it. We're not going to drop this without getting to the bottom of what the hell's going on here because this is weird, and this is important to me. I bet you didn't have that talk, did you? 3 years ago, we had sex one time and our daughter was conceived. Can't tell you how many times I've heard that one. Uh, this just made things worse, of course, and now she uses our daughter as the reason why she doesn't want sex. We have been to over 20 therapy sessions with multiple therapists over the past 5 years, but each time she quit. When things got real. It's Avoidant 101. She claims no infidelity on her part. Let me pause there. I'm not saying she's cheating, dude. I have no idea. She's probably not statistically, but she could be. I don't know. But it's always funny to me when guys go, wife, are you cheating? No. Ah, shit. Phew, good. It's like, dude, if she was cheating, she wouldn't tell you, okay? It's not how that works. And she still loves me. She just has no sexual desire. Uh, we're back in therapy one last time, but still the reasons are not clear as far as I can tell. You sound like you're a very— like you're a third party in all this. You're sitting back watching. Oh man, I can't figure out what's going on. It's up to you to kind of get to the bottom of what the hell's going on or leave such a sad situation. But I digress. Since then, I have told her that we have 6 months to fix this or I will go. I need help here, so please get back to me as soon as you can, as I'm having a really difficult time. Oh, Dak, um, this is, this is tough, buddy. I can feel your anxiety through the message. I know you're just feeling intense amounts of stress. Some things are sticking out to me. Are you— I'm going to ask this, and this is not an insult, this is just an observation of, dare I say, the majority of guys that reach out to me, that join my group and so forth, they— a lot of these guys fall under— no, I'm going to say it— most of these guys fall under the category of neurodivergent. If you watch my stuff, you've heard me say this more than a few times. My eyes have been open to this over the past several years. Neurodivergence, or diversity it's called, same thing, um, includes disorders such as ADHD, obsessive-compulsive disorder, as well as the autism spectrum. I'm mentioning this because men with the— under the neurodivergent umbrella attach really fast and really strong to an individual. They hang on and persist with the relationship through a lot of not so good stuff, and then they take rejection extremely hard. And the idea of leaving said spouse or partner, whatever it may be, is just crippling to them. They just want to crawl in a hole and die. This seems to be very common amongst all guys, again, that fall under that neurodivergent umbrella. And you're showing me some of this with some of your language here. You have a woman who in very not-so-subtle ways has shown you this is who she is. This is what her reaction is going to be towards you when it comes to sexual intimacy, any kind of intimacy. As you can see, you try to go to the therapy sessions, and as soon as things get real, Um, she shuts down. That's your typical dismissive avoidant individual. They just, they cannot open up. They cannot get real with anybody. As soon as things pass the sexy honeymoon stage, um, they shut down. They just don't have it in them anymore to connect at a deep level. And so you had the kid, now you feel like you're kind of stuck with her. Well, if so, this is, this is what you got, dude. Can you work through this and do better? Absolutely. So I can hear you now saying, oh cool, here it comes. How do you do this, Ralph Brewer? Honestly, it's not much you can do, Mr. Passive. I know it's kind of goes against what I'm saying here, but hear me out. Much of it is on her shoulders. She has to be the person to say, yeah, I got a problem here. I need some help. Let me go talk to somebody about some of this stuff. You know, this whole me just shutting down when things get real. No more of that bullshit. The new me is going to open up more. It's going to be really, really tough for me to open up by virtue of a lot of my childhood baggage. I don't feel safe in doing so with people, but I need to get over that. I need to get over the hump and do better. I'm about to lose my husband and my family. And that will take— drum roll— years. Unfortunately, it's not going to be a tomorrow thing. It ain't gonna be a 6-month thing. In the next 6 months, she will not raise her hand and say, I need help. Sometimes what helps bring about that sudden level of accountability on her part is the husband, you, saying, I leave you now, here are the divorce papers. And often they go, oh shit, this is for real, I'm about to be on my own, I'm scared to death. Okay, what is it you wanted me to do again? You want me to go to therapy? When did you set up the appointment? I'll go, I'll make the appointment. And sometimes that gets the ball rolling, and oftentimes it's still not enough, but at least they have momentum towards the good, the right thing. But right now you're at a standstill. And from what I've seen over the years of doing this, it's probably not going to change. I'm sorry. I know that's the last thing you want to hear. By some of the language you have here in the message, I'm concerned about you. And so what you need to do is surround yourself with other guys that are there to help you. And we have a support community just for men that you can check out at help4men.com or jump right to the join page at help4men.com/join. And you can talk to hundreds and hundreds of guys from around the world in our private forums. As well as our private Zoom meetings that we have on a regular basis. I host up to 3, or at least 3 a week if there's no vacations or illness or whatever. In addition to our other coaches and guys on the team, they host meetings as well. So we have a lot of meetings, and we, we record them all so you can listen to any past meetings. And there's a lot of other cool benefits involved with the group too. There's one-on-one coaching at a discounted rate, there's free books, there's free courses, all kinds of cool stuff. So check it out, the Brotherhood. But, uh, you need some help with all this. You're, you're missing the forest for the trees here. You're, you're stuck in the weeds, insert analogy here, and you're missing the big picture, which is all of us outside of your situation are like, dude, what are you doing? And you're not seeing it. And we got to figure out why that is, because this relationship, the chances are, will probably fizzle— or fizzle is not the right word— probably explode and be a dramatic ending. And, um, If you don't get to the bottom what the hell's going on with you, dude, you're going to do this again with the next gal. I have seen it a million freaking times, okay? So get help. Check out the Brotherhood, therapy, whatever else it may be, but you need to get help with these issues. All right, brother, I appreciate you reaching out. And guys, we will catch you on the next one.