Janet is 52. She lives near Reading. She and her husband haven’t had sex in just over four years.
She knows the exact stretch because she remembers the last time — a Tuesday evening, a takeaway curry, half a bottle of wine, neither of them quite paying attention. She didn’t know it was going to be the last time. If she’d known, she said, she might have looked at him properly.
Janet’s situation isn’t rare. Not even close. It’s one of the most common stories Mia hears from members of Illicit Encounters — and one of the least talked about anywhere outside very specific corners of the internet.
A sexless marriage is, by the most widely used clinical definition, a marriage in which the couple have sex fewer than ten times a year. Many of the marriages we hear about are well past that. Some couples haven’t had sex in five, eight, eleven years. They share a bed. They share a mortgage. They share Christmas with the in-laws. And the thing nobody outside the relationship can see — the slow, almost imperceptible erosion of physical contact — is the loudest thing in the room when the door is shut.
This piece isn’t about whether sexless marriages are sad. Of course they can be. It’s about why they happen, what they look like from the inside, how long they tend to last, and what real, ordinary people actually do when they find themselves in one.
So what actually counts as a sexless marriage?
The clinical bar is fewer than ten times a year. That figure comes from research originally compiled in the 1990s and quoted ever since. Most therapists today use a slightly looser definition — anywhere from “less than once a month” to “long enough that one or both partners has stopped expecting it.”
What that means in practice is broader than the textbook suggests. Some couples technically tick over the ten-times-a-year line but haven’t had sex they’d actually call good in years. Others sleep together perhaps once every few months — birthdays, holidays, that strange in-between week between Christmas and New Year — and refer to themselves, accurately, as being in a sexless phase. The diagnostic is less the number and more the feeling: that physical intimacy has quietly slipped off the menu.
How common is it, really?
More common than the social conversation suggests. The most reliable UK estimates put roughly 15–20% of long-term marriages in the “essentially sexless” category at any given point in time. Stretch the definition slightly — to include marriages where physical intimacy has dropped to something both partners would call dissatisfying — and the figure climbs considerably higher.
When Illicit Encounters surveyed members in 2024 about their own relationships at home, almost half (47%) described their marriage as sexless or close to it. Among female members, the figure was higher. Among members over 50, higher still.
The point isn’t to depress anyone. It’s to make plain that if this is your situation, you’re nowhere near alone in it. You’re not statistically unusual. You’re not in a vanishingly small minority. You’re in a vast, mostly silent club whose members very rarely talk to each other about it.
Why it happens: the slow drift no one warned anyone about
There’s a popular version of how marriages become sexless — one partner loses interest, the other resents it, eventually they stop trying. It does happen that way sometimes. But it’s rarely the main story.
Most sexless marriages drift into being sexless. Nobody decided. Nobody announced it. There were small accumulations — a stressful patch at work, a new baby, a hormonal shift, a back injury, a year of nursing a parent — and during each accumulation, sex paused for a perfectly reasonable reason. And then the pauses started joining up. And then the muscle memory of initiating, of being initiated with, of being a sexual person around your spouse — it went quiet. And then it got embarrassing to start it again. And then a year had passed.
This is what nobody warns young couples about. The risk in a long marriage isn’t usually some dramatic rejection. It’s the slow forgetting. The not-quite-saying-anything. The mutual, unspoken agreement to let something quietly drift, because addressing it feels enormous and not addressing it feels survivable.
Other causes do come into it — illness, medication, body confidence, low desire, mismatched libidos that were always there but were easier to paper over when life was busier. But the dominant driver, in story after story Mia hears, is drift. A drift neither partner explicitly chose.
The script vs the reality
The cultural script for a sexless marriage is something like: a frustrated, sex-starved partner, often the husband, suffering in silence whilst his wife rebuffs him. Lots of jokes have been built on this template. Plenty of agony aunt columns too.
What members tell us, in plain language, is far more varied.
In our member survey, nearly half of women in sexless marriages said they were the higher-desire partner. Nearly half. Not a small minority. Many described initiating for years, being met with kindness but not interest, and eventually quietly stopping. Many described their husbands as loving men who simply didn’t want sex — or didn’t seem to want it with them — and didn’t want to talk about why.
Husbands described much the same in reverse. Long stretches of being told “not tonight.” A growing reluctance to be the one always asking. A point at which they stopped asking. And then they stopped wanting to ask. And then the silence around it became part of the marriage’s furniture.
The point of saying any of this is to retire the idea that there’s a typical sexless marriage. There isn’t. There are millions of them, and they all got there their own way.
How long do sexless marriages typically last?
Longer than most people expect.
Many of the people Mia speaks to have been in a sexless marriage for between three and ten years. Plenty have been in one for over a decade. Some — particularly older couples — describe stretches of fifteen or twenty years where physical intimacy has more or less vanished.
What’s striking is how rarely the marriages themselves end. Sexless marriages don’t tend to collapse the way the popular imagination suggests. They often persist for years, sometimes decades, as functioning, affectionate partnerships in every other respect. The shared life remains. The friendship remains. The mortgage, the routines, the in-laws, the holidays — all remain. What’s missing is one specific layer, and the rest of the marriage keeps going on around the absence of it.
That’s not a tragedy by itself. For some couples, it’s a workable equilibrium and both partners are reasonably content with it. For others, it slowly becomes the loudest unspoken thing in the house.
What married people actually do about it
In the experience of those who’ve spoken to us frankly, people generally do one of four things.
A small minority talk about it openly with their partner, and find a way back. They might involve a therapist, work on underlying medical issues, set aside time deliberately, give themselves permission to be sexual people again. These stories exist. They’re inspiring when they happen. They’re not the majority.
A larger group tolerate it. They love their partner, they don’t want to make it a row, they decide they can live with the absence. Some find genuine peace with that. Others become quietly resigned.
A third group leaves the marriage altogether, often after years of trying everything else. This route is rarer than people expect, partly because leaving a long marriage is a vast undertaking — financially, emotionally, in terms of children and shared life.
And a fourth group — the group Illicit Encounters knows best — quietly find what they need somewhere else. Sometimes that means an affair. Sometimes a long-running romantic friendship that may or may not be physical. Sometimes simply the experience of being wanted again, by someone, somewhere, on a Tuesday afternoon, after years of not feeling wanted at home. They make a private accommodation. They keep their marriage. And they get something back that the marriage stopped providing.
There’s no moral ranking implied in this list. People do what works for their particular life, their particular partner, their particular set of constraints.
Can a sexless marriage be repaired?
Sometimes, yes. Often, it depends on whether both partners actually want it repaired — not just one.
Couples who turn things around tend to share a few things in common. Both partners openly acknowledge what’s happened. Neither tries to assign blame. They’re prepared to look at medical causes (hormone shifts, medication side effects, perimenopause, low testosterone — all extremely common in midlife and all very treatable). They give the situation real time. And they often work with a sex-positive therapist who treats the issue as something practical rather than shameful.
What doesn’t tend to work is one partner deciding the situation must change and trying to drag the other into action. That tends to entrench rather than resolve. So does framing the conversation as a complaint.
If you’ve been the higher-desire partner for years and you’ve stopped raising it, the absence of conflict isn’t necessarily proof things are fine. Often it’s proof you’ve given up on raising it because it never went anywhere. Whether that’s a workable equilibrium or a slow goodbye depends on you.
When affairs enter the picture
Sexless marriages are one of the most common reasons people end up on a site like ours. Not the only reason. But a substantial one.
This isn’t a small or shameful demographic. We’ve spent twenty years talking to married people who, for one reason or another, have found themselves in marriages they don’t want to leave and bedrooms that have gone quiet. They’re not bad people. They’re not failing partners. They’re often, in fact, the partner who has tried hardest for longest to address what was happening at home.
What they tend to want, in the end, isn’t drama. It’s a feeling. The feeling of being looked at. Of being chosen. Of being wanted by someone whose wanting is uncomplicated and present and unmistakable. For a lot of people, the absence of that feeling is harder than the absence of the sex itself.
FAQ: Sexless marriage, answered honestly
Is a sexless marriage grounds for divorce in the UK?
Not in any specific legal sense — the UK introduced no-fault divorce in 2022, so you don’t need a “reason” at all to divorce. But persistent lack of intimacy is one of the most commonly cited reasons people give privately for ending long marriages.
How long can a sexless marriage realistically last?
A very long time. Decades, in some cases. The marriage itself often survives indefinitely. The question is usually whether both partners can live contentedly inside that arrangement.
Is it normal to consider an affair in a sexless marriage?
It is extremely common. Whether you act on it is your call, but if you’re wondering about it, you’re not alone and you’re not unusual. Many of our members started thinking about it years before they did anything.
Should I tell my partner I’m unhappy with our sex life?
If you haven’t, and you still want the marriage to change, then yes — but choose the moment and the framing carefully. A complaint will tend to entrench things. An honest, gentle, exploratory conversation has a much better chance of being heard.
Can a sexless marriage be saved without therapy?
Sometimes, particularly if the cause is something practical (a medical issue, an exhausting work period, the early years with small children). For longer-standing sexlessness, professional help generally improves the odds considerably.
If any of this sits uncomfortably close to your own life — the bedroom that’s gone quiet, the conversation you’ve never quite worked out how to start — you wouldn’t be the first person to look quietly for a softer landing somewhere else. Illicit Encounters has been the place a great many people in your exact position have come to for twenty years. No judgement. Just an honest, private space.
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