Three Ways to Prevent a Sexless Relationship

At least 15 percent of American couples don’t have much sex at all. Which is fine, if that’s what you both prefer. But most people in sexless relationships are pretty unhappy about it.

Sexless relationships happen for lots of reasons. Sometimes it’s that the sex just isn’t working. Either it’s unsatisfying, or it’s physically painful, or it just feels like the same thing, over and over again—and not in a good way.

Sometimes it’s because one or both partners have lost desire. Often for reasons that have nothing to do with sex itself.

People have sex for hundreds of reasons. And people lose desire for an equally large number of reasons—stress, overwork, exhaustion, feeling angry, feeling depressed, having been traumatized in the past, or simply not liking their own body very much.

What all sexless relationships have in common 

Whatever the cause, there’s something specific that eventually happens in almost all sexless relationships that makes it much harder to start having sex again—at least with each other.

Psychologists call it The Westermarck Effect, named for Finnish sociologist Edvard Westermarck. He first noted something that, once you think about it, seems kind of obvious: People who live together under the same roof without being physically intimate eventually start registering each other as sexually off-limits. That's in the same way that siblings living under the same roof feel off-limits.

Relationship can become sexless for reasons that have nothing to do with sex.

As a sex and relationship therapist, I get a lot of calls from people in sexless relationships. They’ve stopped being physically intimate, and as a result they unconsciously register each other as forbidden. Once that happens, sex can start to feel pretty darn awkward.

People in sexless relationships can get back to physical intimacy, but it requires some fairly sophisticated therapy to overcome the Westermarck Effect. It's better to make sure your relationship doesn’t become sexless in the first place.

Tools for preventing sexless relationships

Sometimes the answer simply involves certain basic skills—like learning to speak your partner's love language. Or knowing how to manage your own basic needs in a relationship, so you can stay vulnerable with each other.

The most important feeling during sex is when you momentarily forget yourself.

We’ll be talking about those things a lot in future episodes. But today I’d like to focus on something more...

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