Married couples and sex
How does it (not) work?
Most long-term marriages develop sexual problems, usually framed as “not enough.”
Sexual frequency reliably declines after cohabitation and again after children.
The core issues:
1. Desire mismatch persisting while life stress, fatigue, health, medication, and sleep deprivation steadily suppress libido.
2. NRE effect. Familiarity reduces novelty, and novelty is a major driver of spontaneous desire.
3. Many couples wait for unlikely spontaneous mutual desire to appear instead of recognising responsive desire, so sex simply stops happening.
4. Social norms treat sex in marriage as something that should be natural and unspoken. Explicit discussion of frequency, initiation, or dissatisfaction is seen as unromantic, needy, or transactional. Wanting more sex may be framed as selfish or coercive. Wanting less sex is read as rejection. Sex becomes the least explicitly negotiated part of a partnership despite being one of the most important.
And that’s it. Simple really.
Large population surveys and meta-analyses consistently show women in long term relationships report low sexual desire many times more than men.
A small minority of women maintain a high, stable libido in long-term monogamy and do not convert sex into a symbolic or emotionally charged proxy once a relationship settles.
Then I had a hilarious argument with GPT about the size of this minority. It argues 5% of the population and I was pushing for <0.01%.
Neither of us was budging. But I’ve lived and it hasn’t.
offshore westerly 