Sex advice with Suzi Godson: My husband just isn’t interested in sex

Withholding sex in a marriage is often an attempt to communicate anger or hurt, says Suzi Godson.

Q. You always hear about women not wanting sex in long-term relationships, but what if it is the other way round? My husband of 10 years has become less and less intimate and isn’t keen on sex any more. What can I do?

A. Any relationship counsellor will tell you that sexlessness is rarely anything to do with sex itself. Instead, it is almost always a sign that there are unresolved issues in the relationship.

Withholding sex in a marriage is often an attempt to communicate anger or hurt. However, it is not a particularly effective one.

Although the person withholding sex is often hoping for comfort and affection, when faced with a wall of silent hostility people are more inclined to turn away.

Most people interpret sexual withdrawal as personal rejection. Some get angry. Others blame themselves.

We all use sex as a measure of our partner’s affection, so understandably we interpret sexual uninterest as an absence of affection.

This provokes a confusion of emotions that career from neediness to aggression, but the more you badger someone to “talk’’ or to “show that they care’’, the more they are likely to recoil.

In this context, withholding it can be a form of inverted control. By refusing to give you what you want, they hold you in their orbit.

Men tend to be more sexually driven than women, so a man who shuts himself off from his partner tends to be telling her that something is wrong.

He may be feeling depressed, angry or emotionally disconnected.

Alternatively, he may be getting his needs met elsewhere.

Withholding sex can also be a punishment, a way of shutting out a partner to pay them back for some real or perceived wrongdoing.

Finally, some men withhold as a way of disguising the fact that they are suffering from erectile difficulties.

They are so embarrassed about the implications of impotence that they would rather avoid intimacy than face being forced to confront the issue.

The availability of drugs such as Viagra and Cialis has diminished some of the stigma around erectile dysfunction, but if you think your husband’s problem might be physical, the solution is medical and you need to talk to him about going to see a doctor.

If you can rule out physical problems, then the problem I’m afraid is within your relationship, and the best option is couple counselling.

Sadly, unhappy couples wait an average of six years before getting help, by which time marriage guidance is often a substitute for divorce counselling.

In one sense, counselling can act as a filter because your partner’s response to the suggestion will tell you how much or how little he is willing to invest to save the marriage.

Counselling is never a magic bullet and you both have to be committed to the repair process.

If, for example, your husband is having an affair, that relationship would have to be over for him to engage properly with counselling.

Counselling is also dependent on the quality of the counsellor, which means you need to do research and meet different ones until you find the right person.

You can normally have a free introductory meeting, and it may be better to do that part on your own.

Counselling is intense and time-consuming, and it doesn’t work for everyone, but when it does, it can be transformative.

The process of exploring, acknowledging and addressing issues in the relationship almost always opens the sexual floodgates too.

It is as if the desire begins to shift beneath you both and suddenly, instead of abandoning ship, you find you are moving forward together again.

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