Navigating a Sexless Marriage

Permission to be Enchanting Podcast Episode

I was delighted to be a guest on this fabulous podcast with the beautiful host Clare Sente! Clare is such a wonderful interviewer and conversationalist. In this episode of Clare's podcast,  I share my personal story about why I left a sexless marriage, how I found the pathway to my own pleasure and sexual fulfillment, and how I help couples navigate mismatched libido in my role as a somatic sex therapist. 

We explore some of the causes of sexlessness in relationships, why it happens and what to do about it, and how other women can find their own pathway to pleasure even without having to blow up a marriage.

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Navigating Sexless Marriages: My Insights as a Sex Therapist

I often hear about "not enough sex" in a marriage, and it's a deeply common issue for couples. When I work with people, my aim is to normalize that experience – you're truly not alone. I want to remove the shame that can come with it and the tendency to not talk about it, which never helps. We need to tackle the whole concept of mismatched libidos and take the blame off the person who is unfairly labeled as having "low desire."

If your sex life isn't pleasurable or feels lackluster, you're not going to have a desire for it. I want to put that on the table right away. My work is all about empowering women and couples, acknowledging that this is common, and showing them that there are absolutely things that can be done. This is truly my passion.

There's so much wrapped up in what I just said. What we clinically call desire discrepancy is the main issue I help couples with. In my retreats and private coaching, this is what brings couples to me. As a specialist in women’s sexuality, I uniquely work with couples, primarily heterosexual, where the female partner has lost interest in sex.

I'm incredibly passionate about this because that was me, and I found my way out of it. My personal story is often very useful for people to hear. Another key piece is the immense shame couples carry. Did you know that couples sit on a problem for an average of seven years before they seek help?

That's a lot of brewing bad stuff, a lot of resentment and walls being built brick by brick over the years. It doesn’t have to be this way. There are solutions. I'm so glad platforms like this exist to help overcome some of that shame. Many couples think they’re the only ones with this problem, believing their friends aren't struggling.

People just don't want to talk about this publicly. They're not going to Facebook to discuss problems in their sex life. It's these conversations, like the one we're having, that can be a game-changer, letting couples and women know that help is available and it's not their fault.

There's so much misinformation and a lack of education about women’s sexuality and how our bodies work. We are not dysfunctional. There’s too much programming out there that says we are. This whole conversation around mismatched libido needs to be reframed as well. We have this idea of a high-desire partner and a low-desire partner, and efforts often focus on how to get the low-desire partner to rise to match the higher-desire partner. My belief is that we need to change the entire paradigm around this idea of high and low desire.

When I meet a couple, and they've often waited so long to reach out, there's always hope for their marriage. I've heard that some couples would rather divorce than have an intimate conversation about these things.The Fear of Talking About Sex

That points to the first step: you have to be willing to talk about it. The reason the thought of "let's not be together" arises so frequently around sexual issues is simply that couples don't have a framework for understanding what's happening. From my perspective as a therapist, the solution is quite simple. The work and application can be challenging, but the underlying solution is simple.

The thing is, couples don't know what they don't know. They hit these intimacy "train wrecks." They try to be intimate, something goes south, and they both throw up their arms and say, "Forget it." Often, it escalates to a point where they don't even want to approach intimacy anymore because the anxiety is so high.

Most of the couples I work with already have a pretty good relationship. I typically don't work with high-conflict couples. I work with those who say, "Everything else is great, but something's off in the bedroom." Usually, my role is to instill hope that there is a way through the mismatch happening in the bedroom. And there absolutely is. It's so simple. That's the beauty I see when I hear their stories. I can very easily see where the problem is, and I know how to solve it.

One of the main things is that couples need a shared language and a shared framework for understanding what's happening. That's part of the Pleasure Keys Process I teach. Having that clarity helps for the long term, enabling them to navigate differences in desire. When you have these navigation skills, it's not as threatening or intimidating. The train wrecks don't have to happen anymore, or they occur far less frequently. And if they do, couples have a way to move through it rather than getting so anxious they avoid intimacy altogether.

This whole concept I teach is often better in a group setting. It's impactful to tell everyone: "Let's take orgasm off the table as the goal." Not that you can't have it, but don't make it the only goal. That's such a paradigm shift for people, and it often lands better in a group. We discuss why that's so important for moving forward and breaking those set patterns.

I've heard examples from people frustrated in their marriage because the "off-limits" list kept getting smaller. Being able to talk about desires and have pleasures that aren't solely about penetration leading to orgasm is crucial. How do couples react when I tell them to look more for pleasure instead of solely focusing on orgasm?

Why Removing Orgasm As The Goal Changes Everything

The whole concept of removing orgasm as the goal has its roots in a completely different approach to sex. We often don't even know it's an option because we're so brainwashed and conditioned into thinking sex is all about climax. We don't realize that other experiences are available, like full-body orgasms, valley orgasms, G-spot orgasms, orgasmic experiences, or heart orgasms.

There are so many different ways our bodies can experience what I call orgasmic states, not just the climax we're conditioned to. A climax is a specific event in time and space, a linear type of orgasm with a very clear structure. Unfortunately, that's the only type of orgasm Western sexology has largely studied and propagated, going back to Masters and Johnson and Kinsey. A lot of our sexology is still built around this idea of four stages that must be moved through in a specific manner, when there's so much more available to us.

An aspect of this approach is: if climax were no longer the goal, if ejaculation weren't the goal, if orgasm wasn't the goal, the goal is to relax. Automatically, removing the goal creates more relaxation. Anytime we’re goal-oriented, chasing something in the future, it creates tension and resistance, pulling us out of the present moment.

This doesn't mean it can't feel great when it's goal-oriented; it does. But we're talking about ideally having access to a broader range of experience. We can’t do that if we don’t let go of this goal-oriented way of having sex. Instead, we slow down, consciously relax, and learn how to notice what’s happening in the body. "What sensations am I able to notice right here, right now?"

That's the first aspect of the Pleasure Keys I mentioned. The three keys are noticing, naming, and negotiating. Noticing is the ability to feel, "What is happening in my body? What sensations are available? What am I feeling?" When we cultivate that skill, we open a pathway called direct pleasure in the body. We have two ways of experiencing pleasure: direct and indirect.

We must have access to our direct route – the direct sensations on the skin up to the brain. This is crucial for accessing our desire, knowing what we want or don't want, what we're willing to do or not do, provide or not provide, receive or not receive. Without this direct route, it will always be a mystery.

This can lead to many of the problems I help couples with. Often, the female partner defaults to whatever her husband wants. She thinks, "I don't know what I want, so I'll do whatever he wants," to the extent that she loses contact with her own desire. Eventually, she'll likely be putting up with things that don't feel great but make him happy, so she goes along with it. As a result, she'll lose interest in sex over time because there's not much in it for her anymore.

So, the first piece is learning to relax, become more present, and then developing this skill of noticing. It sounds simple, but it’s fundamental to getting back on the same page sexually and overcoming desire discrepancy. We have to be able to identify, "Where do I stand? What do I feel? What do I want? What do I not want? What are my limits? What are my boundaries?" We can't do that without this skill of noticing.

It sounds a lot like teaching couples, and especially women, to speak up and say, "This is what I want," or "This is what I don't want," or "This is what I'm willing to do." I don't think people commonly discuss that regarding sex.

The Power of Voice and Expressing Desire

The next piece is naming. The next key is noticing, then naming. Naming is the ability to say, "I feel, I want, or I need" and to use your voice to do it. We're learning how to connect our throat up here with the "throat" down there, in our vaginas and our bodies.

As a former massage therapist, I know that if you look at the cross-section of the throat and the pelvic floor muscles, they are structurally very similar. When we can loosen the throat, it often reciprocally loosens the pelvic floor and vice versa. There's a connection through the vagus nerve.

I'm a big advocate for using and allowing the voice to be a way for pleasure to move through the body. It works phenomenally for better orgasms, in my opinion. As a mother, I can share that when I gave birth naturally, I let myself go vocally, and it helped me open and surrender in my genitals for the baby to come out. Similarly, sexually and orgasmically, using the voice and vocal cords can be a pathway into orgasm.

Back to negotiating differences in desire, the very first place we begin is that ability to name the thing. There are a million reasons why we don't ask for what we want, and instead, we do other things. We could have a whole series on that question alone because there's so much fear: fear of rejection, fear of being too much, fear of not being enough.

The problem is, when we don't ask for what we want or we're not clear on it, it leads to a whole host of obstacles to pleasure and roadblocks that get in the way of connection, intimacy, and the capacity for more passionate relations, sex, orgasms, and feeling more connected. It leads to all kinds of challenges I see a lot with my couples, such as feeling obligated, for example.

Never speaking up paints us into a tricky corner. If you’re trying to change something, whether you’ve been married for 3 or 20 years, or are going through menopause, it’s vital to talk about it.

I’ve been practicing this whole "taking orgasm off the table" and exploring what some of my other guests have called the "cooler versions of sex." If we had a dial, and 1 is a very low level of desire and 10 is when you'd likely have an orgasm, it's about playing in the 2, 3, 4 range, leading into 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. You can practice relaxing and opening your body when you’re playing at these lower, cooler levels.

I love that example of cool versus hot. There’s a nice distinction between excitement-focused sex and sensitivity or sensation-focused sex. Often, in excitement, there's a lot of friction – it's very hot, heavy, and passionate. But if we take another approach where we slow things down, not aiming for any particular outcome, and become more present and aware of sensations, the beauty is it opens up the gateways to many different types of orgasmic experiences. One type is the valley orgasm.

Redefining Pleasure: Exploring Different Types of Orgasms

Valley orgasms are like cool waves of energy rippling through the body. It feels very cool, like waves or ripples. The beauty is that men can also experience this. Many men are conditioned to one type of orgasm through ejaculation, which I would call more of a linear climax than a general orgasm. If men decide to practice not letting ejaculation be the goal, and they learn to slow down, feel more, breathe more deeply, and even take a break when they get too close to the edge – no one ever thinks of that as an option! The amazing thing is that it can build the orgasmic energy even more.

You can take a break for 60 seconds, 2 minutes, 5 minutes, or even 10 or 15. It's okay if you lose your erection during that time; you can build back up. Her energy is very likely to have built up more in that time as well. There’s a real trick in that pausing. My point is that men have access to many different types of orgasm as well, what we might call more of a yin style of love-making or a yin, female type of orgasm, where it’s more of a wave or a ripple that can go on and on. It’s like a pot of boiling water or an ocean wave instead of this thing that builds and then drops off a cliff.

I truly believe sex should get better as we mature in our sexual journeys. I would never want to go back to sex in my twenties – no, thank you! We can have these awakenings at any stage. There are women who have never had an orgasm and at age 50, they have their first. It’s never too late. Our bodies do change. Hormones change, and sensitivity can change over time, but it’s never too late to get on that journey of learning yourself.

It's about self-discovery, knowing oneself, and being able to know what we want and need. Being able to communicate that, or negotiate that, with a partner can make sex way hotter than the alternative, which is nobody saying anything. Something's happening, but nobody knows who it's happening for.

He thinks she wants it, and she thinks it's what he's wanting, but no one is truly wanting it. She's not having the reaction he wants her to have, and she's wondering why he's not happy because she was "giving" to him. Nobody's happy at the end of that. That's a function of not having the skills of being able to notice, name, and negotiate, and the confidence to do it.

We all have to meet our own resistance to that. We have to encounter the fears and the patterns we've built up in the relationship, like the habits of shutting down, avoiding, or saying, "I want this. Maybe I'll ask him if he wants it. Do you want this thing? Maybe I'll be able to get it." We do that all the time. We think, "If I put my desire on my partner, then I don't have to risk being vulnerable." It is vulnerable to ask for what we want.

It's one of the most intimate things we can do because it's so vulnerable, and it absolutely brings intimacy.

How Self-Exploration Leads To Empowerment In Intimacy

That leads me to a point I've often talked about and is worth repeating. One of the things I learned was advocating for myself, finding out my "pleasure dates," what I loved, what I liked. Let's talk for a moment about how important it is to even know what to ask for. You need to spend some time with yourself to figure out what you like. Maybe start there.

It’s fundamental because how can you expect someone else to know more about your own body than you know about your own body? We are conditioned as women to believe that men are supposed to figure us out. They're supposed to come in, already have all these sexual skills, and rock our world.

Meanwhile, as women, we often don't even know how our bodies work. We don't even know what we want, like, or need. We don't even have the ability to give voice to that, even if we did know. It’s not fair to put that on men, number one. And we're robbing ourselves as women by not taking the time to figure that out for ourselves. This show is all about empowerment, and if we want to be empowered as women, we have to take our pleasure into our own hands, so to speak.

We have to take responsibility for it.

That was exactly how I got on this path. I had been in a sexless marriage for about ten years. The thing was, I was the one who was not interested. I could have cared less. We could go six months and never have sex. I could have plenty of orgasms; I never had a problem with that. But there was something missing for me. There was something more that I wanted that I had no idea how to create, and I blamed my husband for not creating it. I thought, "He's not making it spiritual enough, or deep enough." I blamed him.

Fast forward, I ended up leaving that marriage. There were a lot of other challenges, but sexlessness is usually a symptom of other things going on. A couple of years later, I found myself repeating that pattern in a later relationship that didn't last very long. I had this profound realization: "I have never taken responsibility for my own pleasure in a sexual relationship. I always made the man responsible."

As a result, I was a disempowered woman because I was out there looking for this "thing" in a relationship or a person, instead of figuring out how I could find that pathway within myself. That's what I did. I set time aside every single week for two hours to touch myself and be intimate with myself and my own body. From that exploration, I discovered something interesting. First of all, I realized I didn't have a lot of sensation in my genitals.

It was numbness, which is common.

I had orgasms, no problem, but when I slowed down and got present, there wasn't a lot of sensation. It was partly because I was largely relying on fantasy to have an orgasm. There's nothing wrong with fantasy, but fantasy is the indirect route of pleasure, not the direct route. Many of us do that.

Emotions & Sexuality: Unlocking Deeper Connection

We get overly dependent on this indirect route of experiencing pleasure, relying on things like fantasy, porn, or thinking, "I need to see my partner having a certain reaction so that then I can have a good time." That's the indirect route. This can create a lot of challenges if it's the only way we're capable of experiencing pleasure. We can discuss that; it's a big thing I address in my work with couples.

I was slowing down and opening up that direct route. At the time, I didn't have this language; I didn't realize that's what I was doing. But I was learning to notice sensations. What happened fairly quickly was that I began to have big emotional releases while I was genitally stimulating myself. I felt grief, sadness, anger, and rage. I let myself feel it.

An amazing thing happened: eventually, I started to feel more. I had more sensations. I was no longer relying on fantasy; I put that on the shelf. I also decided, "I'm not trying to have an orgasm here. What I'm trying to do is sensitize my body," because I wanted to experience what I’d heard about called full-body orgasms. I thought, "Maybe that's for other people and not for me." Then I said, "No way. If other people can have it, surely I can, too."

A few weeks into this experiment, I was self-pleasuring. All of a sudden, my hands felt like they had giant snow gloves. It was like I was in a moon suit. They were vibrating and felt fat. My face was tingling and numb. I had this wave of pleasure that started at the bottom of my feet, rolled up through my whole body, a massive feeling of pleasure. All this love shot out of my heart.

I was there on my bed with tears streaming down my face. I had this a-ha moment of, "Love, pleasure, and orgasm—these things exist in me. It's a state that's already there that I can access." I simply removed the obstacles and the things that had been in the way of my ability to access them. Here I was, having this full-body orgasmic experience. It was at that moment that I said, "I have got to help other women find this pathway to their pleasure."

My next thought after that full-body orgasm was, "I need to help other women." Isn't that the truth? It was like, "I've landed at this spot. If other people could see the amount of energy, love, and power that would be here for typically a group of individuals that don't have as much power, this would be so great."

The world is a better place when women are accessing their pleasure and enjoying sex. The world is a better place, and men will be happier, too. If more women were in their pleasure and getting something out of the sexual experience, the men would be way happier. Everybody is happier. There was another piece that I realized when I had accessed that pathway within myself and found my way into it.

I was single at the time. That relationship had ended as quickly as it began. I knew that I could attract a lover into my life or I could grab any guy off the street if I wanted and show him how to take me there. I was no longer grasping at relationships for love, connection, or orgasm, thinking, "Some man has to bring me this experience."

I knew how to find it in myself, and I knew I could show any future lover. I knew the pathway. I wasn't dependent on somebody else taking me there and doing it for me. I was very lucky. About eight months later, I did attract a partner into my life who was wonderful and super open to learning. We had a lot of lovely growth and mutual learning together in the realm of sex. I was lucky to be able to transfer what I had learned solo into a relational setting.

It's so empowering. I felt like I'd flipped a switch. I knew how to do it.

It got better. The beauty was that I had the experience of being in a partnered sexual engagement and having these experiences I'd only read about or dreamed about, like heart orgasms and valley orgasms. My partner at the time was also so willing to learn this whole idea of "let's let go of orgasm as the goal." Also, with ejaculation, he learned how to have more choice and control over his ejaculation so he wasn't just ejaculating.

The average is 2 to 7 minutes for most men. I know some people go longer than that, but for a lot of men, it’s 2 to 7 minutes. He took on the task of delaying ejaculation to the extent that he began having these full-body orgasmic experiences. We helped each other. It was a very beautiful learning and growth experience. It’s life-changing. I've taken what I've learned into my future relationships, and my partner and I now have a lovely connection. I feel empowered because of the journey I've been through, the education that I have, and what I can bring.

That sounds delicious. I'm so excited to hear that it got better. We talked about taking away the goal of orgasm, responsibility, and orgasmic states of being versus orgasm being one event. Let me circle back. I said that orgasms weren't the issue in my marriage. My experience has been that there are these two camps. Maybe I've got the stats better.

Clitoral orgasm is much higher if women are going to be in this "I've had an orgasm" group, but often, an internal vaginal, G-spot, or cervical orgasm is elusive. Then there's the group that says, "I haven't had an orgasm. I'm numb. The answer to all my prayers would be that I could have an orgasm." It blows my mind that I'm saying I was pretty orgasmic but that wasn't the issue in my marriage. Could I explain that a little so someone understands? Did I mean I found more pleasure by doing something else, and that being orgasmic wasn't the "holy grail"?

Responsible Orgasm: How The Body Holds The Answers

Let me speak to the latter point first, for women who have never experienced a climax. There's an important aspect to finding that path. It's a pathway; that's all it is. It's the ability to find that pathway within your own body. It can be elusive for some women, partly because those women are likely very contextually oriented. They're impacted by the environment. If the room isn't at the right temperature, the lighting isn't right, or one little noise outside distracts them, they lose that thread.

There's a lot, potentially, though I don't think it's all women. That's a good portion of women who have some challenges with orgasm. There's also so much sexual abuse that we carry, both known and unknown. Sometimes, there can be issues with numbness or the inability to feel. It can be very scary to feel. Sexual energy can feel scary. That's a separate topic: how we release that trauma.

We have to release that from the body. It's going to translate as numbness. That's what happens with trauma that's caught in the body. We also have social conditioning, which teaches us as women, "Don't be a slut. Be a good girl, yet you've also got to be sexy. You've got to be attractive." There are all these mixed messages.

A lot of that can show up as our own disconnection from our sexual power, our sexual pleasure, and that part of our body, our genitals in general. There's a disconnect. There has to be a reconnecting that happens. That was a lot of the work I was doing with myself, too. I was reconnecting with that part of my body. I was very disconnected and didn't even know it.

The other flip side of this is that even if you are orgasmic, is that orgasm truly fulfilling and connecting? Or is it a purely physical release that doesn't necessarily deepen intimacy or bring joy? That's what I was grappling with in my marriage, even though I could achieve orgasm. My journey wasn't about having an orgasm, but about experiencing a deeper, more connected, and truly pleasurable intimacy that felt meaningful to me.