My husband Jon is the sort of man who brings flowers home, for no other reason than he saw them and thought of me. He surprises me with theatre tickets, cooks elaborate meals and most nights we go to sleep wrapped in each other’s arms.
My friends often comment on how much he dotes on me. When we go out with other couples, his hand rests permanently on my knee. Even after 30 years together, he treats me like the most interesting person in the room.
There’s just one agonising problem: he has absolutely no interest in having sex with me. Even when we first met, Jon had an extremely low libido. I fell in love with him because of his personality; he’s always been affectionate, kind and great fun.
From the start, sex was infrequent and never particularly good. I naively presumed that, given time, it would get better. Instead, it rapidly petered out – to the point where, humiliatingly, we were forced to use IVF to conceive our beloved daughter.
Now, in our mid-50s, our marriage is almost totally sexless and has been for more than a decade.
Although he has had no formal diagnosis – indeed, he refuses point blank to see a doctor or a therapist – we’ve both concluded that he must be asexual. That’s a broad term used to describe someone who simply does not experience sexual attraction, or only very infrequently. On the 2021 census, 28,000 people identified as asexual.
On the 2021 census, some 28,000 people identified as asexual
And while Jon insists he finds me beautiful, the fact that he doesn’t want me sexually has chipped away at my confidence, making me feel unattractive and undesirable.
He’s also very handsome, which is frustrating in itself; like constantly having a delicious chocolate cake glistening on the kitchen counter, but only being able to take the occasional small bite – and it turns out not to taste half as good as it looks.
You might be wondering why I stay with him, if I’m so unsatisfied. And believe me, I’ve thought about leaving him often over the years. But in the end my love for Jon, and for the family we have made together, has always outweighed my sexual frustrations.
We have one daughter, Rebecca, who turned 21 last month. I could never, ever do anything to hurt her. And yet even the joy of parenthood is tarnished for me, because it was when we were trying to conceive that I first realised the depth of Jon’s sexual problem.
All our friends and family think we had IVF because of unexplained infertility — a last resort after seven years unsuccessfully trying for a baby.
But that was just the lie we told to spare us the embarrassment of admitting the truth: I couldn’t get pregnant because Jon simply couldn’t bring himself to have sex with me often enough to give us a realistic chance of conceiving.
Jon and I met through mutual friends in 1994, when we were both 25 and looking to settle down. I insisted we get to know each other before starting anything sexual, and was pleased when he didn’t baulk at the suggestion. Oh, the irony.
For two months, we only kissed and cuddled. It felt warm, loving and affectionate rather a precursor to sex.
When he did finally stay over at my flat, there was none of the physical, can’t-get-enough-of-each-other passion I’d experienced with other boyfriends. Just OK-ish, extremely vanilla sex. Jon had only had a couple of very brief relationships before me, so I just presumed he was inexperienced – and I could teach him.
But within a few months, we went from having sex weekly to monthly, if I was lucky. I learned to leave instigating sex to him, because unless he was totally in the mood he would just bluntly tell me he didn’t feel like it.
When I admitted this upset me and made me question whether he fancied me, he said his sex drive was simply much lower than mine.
‘I find you incredibly sexy,’ he told me. ‘I just don’t feel the urge very often. I never have.’
If I ever suggested he see a doctor to discuss his low libido, he’d look wounded and ask me why I wanted to ‘medicalise’ something he accepted as a part of who he was.
He didn’t fully grasp how much his rejections hurt me. I suspect that, because he didn’t know what a healthy sex drive felt like, he just couldn’t relate.
He’d apologise profusely, saying he felt like he was letting me down. But of course, he couldn’t force himself to want sex more than he actually did.
I respected his honesty. And we had such a nice life together, it seemed almost churlish to let a lack of sex detract from that.
‘You can’t have it all,’ I told myself. I knew couples who’d been together years who weren’t having much sex, which helped me convince myself this wasn’t that abnormal.
But when we started trying for a baby, the problem took on a new dimension.
We both longed for a child, so I stopped taking the Pill as soon as we got engaged in 1996, and we married soon after.
On the morning of my wedding day, as my friends ribbed me about all the ‘fun’ Jon and I would be having on our honeymoon, I did ask myself whether I’d made the right decision. But I squashed down my worries, reminding myself how much we loved each other, which was surely what really mattered.
Still, it wasn’t long before I became acutely aware that we were having sex so infrequently, that our chances of conceiving were very low. At first, I reasoned it would surely happen eventually, that Jon would start to take it seriously and make the effort to have sex during my fertile window.
But as the years went on and I entered my 30s, I grew increasingly panicked as friends, colleagues and relatives began reproducing all around me.
Month after month, my most fertile days would pass without us having sex. I’d mention that I was ovulating, and he’d tell me I couldn’t expect him to perform on demand.
I remember hanging up a phone call from yet another friend announcing her pregnancy, then asking Jon through tears of jealousy and despair how we could hope to make a baby when we so rarely made love?
We hadn’t had sex in five months at that point. Jon’s response was to apologise profusely, yet again – but this time, he went on to suggest IVF. Fertility treatment was rarer in the early Noughties, but a couple we knew well had recently conceived this way.
‘Instead of worrying about missing your fertile window each month, we could get some help,’ he said.
He must have been mulling that idea over for some time, because the words came so easily.
In response, my stomach flipped so violently it was as if he had hit me. I felt aghast that he couldn’t grasp how hurtful – perverse even – it sounded that he would choose to turn a physical act of love into a laboratory procedure, rather than have sex with me on a more regular basis to improve our chances of having a baby.
‘Or,’ I sniped in response, ‘we could try having sex more than once in a blue moon?’
Jon just shrugged, then hung his head with what looked like shame. In other words, that wasn’t an option. I locked myself in the bedroom and wept.
Up to this point, I’d kidded myself that Jon’s libido was low but still ‘normal’. Now there was no denying how dire things were.
I seriously considered leaving Jon; finding someone who would behave more like the men I’d previously slept with, who hadn’t been able to keep their hands off me and had made me feel sexy and wanted. And who could get me pregnant the old-fashioned way.
We both knew I could conceive. I’d already told Jon I’d had an abortion a few years before we met, after accidentally getting pregnant aged just 21. And there was nothing to suggest that Jon had any fertility issues, beyond his low sex drive. We never went for tests, or spoke to a doctor, because we knew it was lack of sex that was the problem.
In the end, I decided to go along with IVF. I was feeling the pressure of my biological clock, and knew it was my best chance of having a child. In 2002, we turned to a private clinic, presuming the NHS wouldn’t want to help a couple without genuine fertility problems.
It was a wretched experience. Every time I injected myself with hormones, and during the invasive procedure to retrieve my eggs, I felt furious with Jon for putting me through this. I tried to talk to him about the fact he was able to produce the sperm we needed to conceive, alone in a clinic room presumably helped along with a pile of girly magazines, but he shut me down, saying it was horrible enough without him sharing the details.
I’d asked him previously if he ever masturbated and he looked at me as though as I was mad. ‘If I feel the urge, I have sex with you,’ he said. He couldn’t comprehend the idea of wanting to orgasm alone.
Thankfully, we conceived Rebecca with our first round of treatment and she was born in 2003, when I was 35. For the first years of our daughter’s life we were a great team, as Jon’s genuinely caring nature came to the fore.
We never considered having another child, though. I found IVF so physically and mentally gruelling, I couldn’t go through it again.
But as Rebecca grew older, I became more and more aware of my yearning for sexual connection. My libido adjusted to an extent – I stopped craving sex as much, and the fact it was never that good when we did do it probably helped.
In the past, when I was between boyfriends, I’d always been able to satisfy myself through masturbation, which I did again now if I became frustrated.
Not that I told Jon this. I’d just say I was going to go soak in the bath and lock the bathroom door. I’m sure he guessed what I was doing, but he never said.
But while I was able to find physical release, over time my DIY orgasms became joyless and lonely experiences, because the fact my husband didn’t want me was always at the back of my mind. It felt desperate and seedy.
‘Is this it, for the rest of my life?’ I remember repeatedly wondering with gut-wrenching despair.
It’s a question I finally answered in 2008 with a firm no, by having a brief fling with a married colleague as my 40th birthday approached.
I work for a large organisation, and this man had joined my department on secondment. After a month of flirting – the sexual attraction had been instant – one evening we slipped away from Friday night drinks and headed to a cheap hotel where we had mind-blowing sex. At that point, Jon and I hadn’t been intimate for ten months.
Being touched by a man who had been lusting after me for weeks made me feel validated as a desirable, sexual being. It made me realise that Jon’s claim that he found me sexy was probably a lie to try to make me feel better.
Still, I didn’t tell my lover about my issues with Jon. It would have felt like an even bigger betrayal to share something so private. And if Jon had any inkling about the affair, he kept it to himself. He’d sometimes express anxiety that I might be unfaithful; I occasionally wondered if that was why he was so publicly devoted to me – to make it harder for me to stray.
You often hear of men having affairs because their wives lose interest in sex. But when it’s a woman with the higher libido, there’s no similar narrative or understanding.
Even when Jon and I did occasionally make love, it felt as though he was doing it through duty, maybe even pity.
With my lover, sex was urgent and exciting. Married with two children, he was taking a huge risk, which made it all the more thrilling. The affair only lasted a month. His wife became pregnant, jolting us both back to our senses.
Knowing he was having sex with both of us didn’t hurt – I felt like I was betraying his wife more than I was my own husband, who didn’t want me anyway.
But it did make me realise that I wouldn’t swap hot sex for a life without my husband. My lover made me feel sexy, but nothing else, whereas Jon makes me feel truly cherished.
I’ve lived off the heady memories of those few weeks ever since. I’m 55 now, and I doubt I’ll have another affair, although I still crave sex.
Despite regularly cycling through a raft of emotions – frustration, anger, sadness and acceptance – I know I’ll never leave Jon. ‘At least you don’t need to worry about him having a mad fling and leaving you,’ one friend said to comfort me after I confided in her.
But it’s not as simple as that. When I see Jon talking amiably with other women, he might as well be caressing them in front of me – it elicits the same feelings of jealousy, because every moment of connection has such high currency in our relationship due to the lack of sex.
I’ve pleaded with Jon numerous times over the years to tell me why he doesn’t want me – is it that he finds me somehow repulsive; was he abused as a child; is he gay? But he always shuts me down.
He insists that his feelings towards me are much more solid than lust. As far as any sex-related trauma is concerned, he’s adamant nothing bad has ever happened to him.
The only time he gets angry is when I ask whether he could be gay. I’ve suggested that he’s so closeted he can’t admit it even to himself, which he furiously denies. ‘I just have a really low sex drive,’ he shouts. ‘That doesn’t make me gay.’
He’s refused to go to couples therapy, saying there’s nothing wrong with our relationship and his low libido isn’t something to be raked over. Perhaps that’s not so surprising for a man of our generation.
The only label that seems to fit is that he is asexual. Online, you find lots of people using the term ACE as a shorthand.
There seem to be three main sub-sections: asexual, where you don’t feel any sexual attraction, ever; demisexual, where you only become sexually attracted to someone after a strong emotional connection has formed; and grey asexuality, where feelings of desire are experienced very irregularly, sometimes with years in between. Jon appears to sit in that grey area.
During our time together, we’ve gone through periods when he’s wanted to make love on two consecutive nights. But then hasn’t been remotely interested again for months, or years.
I’ve confided all this in just a couple of girlfriends. Interestingly, both claimed they’d swap their own normal sex lives for a husband as doting as mine.
Perhaps they have a point. But I sometimes think I’d give up all of the great things about him if he’d only arrive home from work one evening, throw me on to the kitchen table and make mad, passionate love to me.
I know that’s never, ever going to happen, and that’s something I just have to accept. But I can’t pretend that sometimes that realisation doesn’t fill me with despair.
- Names have been changed to protect identities
