Why Won't My Wife Have Sex With Me?

Somewhere tonight a man is lying in bed next to his wife. When he's sure she's asleep, he'll pick up his phone and type the question into a search bar. Why won't my wife have sex with me?

I know that man, because I was him. Sometime around 2014 I typed those exact words. I'd been married a few years. I loved my wife. I had promised my whole life to one woman, and the one woman had quietly stopped wanting me.

It's a very particular kind of trap. You said "only you." And the only one said, more or less, "not really."

It takes a lot for a man to ask for help, even from a search engine. If you're reading this because you typed that question, the moment you're in matters. Almost everything Dawn and I have built, our marriage as it is now, this work, the book, started with me reaching that same point and deciding I was done pretending it was fine.

This piece is about your side of it, the part you can actually do something about. Her side is real too, and Dawn and I go there in next week's episode. But you can't do her work. You can do yours, starting today.

It was never gone

Think back to the beginning.

Dawn and I worked together for eighteen months before anything happened between us. Then one night everything changed, and from then on I wanted all of her, all the time. I'd pull her into the hallway of our office building and press her up against the wall. We'd sneak into back rooms for a few stolen minutes. Dawn describes those first months as a ten out of ten: holding hands in public, kissing everywhere, wanting to be near me constantly.

A few years later, that pull felt like it had vanished.

When I asked Dawn back then where it all went, she told me what most people believe. That was the infatuation stage. Every relationship has one. It ends.

That belief is everywhere, and almost nobody questions it. Desire belongs to the beginning, and when the beginning is over, it goes away. A mature couple accepts that and settles into companionship.

I never believed it. I've spent the years since then turning our life into a test of whether I was right. Seventeen years after that first night, I still want to tear her clothes off. I wasn't wrong.

The beginning of a relationship proves something. The fact that the two of you felt that pull at all shows the desire exists between you. Two people can't manufacture that much heat out of nothing. So you already know it can live between you. What you need to understand is where it went.

My answer, after all these years: it didn't go anywhere. It got buried. And what buried it was the way two people slowly changed, while time took the blame.

Desire is something she feels in response to you

The feeling of desire is something she has to feel in response to you.

Almost every man in a sexless marriage has this backwards. He thinks of desire as something she has or doesn't have, like a battery that ran down. Her libido dropped. She's tired. It's hormones. It's the kids. Some of that may be real. But desire is a response, and a response needs something to respond to.

At the beginning of our relationship I showed up a certain way. I had confidence. I had some swagger. The way Dawn wanted me fed that, which made me show up even more fully, which turned her on more, and we spiraled upward together. A lot of giving and receiving, as she put it.

Then, slowly, the things that made me that man started to come apart.

The fact that she agreed to date you, marry you, and build a life with you doesn't change what desire is. She's a woman before she's your wife. She's a woman before she's a mother. The things that turn her on, turn her on because she's a woman, and a wedding ring rewires none of it.

The man she was drawn to is the reason she was drawn. When he stops showing up, the pull has nothing left to pull toward.

How the man she wanted disappears

Nobody decides to become less attractive. It happens in small surrenders, over years.

For me, the list is long. We moved in together. Dawn's kids went from being with us half the time to living with us full-time. I had started a business in 2007, about the worst year imaginable to start a business, and money got tight. At one point a massive tax bill landed that I didn't have the money to pay.

At the beginning, challenges barely registered. Dawn said it well: in that early pull, you overlook things so easily, and nothing feels big. Then the energy that used to flow toward each other started going into fixing, controlling, and reacting. She watched the confident man she couldn't keep her hands off become a man losing it over a bill, feeling lack and scarcity everywhere, off his game. I also gained a lot of weight.

None of that was sexy. Dawn's words were blunter. It was the opposite.

I can feel the objection coming, because I had it myself. So she only wants me if nothing ever goes wrong? One bad year and I'm out?

No. Every man has problems. What she responds to is who you are inside the problem. When an unexpected bill arrives and you collapse, go dark, get anxious and short with everyone, she feels that collapse in her body. A man who meets the same bill steady, clear, and still himself is a completely different presence in the house, even with an identical bank balance.

That part was mine to control. I couldn't control her side of the equation, though I spent years trying. At least half of whether she wanted me had to do with me, and that was exactly the half I'd been ignoring while I blamed her for the whole thing.

This is also why so much standard advice fails. Date nights, weekend getaways, new lingerie, scheduled sex. I call it the graveyard of ideas. The theory goes that the fire went out because you stopped doing fire-producing activities, so start doing them again. We kept going on date nights through our worst years. Dawn says they just weren't a ten anymore.

The activity matters far less than who's doing it. Take a collapsed man on the best date in the world, and she's still on a date with a collapsed man.

From wanting to keeping

Something else happens in long relationships, underneath the stress and the extra pounds, and it does more damage than either.

At the beginning, two people want each other simply because they want each other. Then at some point, wanting turns into keeping. We start holding on. Trying not to lose each other. Attachment slowly takes the place of attraction.

Once a relationship runs on keeping, obligation moves in. She owes me sex. I'm her husband. We're married, so this is supposed to happen. She has her own version: he needs it, so I should give it.

There is no room for desire inside obligation. None. Obligation can get you a body in your bed. It can't get you a woman who wants you there.

I learned this the hard way. Dawn had reached the point where she would offer. She knew I needed sex, and she was willing. She would basically lie there. And I didn't want that. I wanted her to want me.

So one night I lay in bed and argued with her about why she should.

Picture it. A grown man in the dark, building a case for his own wife's desire.

Looking back, Dawn says it must have felt like immense pressure. She had no idea how to give me what I was asking for. In her mind, she'd already done the generous thing: you need sex, I'm willing. And then I rejected that too.

What I was really asking was this. You used to feel a certain way about me, and that feeling made me feel good about myself, so please feel it again so I can feel good. I had made her responsible for my sense of worth. It was probably the least attractive thing I ever did, worse than any weight I put on.

You cannot negotiate authentic desire. You can negotiate chores, schedules, money, and whose family gets Christmas. Desire is the one thing in a marriage that can't be argued, guilted, or bargained into existence, and the harder you push, the further it retreats.

The decision

Lying there that night, I realized I could never talk her into feeling something. If she was ever going to feel that way about me again, she would have to actually feel it. Which meant she wasn't the problem. I was living, and showing up in my own life, in a way she simply didn't feel that way about anymore.

So I made a decision. I was done asking her to want me. I would focus on becoming a man she actually wanted.

I may have said it out loud. Dawn doesn't remember hearing it, and she's glad she didn't. At that point she wouldn't have understood what I meant, because as far as she knew, she did want me. She just didn't have a sex drive anymore. And if she'd been watching for changes, she would have been unimpressed for a long time, because nobody wakes up the next morning dramatically different. Watching your partner to see whether they're fixing themselves is just pressure flowing in the other direction.

Her not watching gave me something like a laboratory. I could work on myself quietly and see, over time, how she responded.

It took years. 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018. I got in shape, slowly, with a lot of starts and stops I didn't understand yet. I started dressing better. I started taking care of myself and sorting out my own mess. Dawn stayed roughly where she was for most of that time.

I made one more decision in that stretch, and I never said a word about it to her. I loved her. I liked her, too. I knew what we'd had at the beginning, which meant I knew it was available between us. Building this with someone new would take every bit as much work as building it with her. So I chose her. I decided I wasn't going anywhere, even if I never managed to make it work.

That was the beginning of what I now call devotion. Whatever I was going to experience in this life, I would experience with her, through this relationship. Some men will hear that as resignation. It worked the other way. With no exit to keep checking, all of my energy could finally go into the work.

Dawn said it plainly on the episode: if I'd had one foot in and one foot out, I would have been gone a few years into the marriage. She's right. Without that decision, I would have bailed and walked away from her.

Too close to want

Dawn said something about our beginning that's worth slowing down on. There was distance between us. We didn't live together. I was still a little unknown to her. We worked side by side, but we couldn't touch whenever we wanted, and that space carried a constant pull. I want to kiss you. I want to touch you. Especially when we couldn't.

Desire needs somewhere to travel. It's a pull from one person toward another, and it only works when there are actually two people, each with a center of their own, with some space between them for the pull to cross.

Esther Perel built a whole book, Mating in Captivity, around the question of whether you can want what you already have. You can. I live it. But it depends on whether you're still a separate person inside your own marriage.

Most men, without noticing, stop being one.

Before we got together, I had a life of my own. Opinions, an edge, a mood that belonged to me. Then we merged, which is natural and good. And then we kept merging, well past the point where anything of me was left over. That is what I mean by enmeshment. In me, it looked like this:

• My mood followed hers. If she was happy, I was okay. If she was distant, something was wrong, and I couldn't rest until it was fixed.
• My plans waited on hers. I'd rarely commit to anything until I knew what she wanted.
• My friendships faded. Nearly all of my emotional life ran through one person.
• My opinions softened into whatever kept the peace.
• My worth depended on her response to me, in bed most of all. That's what the argument in the dark was really about.

Every one of those can look like devotion from the outside. Attentive husband. Considerate. Puts her first. From the inside, it's a man who has handed his entire inner life to his wife and asked her to hold it.

Look at what that does to her. She's no longer married to a man she can reach toward. She's married to someone who moves when she moves, feels what she feels, and needs her to be okay so he can be okay. There's no distinct person left on the other side of the bed to want. And she's carrying the weight of his emotional state on top of her own, which is exhausting in a way no amount of sleep touches. Nobody feels desire for the thing that exhausts them.

Long-term relationships can hold desire for a lifetime. Over-enmeshment is what makes it structurally impossible to feel.

Manufactured distance does nothing to fix this. Playing hard to get, withholding affection, picking fights to create a spark, going cold so she'll chase you: all of it is the same neediness wearing a new costume, and she'll feel it within a week.

What restores the space is becoming a whole person again:

• A purpose that belongs to you. Work you care about, something you're building, a direction that would exist even if she didn't.
• A body you take care of because you respect it.
• Real friendships with men, so she stops being your only source of connection.
• Pursuits that are yours. Something you do because you love it, with no one to impress.
• Your own mood. You feel her weather fully, and you let it stay her weather instead of turning it into a verdict on you.
• The ability to stand up for yourself. Saying what you want, disagreeing, holding a position warmly without punishing her for having her own.

A man like that is close to his wife, and he's also unmistakably himself. She can lean on him, fight with him, miss him, and reach for him, because someone is there. The space between two whole people is where the heat lives. Intimacy and desire stop competing once both people are actually present.

I wrote about the inner side of this in Giving To Receive, about the man who checks what he's getting before he gives. Enmeshment is what that neediness looks like once it's built into the whole structure of a marriage.

Looks matter

Physical attractiveness isn't everything, but it is a huge deal. And it's the easiest and lowest hanging fruit for a man to improve his attractiveness. When I said that on the episode, Dawn answered for herself: for her, it is. I'd say it is for every woman. There are two types of women, as I put it on the episode: women who like attractive men, and liars.

And every woman has a sex drive for the right man, in the right circumstances.

I asked Dawn what she sees when she looks at men as we travel the country. Her answer: not very good. She sees a lot of men who put no effort into how they look. On date nights she'll notice a woman who's clearly dressed up, sitting across from a man in a ball cap and athletic sneakers, nowhere close to matching her.

Dawn wears heels. She'll find the most comfortable heels she can, and she'll wear the uncomfortable ones too, because they make her feel sexy and that's how she loves to present herself. She has questioned whether her standards are just perfectionism. Then she checks with her body, and her body keeps responding to the same things.

Her suggestions, mostly in her words:

• Take care of your skin. You have skin too. Wash your face. Moisturize.
• Style your hair. Stop covering it with a hat. Ask your wife what she likes, then do it.
• Notice where stress is showing up in your face and your body. It ages you.
• Ask yourself how you'd present yourself if you were single and dating again. How did you present yourself when you were courting her? You're a different man now, ten or twenty or forty years later, so the style may change. The effort shouldn't.

Mine:

• Get T-shirts and jeans that actually fit.
• See a barber every three weeks.
• Get some real shoes. They don't need to cost a hundred dollars. Something other than running shoes that looks good with jeans. If you're a boots guy, get good boots.
• Groom everywhere, including anywhere she might get close to. Ask yourself honestly whether you'd want to put your face there.
• Get in shape.
• Get your bloodwork done and your hormones checked, testosterone included, and deal with whatever you find. Dawn and I have used Function Health for over a year, and we've learned a huge amount about our own health from it. We're not affiliates. If you want to try it, click here for $25 off (they give us $25 too).

Not long ago I forgot to put gel in my hair on a busy day. That afternoon we were in bed, about to have sex, and Dawn looked at me and asked if I'd go do my hair so she'd have something nice to look at. I went and did my hair. How I look is part of her experience of me, and she'll tell me so.

On the episode, Dawn pushed back on something I said. I'd claimed I could have been overweight and still felt confident. She disagreed. The weight, she said, was a byproduct of the lack of confidence that came first. The whole inner state showed up in my body and in how I moved through the world.

She's right, and it's why this section matters more than it looks. Clothes and grooming won't change you from the inside. But the way you treat your body tells the truth about how you regard yourself, and changing it is often where self-respect starts, because it's the first promise to yourself you can actually watch yourself keep.

This is the low-hanging fruit, the easiest thing you can do by far. Most men skip it because it feels superficial. She doesn't experience it as superficial. She experiences it every time she looks at you.

Do you actually like that she's a sexual being?

This one goes deeper, and it can be uncomfortable to look at.

A while back I was talking with a single man who'd come out of a marriage where the sex had been up and down. Half joking, I suggested he date a woman who's openly, unapologetically sexual. He shut it down instantly. He didn't want some woman who'd been "ran through."

Dawn thinks that's a really common way for men to think. And it creates a bind that makes desire in marriage nearly impossible.

If you look down on women for being sexual, and then you marry a woman and ask her to be wildly sexual with you, which one is it? Be turned on, but not like that. Want sex, but don't have a past. Be passionate, but don't be one of those women. She hears the contradiction even when you don't.

This is the Madonna-whore split. Many men divide women into two camps. The Madonna is the pure one: mother, wife, daughter, the angel somehow above sex. The whore is the sexual one: the woman on the screen, the hookup, the affair, the woman used for sex and never respected. Wives get filed under Madonna. Once she's in that camp, part of you won't let yourself see her as a sexual being, and part of her stops letting herself be one with you.

The other camp costs just as much. You can't feel love and tenderness toward something you hold in contempt. If a sexual woman disgusts some part of you, then the more alive your wife's sexuality becomes, the more of her you'll have to push away.

This is one I mostly got right, and I'm grateful for it. I've always loved that Dawn is a sexual being. She carried a lot of guilt and shame about her life before me, and when it came up, I asked her to tell me the stories. I found them kind of hot. Other men who wanted her clearly had good taste. She was a whole person before we met. It blew her mind that I didn't judge her. She was the one who had filed herself under Madonna, and her return to her own sexuality is a big part of what we'll talk about next week.

There's one more step, and it's the one most men refuse. If it's okay for her to be a sexual being, she's going to have sexual feelings, and they won't only ever point at you. She might notice an attractive person across a room. She had a sexual life before you. That's what being a sexual human looks like, and feeling attraction is a long way from acting on it. A man who needs her desire to switch on only for him, and stay off for everyone else in the world, is asking for a woman whose fire is small enough to never threaten him. He usually gets exactly that.

So ask yourself honestly. Do you approve of women's sexuality? Do you approve of your wife's?

Where to start

If you came here because you typed that question into a search bar, or asked an AI about it at midnight, this is what I'd want you to do.

1. Stop asking her to want you. No more arguments, campaigns, guilt trips, or keeping score. Desire can't be negotiated, and every attempt costs you more of it.
2. Take full responsibility for your half. At least half of whether she wants you has to do with you. Start there and stay there.
3. Do the easy things this week. Haircut. Clothes that fit. Wash your face. Book a workout and a blood panel.
4. Get your own life back. A purpose, men you trust, something that's yours, and a mood that belongs to you.
5. Look honestly at how you see women's sexuality, and whether your wife has room to be a sexual being with you.
6. Decide whether you're in. If you're half out, she'll feel it, and none of this will work. If you're in, give it seasons, not weekends.

You can still have this

You can have a relationship that lasts your whole life, deeply intimate, close and loving, and still want to push her up against a wall and kiss her the way you did at the beginning. When I said that on the episode, Dawn's face said everything. Watch the episode on YouTube and you'll see it.

If you had it once and lost it, you can get it back. It's buried under a man who stopped showing up as himself, and you're the one who gets to dig him out.

What's in this piece is where to start. It's the surface. Underneath it is the deeper work of untying what made you hand yourself over in the first place, and that's what the book is for. Infinite Devotion comes out November 10, at infinitedevotion.com/book.

Next week, Dawn and I turn to the women: what actually happens to a woman's desire, and how she comes back to a fully alive sexuality. If your wife has ever told you she just doesn't have a sex drive anymore, that's one to listen to together.

Listen to the full episode: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | All episodes

Mentioned: Function Health ($25 off) | Mating in Captivity by Esther Perel | Giving To Receive | The Infinite Devotion book

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