The questions people type into search engines are blunt. Why would a man stay in a sexless marriage? Will he leave? How long will he stay? What does it do to him?
No study can answer those questions for one particular marriage. But there is a solid body of research on three things that together get close: how common it is for sex to fade in long relationships, why people stay in relationships that disappoint them, and who actually ends marriages. None of it is comfortable reading, and some of it contradicts what the internet assumes about men.
How Common Is a Fading Sex Life?
Start with the scale, because it is easy to assume that your own situation is unusual. The data says otherwise.
A study by Jean Twenge and colleagues in the Archives of Sexual Behavior used the General Social Survey, a nationally representative US survey, with 26,620 respondents from 1989 to 2014. It found that American adults had sex about nine fewer times per year in the early 2010s than in the late 1990s. Crucially, frequency declined among people who were married or living together, while it stayed steady among singles. The declines were largest among people in their fifties and among those with school-age children.
A later analysis of the same survey in JAMA Network Open by Peter Ueda and colleagues looked at adults aged 18 to 44 from 2000 to 2018. Among married people, the share reporting sex weekly or more fell from 71.1% to 57.7% for men and from 69.1% to 60.9% for women.
Inside individual marriages the pattern starts early. A study of 207 newlywed couples followed over their first four to five years, published by James McNulty, Carolyn Wenner and Terri Fisher, found that marital satisfaction, sexual satisfaction and frequency of sex all declined over time.
There is no single official rate of "sexless" marriages, because researchers define it differently: no sex in a month, in a year, or fewer than a set number of times a year. What the data does show is that a marriage in which sex has faded or stopped is a common situation, not a rare one, and it has become more common. The wider social trend is covered in The Sexless Generation.
The Study That Asked the Question Directly
One study went straight to the question in the headline. Denise Donnelly and Elisabeth Burgess published it in the Journal of Marriage and Family in 2008 under the title "The Decision to Remain in an Involuntarily Celibate Relationship."
They collected qualitative data from 77 married or long-term cohabiting people who described themselves as involuntarily celibate. Their summary is short and striking: the reported consequences of involuntary celibacy tended to be negative, yet "most partnered celibates were in stable relationships and reluctant to leave." They developed a range of coping strategies, and most were still hopeful of resuming sexual activity.
Two things stand out. First, people in this position mostly do not leave, even though they are unhappy about it. Second, most of them have not given up. They are waiting for things to change.
The study has limits. It is small, it is qualitative, and it is not a representative sample. But it matches what a much larger body of relationship science predicts.
Why Unhappy People Stay: The Investment Model
One of the most tested explanations of why people stay in relationships is the investment model, developed by the social psychologist Caryl Rusbult, whose longitudinal test of it appeared in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 1983. It says that commitment to a relationship rests on three things:
- Satisfaction: how good the relationship feels
- Quality of alternatives: how good life outside it looks
- Investments: what would be lost by leaving
In 2003 Benjamin Le and Christopher Agnew pooled 52 studies with 11,582 participants in a meta-analysis published in Personal Relationships. They found that satisfaction, alternatives and investments each correlated significantly with commitment, and that together the three accounted for nearly two-thirds of the variation in commitment. Commitment, in turn, predicted whether couples broke up.
Apply that to a sexless marriage and the puzzle mostly dissolves. Sex is one part of satisfaction, often an important one, but it is not the whole of it. A man can be deeply frustrated in bed and still value the friendship, the shared routine, the family life and the partnership in running a household. His satisfaction score drops, but it does not fall to zero.
Meanwhile his investments are usually large. Children, a home, joint finances, years of shared history, a social circle built around the couple, and often a sense of identity as a husband and father. And the alternatives may look poor: the cost of divorce, the prospect of living alone, uncertainty about finding a new partner, and the fear of seeing his children less.
When investments are high and alternatives look weak, the model predicts that people stay even when satisfaction is low. That is not weakness or confusion. It is a calculation, often an unspoken one.
The Custody Arithmetic
For fathers, one investment dominates all the others: the children.
The US Census Bureau's report on custodial parents found that in 2018, 79.9% of the 12.9 million custodial parents were mothers, and 20.1% were fathers. That figure covers all parents living apart, including those who never married, so it is not a direct measure of divorce outcomes. But it describes the landscape a father sees when he thinks about leaving. In most families where parents live apart, the children live mainly with their mother.
A man weighing whether to end a sexless marriage is therefore often weighing something much larger than his sex life. He is weighing daily contact with his children. Few men will say that out loud, but the numbers explain why so many stay.
Will He Leave? Look at Who Actually Ends Marriages
The question "will a man leave a sexless marriage" assumes that men are the ones who leave. The evidence says that in most marriages that end, they are not.
The Stanford sociologist Michael Rosenfeld used the How Couples Meet and Stay Together survey to study who wanted the breakup in heterosexual couples. He found that women accounted for 69% of the breakups of heterosexual marriages, with a 95% confidence interval of 61% to 78%. He notes that this is consistent with the roughly two thirds of divorces wanted by wives reported in other studies.
So the base rate matters. In the typical marriage that ends, it is the wife who wants out. A man who stays in an unsatisfying marriage is not an outlier. He is behaving the way most husbands in unhappy marriages behave. Rosenfeld's work also shows the other side: when a marriage does end, the husband is more often the one who did not choose it. That is the situation addressed in 12 Rules for the Man She Left Behind and in the divorce story nobody tells.
None of this predicts what one particular man will do. It does suggest that a sexless marriage on its own rarely drives husbands out, and that the more common risk is a slow erosion that ends with the other partner leaving.
What Staying Does to Him
"What happens to a man in a sexless marriage" is the question behind many searches, and the research gives a clear direction, if not a precise answer.
The McNulty study of newlyweds found that sexual satisfaction and marital satisfaction feed each other over time: higher sexual satisfaction at one point predicted improvements in marital satisfaction later, and the other way round. The same was true of sexual satisfaction and frequency of sex. Let one slide, and the others tend to follow.
A set of three studies with 30,645 participants by Amy Muise, Ulrich Schimmack and Emily Impett found that for people in relationships, sexual frequency was associated with well-being, and that the association ran through relationship satisfaction. The link levelled off above about once a week. More sex than that was not associated with more well-being. But the flip side is that very little or none sits at the bottom of the curve.
Put simply: sex is not everything in a marriage, but its absence is not neutral. Over time it tends to pull down how both partners feel about the relationship, and through that, how they feel about their lives. The involuntarily celibate participants in the Donnelly and Burgess study reported mostly negative consequences, even while they stayed.
Check His Health, Not Only Hers
The debate about sexless marriages often assumes that one partner has simply lost interest. Sometimes the problem is physical, and sometimes it is his.
The Massachusetts Male Aging Study, a community-based random sample of men aged 40 to 70, reported a combined prevalence of minimal, moderate or complete erectile dysfunction of 52%. After adjusting for age, it was associated with heart disease, hypertension, diabetes, related medications, and with measures of anger and depression.
When sex stops, a problem a man would rather not discuss can be part of the reason, and those figures show how widespread such problems are. The same conditions that affect sexual function also affect long-term health. A visit to a doctor is part of the answer, not a side issue.
How Long Will He Stay?
No study puts a number on it, and anyone who gives you one is guessing. What the investment model does give you is a way to think about when the calculation changes.
Staying becomes less likely when investments shrink or alternatives improve. That happens at predictable moments: when the children grow up and leave home, when a financial change makes separation affordable, when health changes, or when another relationship appears. Twenge's finding that declines in sexual frequency were largest among people with school-age children and people in their fifties fits the same life-stage pattern. Those are also the years when the calculation around staying starts to shift.
It also changes when satisfaction improves. That is the part of the model a man can influence most directly.
What the Research Suggests Doing
The McNulty study ends with a practical conclusion. Because sexual and marital satisfaction are so closely intertwined, the authors suggest that efforts to treat marital distress may benefit from addressing the sexual relationship, and efforts to treat sexual distress may benefit from addressing the marriage. In other words, the sex and the relationship are one problem, not two.
The evidence points to a few principles:
- Name it. A fading sex life is common and usually gradual. Treating it as a shameful secret makes it harder to address.
- Rule out the physical. For both partners, health problems, medication and exhaustion are frequent causes.
- Work on the marriage, not only the bedroom. The research shows that satisfaction in one area moves satisfaction in the other.
- Be honest about why you stay. If it is the children, the house or fear of the alternative, knowing that makes it possible to decide rather than drift.
The practical side, from how to raise the subject to when to walk away, is covered in Sexless Marriage: A Man's Guide to Fixing It. The research explains why so many men stay. It does not say they should stay without trying to change anything, because the evidence is clear that doing nothing is not a stable place to be.
