Sexlessness Is Not a Verdict

The word arrives, almost always, from the inside. Nobody has to say it to her. She counts back to the last time, passes some number she did not know she was keeping, and a label appears in her own voice.

It does not sound like a description when it arrives that way. It sounds like a finding. So that is what we are. That is the kind of couple we have become.

This essay is an attempt to take the finding apart, and it is the third piece in this Library to work on the word. An earlier essay argued that sexless is a category rather than a verdict, at the level of the term itself. Another asked why Japan counts it at all and what the counting hides, at the level of the state. This one works at the level of a room: what is usually already true before the word arrives, and what a person might ask herself instead of looking for somebody to hold responsible.

Nothing here is a method for getting sex back. That is not modesty about the subject. It is a refusal, stated once at the start so it does not have to be repeated: an essay that ends in a programme has decided in advance that the situation is a fault, and that is the assumption being examined.

Japan is unusual in having a formal definition at all, which is part of why the word lands so heavily here. In most English-speaking countries sexless is a vague social term. In Japan it has a sentence.

The Japan Society of Sexual Science defines a sexless couple as one in which, without special circumstances being recognised, there has been no consensual sexual intercourse and no sexual contact of any kind for more than one month, and the situation is expected to continue for a long period. The society records that the definition was first drafted in 1991 and settled in 1994.

Read the sentence slowly, because almost nobody who uses the word has read it.

What it counts is whether intercourse or sexual contact happened, and how long it has not. That is the whole measurement. Notice the word consensual, which is doing quiet work: the definition is describing the absence of something both people agreed to, not the absence of something one of them was owed.

Now notice everything the sentence does not contain. It says nothing about how the two people feel about each other. Nothing about whether either of them wants to be touched, or specifically does not. Nothing about whether the situation is a source of grief or a settled and mutual peace. Nothing about love, and nothing about the quality of anything.

It is a shared ruler that lets clinicians and researchers talk about the same thing. It is not a diagnosis and not a finding of failure.

The trouble with a good measurement is that it invites a reader to think the thing measured is the thing that matters.

A ruler measures length. It does not measure weight, or warmth, or whether the object is any use. Nobody would look at a measured length and conclude something about the object’s worth, and yet that is precisely the move the word performs the moment it is applied to a marriage.

One month is also a short unit for the thing it is being asked to describe. Illness lasts longer than a month. So does a newborn, a bereavement, a move, an examination period, a bad season at work, a course of medication. A definition that triggers at four weeks will collect, along with the situations it was built to describe, a very large number of situations that are simply life happening at its ordinary speed.

This is not an argument that the definition is badly made. It was made for research, where a clear threshold is worth more than a sensitive one. It is an argument that a research instrument has escaped into the language, where it is now being used to answer a question it was never shaped to answer: not how long, but what does this mean about us.

The figure most often quoted comes from the eighth edition of the Japan Family Planning Association’s national survey of men’s and women’s lives and attitudes, conducted in 2016. It sampled three thousand people aged sixteen to forty-nine, received one thousand two hundred and sixty-three valid responses, and analysed six hundred and fifty-five married respondents. Among those married respondents, 47.2 percent reported no sex in the past month, a figure the association described as 15.3 points higher than when the series began in 2004.

A ninth edition was fielded in September 2023. Its headline result could not be confirmed against a primary source while this essay was being written, so it is not quoted here, and no trend beyond 2016 is claimed.

What that figure establishes is exactly one thing, and it is worth having. A married person in Japan who has not had sex in the past month is not unusual and not an outlier. Whatever else is true, she is not the only one.

What it cannot establish is far larger. It cannot say how many of those people are in pain about it. It cannot say how many are content. It cannot say how many had never given it a thought until a questionnaire asked. It cannot distinguish a couple in the third month of a new baby from a couple who have not touched each other in four years. And it knows nothing whatever about the reader.

Other essays in this Library have traced how the word normal drifts from being a description into being a scorecard. The word sexless makes the same journey, and it makes it faster, because it arrives with a number attached and numbers feel like verdicts even when they are only counts. A statistic is context. It is not a ruling about a particular house.

This is the centre of the essay, and it is a point about grammar before it is a point about relationships.

No sex. No intimacy. No desire. No love. In ordinary conversation these four melt into a single statement, and the inference runs so smoothly that it barely registers as an inference at all: if you are not having sex, the love must have gone.

They are four separate sentences, and each can be true or false independently of the others.

There are relationships without sex in which two people sit at the same table every evening, notice when the other is tired, and rest a hand on a back on the way past. There are relationships with a great deal of sex in which neither person has looked at the other properly in years. There are seasons when desire is unmistakably present and cannot be pointed at this particular person, and seasons when love for this particular person is unmistakable and the body is closed all the same.

An earlier essay in this Library put the general principle without the statistics attached: desire is not an instruction, it is information. The same applies here. That sex has receded is not a signal commanding anybody to do anything about it. It is a light saying something in this room matters. What the light is shining on is not visible from the label, and cannot be read off a month.

What follows are five dynamics that are often already in place before anybody reaches for the word. They are not diagnoses, and not stages. They are the landscapes people describe most often, and none of them is a story about one person being at fault.

The first is the plainest and the least discussed, because it is not dramatic enough to feel like an explanation.

Consider the arithmetic of an ordinary weekday. Work, and the commute at both ends of it. The meal, and the thinking that preceded the meal. The laundry that was started in the morning so it could be finished at night. A child’s schedule held in somebody’s head. A parent phoned. A message answered at eleven because it could not be answered at four.

By the time the day empties out there may be forty minutes left, and the body in them is not neutral. It is a body that has been available to other people since it woke up. Being touched is not restful for such a body by default; it is one more demand arriving at the one hour nothing was being asked.

That is not a loss of desire. It is desire with no room to appear in. The two feel identical from inside, which is why the first thing a person concludes about herself here is usually wrong.

The second dynamic is subtler and takes longer to accumulate.

A person in a long relationship is rarely one thing. She is an employee, a mother, a daughter, a daughter-in-law, a neighbour, the one who remembers the appointments. Each of those has a face that goes with it, and each face is competent.

What shrinks, year by year, is the number of hours in which she is looked at as none of them. Not as the person who will handle it. Just as herself.

Sexual availability asks something of a person that the competent faces cannot supply. It asks her to be unguarded in a day that has required her to be capable since morning, and to make that switch in the last hour, on request, without a transition. Some people can do it. For many it is like being asked to speak a second language at midnight: not unwilling, simply not able to reach it on cue.

The partner, watching from outside, sees a refusal. What is actually happening is that no route back was ever built into the day.

The third dynamic is the one that does the most damage for the least obvious reason, and it is almost always built by accident.

Early in a relationship, touch is various. A hand on a shoulder is a hand on a shoulder. Later, often without either person deciding it, touch narrows: the only contact that reliably happens is contact that is heading somewhere.

Once that is true, the shoulder is no longer a shoulder. It is a question, and a question that has to be answered immediately. So a person who is tired and would gladly be held learns to step away from the hand, because accepting it commits her to something she has not got the resources for tonight.

From the other side this reads as a woman who does not want to be touched at all. From the inside it is the opposite: it is a person who would like to be touched and has lost the ability to accept touch without also accepting everything downstream of it.

The couple then has less contact of every kind, including the kind that had nothing to do with sex, which was also the kind that made the other kind likely.

The fourth dynamic is short, and it usually happens in under a month.

Somebody initiates. The answer is not tonight, for one of the ordinary reasons above. It happens again a fortnight later. Perhaps a third time.

Nothing has been decided. But the person who initiated now has a small piece of evidence about what happens when they initiate, and initiating is not a neutral act. It involves saying, without any protective phrasing available, that you want something from somebody who can decline. Three declines is enough for most people to stop volunteering for that.

So the asking stops. And here is the part that makes it stick: the one who declined does not experience the stopping as relief. She experiences it as no longer being wanted. She has no way of knowing that her three ordinary refusals were received as a verdict, because to her they were three tired evenings.

Each of them now has a private, coherent and wrong account of the other. He believes she does not want him. She believes he has stopped wanting her. Neither account is checked, because checking it would mean raising the subject, and the subject is now the most dangerous one in the house.

The fifth dynamic is not a separate thing so much as what the other four turn into when they are left alone: avoidance, and what grows underneath it.

Not mentioning it becomes an arrangement neither party agreed to in words. The subject acquires a shape in the room that both of them steer around, and the steering itself becomes a habit, so that after a while they are not avoiding the conversation, they are simply people who do not have it.

What does not happen is that the unsaid goes away. It sinks, and it changes character on the way down. A tired evening, unspoken, is a tired evening. A hundred tired evenings, unspoken, become a belief about what the other person thinks of you.

The most important structural fact about the whole situation is this: both people are interpreting the same silence, separately, and neither of them is interpreting it accurately. One reads it as rejection. The other reads it as relief, or as an accusation being prepared. Both readings are built from real evidence and both are wrong, and the only instrument that could correct them is the conversation that the silence exists to prevent.

One thing must be said plainly here rather than left to be inferred. Sometimes the reason lives in the body: pain during sex, physical change, the effects of medication, illness, the aftermath of childbirth. Those are outside the reach of an essay and belong with qualified medical care, and nothing above should be read as a reason to interpret a physical cause as a relational one.

It is worth setting the word beside a definition built for a different purpose.

The World Health Organization defines sexual health not as the absence of disease or dysfunction but as a state of physical, emotional, mental and social well-being in relation to sexuality, and says it requires the possibility of pleasurable and safe sexual experiences, free of coercion, discrimination and violence.

Nowhere in that framework is there a number of times per month. There is no threshold, because the framework is not built around counting.

That cuts in a direction people sometimes miss. It means there is no need to grade a relationship by frequency. It does not mean anybody may tell a person in real distress about the absence of sex that she should not mind.

One more distinction belongs here, and the society’s own definition supplies it with the word consensual. Desire and consent are different things. Wanting more sex in a relationship is never the same as being owed it, and a period without sex is never a period in which the right to decline has been suspended. An essay defending a person’s right not to be judged for the absence would be worthless if it quietly implied that somebody was failing to supply something.

The objection that deserves answering is not from the person who is comfortable. It is from the person who is not.

It runs like this. All this careful separating of sentences is a way of talking somebody out of a real grief. She is not confused about definitions. She knows that intimacy and sex are different things and she wants both. She has wanted to be touched for four years, she has said so, and being told that the word sexless is only a measurement is not a liberation; it is a sophisticated way of asking her to stop minding. Meanwhile the essay’s refusal to offer any route forward looks less like respect and more like a house that does not want to be held to a result.

That lands, and the honest answer is not a rebuttal.

If you are in pain about this, the pain is accurate, and nothing above is an argument that it should be smaller. The claim of this essay is narrow: that the label is not the explanation, and that the five dynamics are worth knowing about because they are so often the actual mechanism, and because each of them is a thing that happened rather than a thing somebody is. A person who understands that her partner stopped asking after three ordinary refusals is not being consoled. She is being handed a more accurate account of a problem she still has.

And on the second half of the objection: the reason there is no programme here is that a programme aimed at a situation whose cause has not been identified is a way of being seen to act. If the mechanism is exhaustion, more effort is exactly wrong. If it is touch that has narrowed, initiating more is exactly wrong. The questions below are not a softer version of advice. They are the step that has to come first for any advice to be worth anything.

Neither this house nor anybody else is qualified to pass judgment on a reader’s relationship, so what follows is not a conclusion. It is four questions, offered with the context that makes each of them answerable.

In our case, is the absence of sex really the same thing as the absence of intimacy? The four sentences come apart, and it is common to discover that the one causing the grief is not the one being counted.

When was I last touched in a way that was not heading toward sex, and is that something I want? If touch has narrowed to one meaning, this question locates what was actually lost, which is often not what the word names.

Who is suffering in this situation: me, my partner, both of us, or the version of me being looked at from outside? A surprising amount of distress about this belongs to the imagined observer rather than to anybody in the house, and it is worth knowing which one is generating the feeling.

If I could put it into words, what is the first sentence I would want to say? Not the whole conversation. The first sentence, which is the only part that has to be built from nothing.

The answers do not have to arrive quickly. A person can talk to someone, or think alone, or decide nothing at all for the time being, and none of those is a failure to act.

Sexless was a word made to describe what has not happened during a period of time. It does not have to be made to say anything more than that. Whatever is actually happening in a particular house is not visible to the label, and the person who can see it is not the word.

This is not medical advice, clinical guidance or counselling, and it diagnoses nobody. Pain during sex, physical change, the effects of medication and illness belong with qualified care, and the essay names them rather than absorbing them.

Nobody in the five dynamics is at fault. They are described as mechanisms that accumulate, not as behaviours to be corrected in a partner, and nothing here should be used as evidence in an argument.

The 2016 figure is context and not a verdict. Its year, its sample and its scope are stated in the sentence that carries it, no trend beyond that edition is claimed, and the ninth edition’s headline result is deliberately absent because it could not be confirmed against a primary source.

Desire is not consent. Wanting more is never being owed more, and nothing above implies that anybody is failing to supply something.

Neither contentment nor distress is the correct answer to this situation. A settled peace is real and a real grief is real, and this essay does not crown either.

This house is not a remedy for any of it, does not present itself as one, and has an obvious commercial interest in being read as one, which is the reason the essay ends in questions rather than in a route. No institution cited here endorses this house or knows of it.