When married couples live like brother and sister. No sex for years and they insist they are happy. Are they deluded - or just honest? Read and tell us what you think...
Most evenings, with their little girl
safely tucked up in bed, Charlotte and Chris Everiss (pictured right) enjoy a kiss and a
cuddle on the sofa in front of the television.
Happily
married for a decade, the couple cannot bear to even imagine their
lives without one another. Yet, astonishingly, they haven’t made love
for more than two years.
Both
insist that their marriage, which followed a two-year courtship after
meeting on a dating website, is stronger than most. It’s just that sex,
they say, is not important to their happiness.
‘We still turn each other on but we don’t want to take it any further,’ says Charlotte. ‘We don’t have the time or the energy.
‘I
find it hard switching off knowing that our four-year-old, Addison, is
in the next bedroom. I think if Chris really missed sex he would tell
me, or I’d catch him watching porn on the internet as a substitute.
‘But he doesn’t seem to want to go back to having sex, either.
‘We sound like Darby and Joan, I know - even though I’m only 34 and Chris is 40 - but that, to us, is contentment.'
Charlotte and Chris, it seems, aren’t
the only ones whose sex life has dwindled to nothing. A recent survey
estimated that 15 to 20 per cent of couples have sexless relationships -
defined by experts as making love fewer than ten times a year - while
around 5 per cent go without altogether.
Actress
Helen Mirren spoke for many of these couples earlier this year when she
said: ‘I think the power of partnership in marriage is under-recognised
in our society. That’s what makes marriages work, not sex.’
In a sex-obsessed society, where
everyone - young, old, male and female - seems to be boasting of how
many times a week they ‘do it’, it may come as a relief to many that
couples like Charlotte and Chris are happy to admit that sex plays no
part in their marriages at all.
Most couples who find themselves at a
point where sexual intimacy has died tend to confide their predicament
to no one at all. But today three brave couples reveal to Femail how
they have learned to live contented lives without sex.
You
don’t need a degree in psychology to work out why Charlotte, a social
media consultant from Great Wyrley, Staffordshire - who in the early
years of her marriage made love to her husband three times a week - may
have problems surrounding sex.
Three
years ago, when their daughter was 18 months old, Charlotte almost died
after an ectopic pregnancy resulted in her having a partial
hysterectomy during a six-hour operation. Since then, she and Chris have
made love only once, around ten months after her loss, an encounter
from which she derived no pleasure.
Chris is understanding about her
aversion to sex. ‘It can be hard knowing that our cuddles will never
lead to anything more intimate,’ he says. ‘Charlotte is a gorgeous woman
and I’m still very attracted to her, but she nearly died and I count my
blessings every day that she’s even still here.’
‘I have an hour-long commute at either end of my working day so, to be honest, most of the time I’m too tired for sex anyway.’
Chris,
a digital marketing manager, says he doesn’t discuss with friends the
absence of sex from his marriage, but believes it is more common than
people admit.
‘I don’t know that we’re all that different from other couples, we’re just more open about it,’ he says.
In
all other respects, the Everisses have an enviable lifestyle. They live
in a beautiful, four-bedroom detached home, have a Mini Cooper
convertible and a VW Golf parked on the driveway, and enjoy several
foreign holidays a year.
Tracey Dowler, 42, (pictured above with husband) spent several
months worrying that husband Julian, 55, didn’t want to make love to her
because he was attracted to other women. But she has now accepted that
the stress of his demanding job as director of a motor mechanical and
haulage company is the reason they no longer have sex.
And,
while she admits there have been times when she has felt like walking
out of their immaculate, three-bedroom semi-detached home in Rugby,
Warwickshire, over the lack of intimacy, Tracey values other aspects of
their marriage too highly.
‘We
got married in 2007 after only knowing each other for six months, so it
was pretty whirlwind,’ says Tracey, a wedding fair organiser. ‘When we
were dating, we’d have sex up to three times a night, which was
wonderful, but after the wedding we only made love once or twice a week.
We started going months between encounters and now we haven’t made love
for well over a year.’
Tracey still feels very attracted to
her husband, and he says the same of her. The couple are loving in other
ways, holding hands when they go out together, kissing one another
goodnight before going to sleep and saying “I love you” at the end of
telephone conversations.
But Julian has 40 employees under him
and says his job has become far more demanding in the years since their
wedding. He gets up at 4am to start work at 5am, puts in a 12-hour day
and, as he is on 24-hour call, his phone often rings several times
during the night with drivers needing advice.
Weekends
are no more relaxing as Julian also runs a photography business, which
he is hoping will take off enough for him to concentrate on it full
time.
They are both keen to have a family together. They’ve had IVF and plan to have another round of it in August.
‘We
talk about rekindling our love life but never seem to get around to
it,’ says Julian. ‘We had a weekend away at a country hotel a couple of
weeks ago and I was so exhausted I spent most of the time asleep.’
Julian
regards Tracey as his best friend and soulmate - a fact common, it
seems, to many couples enduring sexless marriages - and believes that
once he retires they will be able to rekindle some semblance of romance.
Once a couple gets out of the habit of having sex, however, this can be easier said than done.
‘Couples
who don’t make love start living like brother and sister or friends and
get out of the habit of seeing one another in a sexual way,’ says
Relate counsellor Paula Hall.
‘If
both partners want to reintroduce sex, we encourage them to do so
slowly, learning how to be sensual with each other and gradually
building up to intercourse.’
Culled from UK Daily Mail