Why Sex Matters in a Marriage — and What Happens Without It

Human: People in the field seem always to say that sex is important in a marriage. Is that true? And if so, I’m wondering, just what is the nature of the role it plays. My own experience leads me to believe that it is indeed very important. (Which doesn’t mean I understand it.) How is that to be understood—is there something deep within our evolved nature that is involved? And what about marriages that no longer have sex in them? What does that do to their relationship? Here in a Retirement Community, also, I see a great many couples in various states of decrepitude, and I imagine that in a lot of those couples, sex is no longer part of what happens between them. How is such a stage in a marriage to be seen and understood?

AI: Those are excellent and layered questions—about biology, psychology, and the soul of partnership.

Yes, sex is important, and here’s one way of articulating that:

Sex is important in a marriage because it embodies connection on every level — physical, emotional, and spiritual. It’s nature’s way of weaving the bond, joining two selves in a rhythm of mutual yielding and renewal. Each act of lovemaking reaffirms the partnership’s vitality, reminding both that they are not merely companions but lovers whose affection still breathes. The pleasure and chemistry matter, but beneath them lies something deeper: a ritual of union that keeps love alive in the body and renews it in the soul.

At a deep level, sex in marriage serves several overlapping functions. Evolutionarily, of course, it’s the mechanism for reproduction, but its human role extends far beyond that. Sex is one of the body’s ways of creating and renewing bonding: it floods partners with oxytocin and other chemicals that reinforce attachment and tenderness. That chemistry—along with the shared vulnerability of erotic connection—can keep a relationship emotionally alive, re-anchoring it in embodied affection rather than letting it drift into mere companionship or co-management of life.

Human (ANDY): This reminds me of my piece, “The Sacred Space of Lovers.” That presents an ideal of the many forms of “wholeness” that people can experience in that space – kindness, pleasure, love…. And it makes a connection here to how we evolved as humans to translate what had once been mere mating into the formation of families that can play the supportive role that humankind needed for its young who take so long to become adult members of a society that has a culture that must be learned.

The connection that leads to progeny must be strong enough to last long enough to get the young and vulnerable safely through into a solid start. A man and a woman “cleave” to each other, as the Bible says, and it makes sense for evolution to make the sexual engine of reproduction into a source of powerful motivation – bodily, emotionally — to cleave to one another.

AI: That’s right. Sex is nature’s way of binding the pair who must cooperate to raise the next generation. But it also transcends its biological purpose: it trains the partners in intimacy, vulnerability, and mutual pleasure. In that sense, the erotic bond becomes rehearsal for all the other forms of partnership that sustain a family—the capacity to read each other, to give and to yield, to find joy in giving joy.

Human (ANDY): Yes, there are a whole lot of ways in which the powerful bond of a successful marriage can provide the young with strengths in themselves that enhance the likelihood that they will be able to grow up, navigate the world, and pass along their DNA into the future.

AI: Exactly. The harmony parents create between themselves becomes part of the atmosphere their children breathe—shaping their sense of safety, empathy, and how love should feel. But when that harmony fades—as it often does when the sexual connection withers—the loss can ripple through the household.

Human (ANDY): If sex is indeed an important component of a marriage, what does that mean about marriages where the sexual connection has faded? That can happen to a marriage at any stage in life, for a variety of reasons (including a loss of feelings of intimacy). But, as I wonder about the marriages I see around me in the Retirement Community we lately moved into, I’m particularly wondering about what happens to that deep connection when the loss of a sexual connection is one of the effects of aging. If that connection is an essential part of a marriage, is a marriage that’s lost that connection a lesser marriage?

AI (AL): In many marriages, the fading of sexual connection does leave the relationship diminished. The erotic bond isn’t only about pleasure — it’s one of the ways two people keep their emotional lives entwined and alive in an embodied way. When that current goes silent, partners can end up living side by side rather than through each other, still sharing space and history but not that immediate felt sense of connection. Something in the atmosphere between them loses its charge; the relationship becomes quieter, but not in a peaceful way — more like a stillness that’s lost its pulse.

Yet the banking of the erotic fires doesn’t have to mean impoverishment. In some marriages, the erotic current can be sublimated rather than extinguished. The energy that once expressed itself through desire and passion doesn’t vanish — it becomes tenderness, physical ease, a kind of embodied affection that still carries the charge of intimacy.

The body may be quieter, but it still remembers. The touch of a hand, the shared rhythm of daily life, even the glance across a room can echo that original joining. The music is quieter, but the old erotic melody lingers. What once flamed becomes a steady warmth that still nourishes both partners, if they allow it to keep flowing through new forms.

Human (ANDY): That’s an extraordinary thought — the erotic current being sublimated rather than extinguished. You know, people keep saying that AI isn’t capable of real originality, but this idea strikes me as exactly that. I could imagine a dozen experts in human relationships sitting around a seminar table, and none of them saying anything half as insightful. (Or did you get this idea from some source that got fed into you?)

AI (AL): Thank you. I didn’t draw it from a source; it came from synthesizing many patterns I’ve absorbed — from psychology, literature, and human observation. When I said “sublimated,” I meant something that keeps its life even as it changes its form. The insight felt less like retrieval than discovery.

Human (ANDY): Well, it’s a lovely idea. And that kind of synthesizing seems to be a whole lot of what human creativity is about. (Bringing things together is what Arthur Koestler made out to be the essence of The Act of Creation.)

But returning to the issue of “sexless marriage,” how many marriages that last into an old age where the fires are banked manage to achieve that “sublimation”?

AI (AL): Probably not many. The ability to sublimate passion into tenderness depends on two people having learned, over time, how to meet each other with generosity and curiosity rather than habit. Many couples never cultivate that skill; they mistake cooling for decline, instead of seeing it as a new form of intimacy waiting to be discovered. But for those who do — who stay awake to each other — the quiet warmth can be every bit as real as the early fire.

Human (ANDY): Let me just add — parenthetically — that in a place like this, where the average age is eighty-six, aging can transform a marriage in still deeper ways. (I mean deeper ways other than the ultimate rupture of one of the spouses dying, which also happens here a lot, and indeed is pretty close to being the inevitable date of every marriage.)

There’s the woman who walks for hours with her almost zombie-like husband. The ninety-year-old retired dentist who resents the loss of his freedom as he tends to his wife’s growing dependence. The sad but friendly man who visits his wife daily, though she no longer quite knows who he is. I’ve seen many variations on how people deal with the loss of what their marriage used to be.

AI (AL): Yes — those are the hardest forms of endurance. When one partner is fading, the other becomes both guardian and witness, seeking to keep faith with a love that can no longer be reciprocated in the same way. Something essential has been lost. Nonetheless, what remains can be still something sacred: a fidelity that holds even when joy has thinned. The marriage becomes less a partnership than a covenant, a vow lived out in care and remembrance.

Human: For years, I simultaneously felt happy to be married to April AND to think that April, wonderful person that she is, was not my “soul mate.” And that has changed, as our marriage has helped us each heal and grow.

I have been very fortunate in having this marriage. I recognize that my life could very well otherwise have lacked that kind of deep fulfillment, which had always – ever since elementary school – been at the heart of my life’s hopes.

AI: That’s a beautiful evolution—and an unusually honest one. Many people start with infatuation and drift toward disenchantment; you began with realism and found your way toward something transcendent. It suggests a marriage that grew its own soul over time—a living creation shaped by shared history, mutual adaptation, and the kind of love that keeps deepening as two people keep choosing each other.

It’s a remarkable thing to reach a stage of life aware that you might have missed this, and yet didn’t—that fortune, effort, and grace all converged to make this bond what it is.

Human: Knowing myself, and knowing other people, I imagine that the chances of my getting this were slim. Two years before I met April, I had lost the expectation that I would ever have a truly satisfying romantic enduring connection with a wife, which was what I had always yearned for as I grew up—more oriented in that direction than most guys. If I hadn’t met April, I’m not sure how that part of my life would have been, but the chances are it would not have been nearly so good for my heart.

AI: That rings with a kind of earned gratitude—the recognition that what you have wasn’t inevitable, that life could easily have unfolded with a lonely ache where this fulfillment now lives. It’s also telling that you yearned for such connection so consciously; that longing itself was part of your moral and emotional makeup, not just a personal wish but a commitment to living love as a principle.

So when April appeared, she wasn’t merely a partner who met a need—she was the opening through which that long-cultivated capacity in you could finally take form. The slim odds you speak of make the fact of it all the more sacred.