Sexless marriage
[1] Having children, sexual boredom, busy work schedules, and spousal infidelity are all factors that can lead to a sexless marriage.
Aging is overwhelmingly the most common cause of sexless marriage, for men and women, largely because of the inability to engage in sexual intercourse due to health status, decreased sex drive, lower energy levels, and other age-related physical changes.
[2] Because approximately 60% of marriages worldwide are arranged, in many cultures around the globe potential partners meet for the first time on the day of the wedding.
[2] Older adults in Israel were found to refrain from sex for multiple reasons, among them body image and performance anxiety.
[11] During the post-war period in the 1950s, Japanese women began to work outside the home for the first time, but were still considered mere domestics regardless of their occupation.
[11] Today, young, highly educated working women are postponing marriage thereby delaying entering into these institutional norms.
In Hong Kong, sexless marriages are prevalent, particularly in urban Chinese married couples across all age groups from 25-59 years.
For Chinese men, marital sexual inactivity was more attributable to a lack of interest in sex, extramarital relationships, or a low libido on the upper end of the age scale.
Some Gnostic sects believed that abstaining from sexual activity would assist individuals in achieving higher spiritual enlightenment and purity, thus aligning more closely with the divine.
[14] Jainism, an Indian religion, practices self-effort toward enlightenment, divine consciousness, and liberation from repeated lives through reincarnation.
As a part of this philosophy, sexless living is practiced by monks, nuns, and secular practitioners, male and female, married and single.
The US National Health and Social Life Survey in 1992 found that 2% of married respondents aged 18 to 59 reported no sexual intimacy in the past year.
[16] The definition of a nonsexual marriage is often expanded to sexual intimacy fewer than 10 times per year, in which case the NHSL survey would include 20% of the couples.
