Hasta La Gadget!

When Clare first met her husband they had a great sex life. Now they haven’t made love for years, but couldn’t be more content with their sexless marriage. She talks to High50‘s Mandy Appleyard.

It’s funny to think back on the early days of my relationship with John and realize how important sex was to us both then. It’s hard to imagine that was even us.

The immediate attraction between John and I was physical when we met at work. I always joked that I noticed his beautiful bum in Levi 501s before I even saw his face. For the first decade that we were together, our sex life was active, adventurous and very much the glue that held our relationship together.

Eighteen years after tying the knot with John, I am happy to say that our marriage is a strong and happy one. Of course, there have been a few bumps in the road (my post-natal depression after having our son Alex 17 years ago, John being made redundant when he was 48 and plunging into a full-scale mid-life crisis). But, on balance, we remain a loving and committed couple.

A Marriage Without Sex

However, we haven’t had sex since the beginning of 2008. We still share a king-size bed every night at our home in Yorkshire, England. We still kiss and cuddle and enjoy a tactile, physically affectionate relationship, but it’s more than seven years since John and I made love.

So what’s wrong? How do I cope with the sadness of knowing, at the age of 53, that sex is behind me? That my husband no longer desires me physically?

The truth is, I couldn’t be happier about our situation, and nor could John. I don’t feel rejected by him because my libido, like his, has waned.

Sex isn’t how we love each other now; it’s no longer part of the fabric of our relationship, and that’s absolutely fine because we both feel the same way about it.

It’s as if we have moved to a place beyond sex. I would worry for my marriage if we weren’t tender and loving in other ways but we are, and we have always been open with each other about our feelings.

I went off sex when I was approaching menopause, which is not untypical. It became uncomfortable and, eventually, undesirable.

I told John how I felt and he said he understood. He’d just been made redundant from his job as an engineer and was doing a lot of soul-searching, so I think sex was probably not much in his thoughts then anyway.

I thought my libido would make a comeback after menopause but it didn’t. “What if it never comes back?” I asked John in bed one night.

“It’s nothing to worry about,” he replied. “We’re in our 50s, we’re fit and healthy and still very much in love with each other, and I don’t see any benefit in fretting about sex if neither of us is bothered about having it.”

A New Phase In The Relationship

His reply was both logical and reassuring. Our marriage would have been in deep trouble if one of us had still felt the need to be swinging naked from the chandeliers on a nightly basis, but thankfully we both seemed happy to move into a different phase of our relationship.

Perhaps this sounds too easy, but I have always felt secure in my marriage to John. We are very lucky that we talk easily and openly about whatever’s bothering us, and that we have shared interests.

We used to make love until dawn in the early days. Today we’d rather put on our boots and head up into the Dales for a long walk and a pub lunch, or catch a flight to Paris or Budapest to explore the city for a weekend.

We both love cooking and homemaking, taking to the road in our vintage MG, spending time with our 17-year-old son who’ll be leaving for university next year, and dreaming about buying a dilapidated property in France that we can renovate in our dotage.

Happy In A Sexless Marriage

We have plans and dreams, and we don’t need sex to fulfill them. We do need the closeness of sharing a bed, of cuddling up next to each other on the sofa in the evenings, of walking hand-in-hand sometimes.

I know people will judge the path we have chosen. They will say there must be something wrong, something missing, in a sexless marriage; that there is something unnatural about our celibacy.

But that’s not how we see it. So irrelevant is sex to me, in fact, that I don’t even think it would be a deal-breaker if John had it with someone else.

It would shock me because, like me, he says he’s not interested in sex any more, but it would make no sense to call time on my marriage simply because John had chosen to find elsewhere something he knew wasn’t available at home.

Anyway I’m confident that, like me, he cherishes and respects our relationship, and would be unlikely to put it in jeopardy for something we have both grown to regard as extraneous.

Related Articles From High50:

Does An Affair Automatically Mean Divorce?

How To Have A Happy Marriage

We Have Great Sex – Now The Kids Can’t Hear Us

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WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court is set to hear historic arguments in cases that could make same-sex marriage the law of the land.

The justices are meeting Tuesday to offer the first public indication of where they stand in the dispute over whether states can continue defining marriage as the union of a man and a woman, or whether the Constitution gives gay and lesbian couples the right to marry.

The court is hearing extended arguments, scheduled to last 2 ½ hours, which also will explore whether states that do not permit same-sex marriage must nonetheless recognize such unions from elsewhere.

Same-sex couples can marry in 36 states and the District of Columbia.

The cases before the court come from Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio and Tennessee, four of the 14 remaining states that allow only heterosexual marriage. Those four states had their marriage bans upheld by the federal appeals court in Cincinnati in November. That is the only federal appeals court that has ruled in favor of the states since the Supreme Court in 2013 struck down part of the federal anti-gay marriage law.

Justice Anthony Kennedy has written the court’s three prior gay rights decisions, including the case from two years ago. All eyes will be on Kennedy for any signals that he is prepared to take the final step in granting marriage rights to same-sex couples.

Such an outcome was inconceivable just a few years ago.

The first state to allow gay and lesbian couples to marry was Massachusetts, in 2004. Even as recently as October, barely a third of the states permitted it. Now, same-sex couples can marry in 36 states and the District of Columbia, a dramatic change in the law that has been accompanied by an equally fast shift in public opinion.

The main thrust of the states’ case is to reframe the debate.

“This case is not about the best marriage definition. It is about the fundamental question regarding how our democracy resolves such debates about social policy: Who decides, the people of each state or the federal judiciary?” John Bursch, representing Michigan, wrote in his main brief to the court.

Other arguments by the states and more than five-dozen briefs by their defenders warn the justices of harms that could result “if you remove the man-woman definition and replace it with the genderless any-two-persons definition,” said Gene Schaerr, a Washington lawyer.

The push for same-sex marriage comes down to fairness, said Mary Bonauto, who will argue on behalf of the plaintiffs. The people who have brought their cases to the Supreme Court are “real people who are deeply committed to each other. Yet they are foreclosed from making that commitment simply because of who they are,” she told reporters last week.

Arguments made by Bonauto, other lawyers for same-sex couples and more than six-dozen supporting briefs have strong echoes of the 1967 Loving v. Virginia case, in which the Supreme Court struck down state bans on interracial marriage. In that case, the justices were unanimous that those bans violated the constitutional rights of interracial couples.

No one expects unanimity this time. But many believe the justices will take the final step toward what gay rights supporters call marriage equality, in part because they allowed orders in favor of same-sex couples to take effect even as the issue made its way through the federal court system.

That was action through inaction, as other judges played a major role over the years. Only 11 states have granted marriage rights to same-sex couples through the ballot or the legislature. Court rulings are responsible for all the others.

A decision is expected in late June.

___

Follow Mark Sherman on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/shermancourt .

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