We’ve spent almost a quarter century here at ErosBlog writing about sex, and in that time the quality and frequency of marital sex has been a topic often discussed. So it will hardly be novel to read Dr. Richard Wadsworth’s perspective that sex is the primary reason that marriages fail or succeed:
Sex is the primary reason that marriages fail or succeed.
As a psychiatrist and a medical doctor, this is not opinion, this is not an over generalization.
This is fact. Marriages fail because they’re not having good enough sex. And they’re not having good enough sex because the marriage is failing.
This will be one of the very first questions that a good therapist should ask. How often are you having sex? And rate the quality from 1 to 10. And if the frequency is low, and if the quality is low, the next question needs to be why.
That should be the very first thing addressed in most marriages. And you try to resolve that why as quickly as possible. Because at the heart of it, either he is not attracted to her or she is not attracted to him, and marital intimacy is not happening. And that means dopamine is not being released. That means oxytocin is not being released. That means that the brain is not associating their partner with pleasure and joy and acceptance and happiness. And instead, their brain is associating their partner with rejection and hurt. And it will lead to a divorce.
Now, there can be very legitimate reasons why marital intimacy is not happening. He cheated, or he’s looking at porn, or he’s terrible at it, or she treats me like a child, or he’s acting like a child, or I feel like it’s a chore. The reasons can go on and on and on and on. But these reasons have to be addressed so that the two partners can resume having marital intimacy as soon as possible, of the highest quality, and at least three to five times a week.
That’s based on statistics. That is what happily married couples do. And they do it because they’re happily married. And they’re happily married because they do it.
All of the neurotransmitters that are released when a person makes love causes you to like the other person. You will become a good spouse. Generally. There’s always exceptions.
Now, typically, people do not want to have sex unless all four types of love are addressed in the relationship. Number one: friendship. Number two: romance. Number three: familial love. And number four: sexual love. Usually,
people are not having sexual love because one of these other relationships, these types of love, is broken somehow. You need to fix it as quickly as possible so that you can make love as often as possible with the highest quality possible. Sometimes one partner just doesn’t even know how to do it correctly, and so it’s miserable for their partner.
All of these things need to be explored. And all of this should be the first conversation that you have with a therapist. Therapist that go in there and they start talking about, well, what happened when you were a child
or this, that and the other. Sure, but that’s not gonna fix the marriage. Sex is going to fix the marriage. Doing it, or figuring out why you’re not doing it, or doing it correctly.
I know this is not a popular solution. You can pretend to ignore psychology and biology and physiology and neuroscience. Biochemistry. You can pretend like it’s not important, and you’ll be wrong, and then you’ll get divorced. You can’t ignore biology and win in the end.
