Casual observers assumed Martine Langley’s marriage was not merely happy, but physically fulfilled. Her husband, Chris — sophisticated, worldly and 24 years her senior — would parade his attractive young wife and flirt ostentatiously with her. His banter among friends was invariably risqué. His aim, it seemed, was to solicit their admiration and envy. Yet Chris’s public image and private persona could not have been more at odds. When his audience had dispersed, all intimacy with his young wife ceased. Although Martine tried desperately to arouse her husband’s passion, she consistently failed. In fact, during their 16-year marriage they did not have sex once.
‘Chris and I shared a bed yet we never consummated our marriage,’ says Martine, 52. ‘He’d deploy a whole litany of excuses to avoid physical contact. One night he’d say it was too hot; the next it was too cold. Then there would be something vital he had to watch on TV. I even lost out to the Grand Prix. ‘I constantly asked myself why he didn’t want to have sex. I assumed there was something wrong with me. And he swore he wasn’t being unfaithful.’Martine married Chris, a divorced father of two grown-up children and a successful self-made businessman, when she was 25.
‘I tried everything — seduction techniques I’d read about, pretty underwear, massages — yet nothing worked. His brush-offs made me feel cheap, dirty and humiliated. ‘He was clever, too. When I challenged him about it, he’d reply: “It’s not that I won’t have sex with you that’s the issue — it’s your reaction that’s the problem.”‘He constantly shifted the blame onto me, yet I wasn’t remotely sexually forward. He seemed to want to create animosity, so sex would be the last thing on our minds.’
Although we live in an increasingly sex-obsessed society, marriages that are bereft of sex are, it seems, unexceptional — even among glamorous Hollywood couples. Indeed, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s former mistress claimed he cited his ‘sexless marriage’ to wife Maria Shriver as justification for his adulterous liaison with her. It isn’t surprising the frequency of sex wanes in long marriages. What is startling, however, is the relatively high number of marriages in which it does not feature at all. Can such relationships ever be happy?
Paula Nicolson, professor of social health psychology at Royal Holloway, University of London, has conducted research on women’s sexuality and the myths that pervade it. She points out: ‘Marriages endure for a multiplicity of reasons, many of them unconnected with sex. ‘There are plenty of couples who’ve been together perhaps 25 or 30 years and who have decided sex is no longer important. However, they calculate that other things — such as companionship, security, familiarity — are worth staying together for.
And they are prepared to sacrifice their sex life for them. ‘Affection often remains. There will be physical contact, kissing and cuddling — just not full sex.’ For Martine, however, there was not even the comfort of such peripheral intimacy. As soon as she married Chris, all sexual contact — even the perfunctory couplings that had preceded their wedding — stopped.
Martine — who is originally from Cornwall — had had three lovers before Chris, so she knew his lack of interest in sex was unusual. But she assumed lack of opportunity and self-reproach contributed to his apathy: when their romance began, Chris was married.
‘I was 20 when I started working with Chris,’ she explains. ‘He took me out for lunches and these segued into intimate evenings. Bit by bit, we fell in love and began an affair. Looking back, I realise that even in the throes of an illicit affair, sex was rare. At the time I attributed this to his guilt, but I brushed aside my misgivings because the real attraction lay in Chris’s wisdom and sophistication.’
However, if it was Chris’s power that had proved a potent lure to Martine, soon their roles were reversed. After a couple of years, and by now divorced, he suffered from complications following stomach surgery. Illness prevented him from running his successful computer sales company, and he proposed to Martine.
She became not only his wife but the sole breadwinner. ‘I had a successful career selling imported luxury products, and was away from home a lot during the week, which meant weekends were our only opportunity to be intimate. Chris invented every excuse under the sun not to have sex,’ she recalls.
For Martine, it was a source of acute embarrassment that what she perceived as the ‘traditional’ sexual roles had been reversed. While female friends complained of flagging libidos, it was she who was frustrated. ‘My girl friends just said: “You should consider yourself lucky. My husband is so demanding. He’s always pestering me for sex.” ’
However, social psychologist Dr Gary Wood points out that it is a common myth that men are invariably more sexually voracious than women. ‘It’s a popularly held misconception that men fall into an evolutionary stereotype, that they’re compelled by some primal urge to go out spreading their seed; that they’re fired by animalistic lust,’ he says. ‘But this is overlooking the fact that we’re not animals; we’re humans with the capacity to make considered choices. ‘Women, similarly, are often stereotyped as the ones who “go off sex”. In fact, it’s equally likely that men will become tired and unresponsive. This is often the time when women are susceptible to affairs.’
Martine, however, was not unfaithful, despite numerous opportunities to take a clandestine lover. Instead, she and Chris moved from Cornwall to Belgium, and she fervently hoped the change of scene would breathe life into her marriage. But there her sense of rejection grew. Chris seemed to feel even more guilt about leaving his grown-up children and opted to end his marriage to Martine and return to England to be closer to them. ‘It came as a relief,’ she says. ‘I no longer loved him.’
Could guilt alone have been a potent enough force to prevent Chris from making love to his wife for 16 years? Professor Nicolson believes stronger psychological and physiological inhibitors were at play.
‘A lot of men in their 50s suffer from erectile dysfunction, and if they are in a long-term relationship they often settle into a phase of comfortable intimacy instead of having sex. In Chris’s case he had a new, young wife and it is possible he could not perform sexually, but could not bear the thought of finding out why.’