In a YouTube Sex Talk podcast, I recently made (are you subscribed yet, by the way?) I mentioned that one wife had told me she would be okay if she did not make love with her husband even for two years, because that is how done she was with the whole hullabaloo called sex. I shared that I had asked her whether that meant she did not mind her husband cheating during that sabbatical, and she looked at me like I had grown a pair of horns. After watching the channel, a friend of mine who is also a marriage and relationship counsellor reached out via WhatsApp saying: “Heard you talking about some not having sex for two years… how about 11 years?” I assumed she was talking about single, healthy Ugandans happily choosing celibacy for years – which is a growing trend, by the way – but she quickly qualified her submission, saying many of her clients have been married for decades, still share the marital beds, but stopped being intimate with one another a long time ago. She reminded me of a Ugandan married to an Asian, who said for decades now, they share a bed like brother and sister, and they are not even fighting or angry with each other. Just. Apparently, asexual marriages are more common than we know. “Most people start the union for wrong reasons. Others, after the love flies out, stay for status, but no sex,” the counsellor, who requested anonymity not to freak out her clients, shared. “Some, who have had a relationship before the marriage, keep comparing the sex [with what they did with an ex] and then give up because the current spouse does not measure up.” But because there is financial comfort and possibly children, they stay, nonetheless, to keep up appearances. And the ex does not always have the upper hand, by the way. For one wife, her ex was terribly abusive and routinely raped her when she said no after he had physically assaulted her. When she eventually left and married a man that adores her, she came with all her unresolved baggage and trauma, and that has effectively killed the sex in her marriage, and her frustrated husband is hanging on to the union by a thread. Others stay for religious reasons – “not to bring shame to my church and parish as a divorcee” – but the sex clearly no longer lives at their address. I asked the counsellor, “So, do your clients come to you because one of them wants to rekindle the sex; because one of them is cheating… for what exactly do they seek your services?” She said: “Several want us to revive the sex for them. The big issue is that most of them don’t communicate – both men and women – if the partner is not doing what they want or would like. This makes the men just beep and they are done, leading to many things that turn nasty. Strange things happen behind closed doors.” You may assume that automatically it is only women that give up on sex, leaving their husbands high and exposed to infidelity. Not necessarily. There are also many low-libido men that find every excuse not to make love with their wives, and are not cheating on them either. On the rare occasion that they show up for sex, they seem to ‘lose their way’ and end up trying to force their way up the wrong Exit, which has led one wife to suspect that the only reason her marriage is asexual is because her husband is secretly attracted to fellow men, but is too religious and traditional to dare step out of his closet, full throttle. caronakazibwe@gmail.comThe post Sex does not live here anymore appeared first on The Observer.