Twenty—Men Who Come
I understand sexless marriages. Not as a failure of love or commitment or even desire. As a structural outcome. Something that happens gradually, without decision, to two people who are otherwise doing everything right.
She’s tired. Not as excuse—as fact. The children, the work, the maintenance of an entire life. The body that was once primarily hers becomes primarily functional in a different way—used up by the day before the night begins. Sex requires energy and attention and a particular quality of presence that exhaustion makes genuinely unavailable. This isn’t rejection. It’s arithmetic.
And he—faithful, patient, unwilling to betray what they’ve built—waits. Not dramatically. Just waits, the way you wait for weather to change, and the waiting becomes the condition and the condition becomes the marriage and somewhere in there the wanting goes underground the way wanting does when it has nowhere to go.
The less you get the less you get. Not just physically—though that’s real, the body finding its own level, recalibrating downward until a man in his fifties genuinely believes that what he has is what’s available. But intimately too. The less you are touched the less you expect to be touched. The less you expect the less you ask. The less you ask the less you know what you’d ask for if you could.
And then there’s the community.
A man doesn’t just marry a woman. He marries a life—a set of relationships, obligations, social coordinates that organise everything from Sunday afternoons to how he’s perceived at work. The marriage is the keystone of an entire architecture. Pull it and everything shifts.
Which means the man with odd sexual proclivities—and I use the word odd only in the sense of outside the expected, not deviant, not wrong, just not what the architecture was designed to accommodate—has nowhere to put them.
Not because he’s ashamed exactly, though shame is usually present. But because the question who am I going to tell has no good answer. Not his wife, for reasons too numerous and too tender to list. Not his friends, who are also his community, which is also his marriage’s community. Not his colleagues. Not his brother.
My brother told me once that I’d have to stop sex work after fifty. That was the age men stopped having sex. He said it with the casual certainty of a man stating something obvious—not advice exactly, just the way things were.
He was telling me about himself. About his own marriage, his own recalibration, the level his wanting had found after years of the less you get the less you get. He had no idea that’s what he was doing. He thought he was describing a biological fact.
I didn’t argue. But I thought about the men who had sat on my sofa that year. Men in their fifties, sixties, seventies. Men who had been told, by the accumulated weight of their lives if not in so many words, that this part of them was over. Who arrived not knowing whether what they felt was normal or aberrant or simply embarrassing, and left knowing that their brother had been wrong about them, even if their brother had been right about himself.
Sex doesn’t end at fifty. Wanting doesn’t end at fifty. What ends, sometimes, is the opportunity. The context. The person willing to be honest in the same room.
That’s all that ends.
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