"Is It OK For Spouse to Withhold Sex?"

Someone came here by that search. [This entry is bumped up because it is still relevant.]

It used to be cultural and legally understood in this country that sex and marriage went hand-in-hand, so to speak. We can go all the way back to the Puritans, and if a wife told her friends her husband wasn't giving it to her as often as he should, word would inevitably get to other men in the community and that guy would be confronted. Withholding can be seen as a form of cheating. You're cheating your spouse out of something they should have.

Up until recent times, this concept of sex and marriage being necessarily intertwined continued. Unrelated men and women had no right to live together or even share a hotel room together, and in some places could be prosecuted for doing so. Marriages could be considered null if they were never "consummated" with intercourse. Husbands could rape their wives without violating a law, because her body, or at least her sexuality, belonged to him (and his to her... people forget that part). Adultery was grounds for divorce and could impact the outcome of the divorce. Affair partners can still, in a few places, be successfully sued by the scorned spouse for "alienation of affection". To this day, when a married person is a plaintiff in a lawsuit, their spouse can join in, depending, claiming a loss of consortium (less or no sex because of wrongs done to the spouse by the entity being sued).

The question about whether it is OK for a spouse to withhold sex has to be addressed to someone, though.


The Biblical concept of marriage includes the husband and wife becoming "one flesh". The Apostle Paul wrote that spouses were not to deprive each other except by mutual consent, and only temporarily.

Dennis Prager received and still receives much scorn and accusations of supporting marital rape for telling wives that if they're married to a good man, they should make love with him even if they're not in the mood when he starts up. (Prager assumes husbands don't need similar instruction.)

Dr. Laura's approach is to appeal to pleasure for oneself: "Why give up perfectly good orgasms?"

Feminists tend to reject the idea that a wife owes her husband sex, and at least some of them probably think the same goes for husbands owing wives sex.

Modern individualistic notions of bodily autonomy might indicate that it's OK to withhold sex.

Plenty of women do it, whatever their philosophy. Some might use the excuse "Well, I'm just not turned on. He needs to do X, Y, and Z, first!" But almost all of them would hop right into bed with at least one or two celebrities they don't actually personally know.

Especially in no-fault states, there is no question that, legally speaking, it is OK to withhold sex because there is absolutely no punishment for doing so. Your spouse can leave you, but you'll get the same settlement you would have if you hadn't withheld.

Morally/socially, the answer depends on one's view of the nature of marriage, and what obligations and entitlements spouses have. This is why I ask "What do spouses owe each other?"

Practically speaking, ask yourself, "Is this how I want to live? Holding back on something that's supposed to be an expression of love with the person I'm supposed to love more than any other mortal person? Something mutually enjoyable? Something we can enjoy essentially for free?"

As some people put it, "If I'm hungry and the refrigerator is empty, I'm going out to eat." Then there are people who insist, even though they refuse to "cook" for their spouse, that their spouse not make themselves anything to eat. What person with a sex drive wants to live like that?

We also need to ask, "What constitutes withholding?" I mean two different things by that.

The first is that withholding can take many forms in addition to one spouse saying to the other "I'm not going to have sex with you." It can be things like "delaying" sex. "Tomorrow, OK?" And then repeating that. Or imitating a corpse during sex. It can be things like feigning illness, picking fights, or making oneself so unattractive as to turn off their partner (nasty attitude, poor hygiene or lack of grooming, significant weight gain, etc.)

The second is that there's more to sex than intercourse. Erections are biologically and psychologically complicated. If a husband in unable to sustain erections for intercourse, is he withholding? What if his wife says it is her favorite thing and eschews cunnilingus or manual sex? What if he really wants fellatio and she refuses? What if he really wants to see her and she insists on total darkness or being almost entirely clothed?

Finally, I'm curious as to who was asking the question. If the rejecting person was asking, I'd implore them to reconsider what they're doing. If your marriage was voluntary (instead of coerced), you chose to get married and part of that should be sharing yourself sexually with your spouse. If it was the rejected person asking.... why? What if I made a clear case that withholding isn't OK? That's not going to change your spouse's behavior. So now what? Are you going to break up your marriage? Some would say your spouse already has done that, and that's true in some ways, but it's another matter to physically and socially separate, especially if you have minor children to raise. If someone who isn't married is asking, I would encourage you to avoid marrying.

Men can avoid dealing with this issue by refusing to marry in the first place, and for most men, that's exactly what I recommend.