Silent Consent: Sexless Marriages Don’t Begin — They Settle

There’s a detail that’s easy to avoid when talking about sexless marriages, and it’s the one that matters most. They don’t always begin with a simple refusal. They often begin with silence.

I didn’t want a sexless marriage. That part is simple, and it matters that I say it plainly. But wanting something and enabling its absence are not opposites. They can coexist — and they did.

What I have had to accept, slowly and without the comfort of self-deception, is that I was part of the process that led there. Not in some dramatic, villainous way. Not through a single decision. But through a series of adaptations that felt reasonable at the time and corrosive in hindsight.

By staying.
By adjusting.
By accepting the conditions, I didn’t consent explicitly — and then living within them long enough for them to harden into routine.

I didn’t wake up one morning and agree to a celibate life. But by settling into one, I inadvertently sent a message: this is tolerable. And once that signal was sent, it was difficult to retract without consequence.

It wasn’t tolerable. Not to me.

I wasn’t okay about it — for a long time.

One of the complicating factors was that my wife was a closeted asexual. She wanted, believed, needed, monogamy — the structure, the safety, the picture, the permanence, the moral enclosure of marriage — without the physical component most people quietly assume comes with it. That created a particular kind of bind: a marriage that looked intact, even admirable, from the outside, but operated on terms that were never equal.

There was no affair.
No betrayal anyone could point to.
No clear villain.

Just an absence of intimacy — and the expectation that loyalty should be proof enough of love.

What interests me now isn’t assigning fault. It’s examining the mechanics of how these arrangements persist. Because they don’t require cruelty to survive. They require compliance. And compliance is often rewarded with peace — at least initially.

That peace is seductive. It looks like maturity. It feels like emotional restraint. And for men especially, it’s easy to mistake endurance for virtue.

This dynamic didn’t stay contained in my personal life. It bled into my writing long before I consciously recognised it. If you’ve read SEETHINGS, you’ll recognise it immediately in the voice of Mitchell Felding. Mitchell doesn’t complain about deprivation. He adapts to it. He functions. He maintains appearances. And that adaptation — not the violence, not the mythology — is the real disturbance at the heart of the book.

Mitchell exists because wanting itself became improper.

Because desire, when it has nowhere legitimate to go, doesn’t vanish. It relocates.

That’s the part we’re taught not to talk about.

After discussing this publicly, I received a letter from a man whose situation was structurally different but eerily familiar in consequence. He wrote to me because he recognised the shape of the silence, even though the terms of his marriage had been known from the beginning.

He is a gay man who married a woman (assumedly hetero). Not under coercion. Not under religious pressure. Both parties understood the arrangement before committing to it. What they entered into was often described as a “lavender marriage” — companionship, loyalty, shared history — with a small sexual component.

They built a life together. A home. A family. Over time, intimacy shifted from something physical to something logistical. Separate rooms became separate floors. Sex disappeared, not with argument or blame, but with practicality.

And yet, by most external measures, the marriage endured successfully.

He still described his wife as his person. His emergency contact. The person to call if something went wrong. They shared investments, memories, and the kind of shared history that makes separation feel less like liberation and more like amputation.

What struck me was not the uniqueness of his arrangement, but the clarity with which he understood its cost.

He wasn’t writing to defend his choices. He wasn’t asking for absolution. He was acknowledging something many people avoid naming: that even when consent is explicit, consequence remains. That choosing a structure doesn’t immunise you against its psychological effects.

He wrote because he recognised the same containment in my work — the same quiet redirection of unmet need into places it was never meant to go.

This is where discussions about sexless marriages often fracture. One side demands endurance. The other demands escape. Both miss the more difficult question in the middle: what happens to a person who stays without needs being met?

Because staying is rarely neutral.

It teaches you to minimise yourself. To downgrade your expectations until they resemble character flaws rather than needs. And eventually, it teaches you to stop asking altogether — not because the answer is no, but because the asking itself feels disruptive due to negative feelings.

That was my experience. I didn’t want to break anything. I didn’t want to be accused of prioritising sex over stability. I didn’t want to be the man who “couldn’t be satisfied.” So I adapted. Quietly. Respectably.

The cost of that adaptation wasn’t immediate. It accumulated.

And this is where SEETHINGS becomes useful, not as an autobiography but as an examination. Mitchell Felding is not a stand-in for me. He is an extrapolation of a condition: what happens when suppression is mistaken for control. When civility becomes a cage. When the self you present to the world bears less and less resemblance to the self that still wants.

I didn’t write SEETHINGS to excuse anything. I wrote it to understand something that didn’t want to be discussed in plain language. Fiction allowed me to pull the mechanism apart without turning the process into a confessional spectacle.

But the mechanism is simple enough to state clearly here:

Silence functions as consent once it’s sustained long enough.

That doesn’t mean everyone should leave their marriage. It doesn’t mean endurance is always wrong. It means pretending that nothing is happening is itself an action. And actions have outcomes, whether we acknowledge them or not.

The man who wrote to me understood that. So do many others who never put it into words. They live inside respectable arrangements that ask something from them continuously, quietly, and without acknowledgement.

The question isn’t whether these marriages exist. They always have.

The question is whether we’re honest about what they require.

If you’re interested in how these dynamics play out when taken to their psychological extreme, SEETHINGS is available through Smashwords.

And for further writing, essays, and audio that explore these themes without sentimentality, you’ll find me at michaelformanwriting.com.

No prescriptions. No easy exits.

Just a clear-eyed look at what happens when staying becomes agreement — and agreement slowly erases the part of you that once wanted more.

–Michael (Dark fiction. Author of SEETHINGS (the first book), free for a limited time)