Silent Divorce: Why sexless marriages are the elephants in our bedrooms, by Stephanie Shaakaa

A marriage without intimacy is like a country with no currency.  It still exists on the map, but nothing of value is exchanging hands.

We don’t talk about it in public. But the whispers are deafening.

The perfect Instagram anniversaries. The matching church outfits. The “my darling husband” captions.

And yet, behind closed doors, the bed has been cold for months, sometimes years.

We are living through an epidemic of sexless marriages. And the silence is louder than the truth.

In homes across Nigeria, couples have stopped touching each other, not because of sickness, or distance, but because somewhere between the wedding and today, desire died.

Stress. Children. Exhaustion. Excuses are many. But the truth?

Love without touch isn’t love, it’s a business arrangement. A roommate contract sealed with rings and ceremonies.

We romanticize endurance. But there’s an endurance that kills the soul.

A woman can be praised for holding her home while starving for intimacy.

A man can be respected in public while lying beside a wife who hasn’t touched him in years.

We’ve turned human need into a shameful secret as if admitting it makes you weak.

Sexless marriages don’t die in a day.

They start with emotional withdrawal.

Then unspoken resentments.

Then unmet needs.

Then touch becomes rare. Then awkward. Then gone.

Still, the couple smiles at weddings. They teach others how to make marriage work.They just forget to mention the part about living like strangers under the same roof.

Some couples sleep side-by-side every night yet haven’t touched each other’s souls or skin in years.

When the bedroom goes cold, the whole house becomes a freezer.

It’s not always adultery that kills a marriage.

Sometimes it’s the quiet starvation of touch. Sometimes sex isn’t forbidden, it’s just forgotten.

A cold bed is the loudest silence in a marriage.

We have normalized emotional famine in the name of morality.

We have told women to endure and men to be patient and in doing so, we’ve made intimacy optional in marriage.

But here’s the truth.

If there’s no touch, no intimacy, no physical connection… you’re not married. You’re co-managing a household.

Some will say, Sex isn’t everything. And that’s true but intimacy is more than sex.

It’s the electricity in a touch.

The warmth of a hand reaching for yours.

The silent language that says,I see you. I want you.

Without that, love becomes theory.

And before you blame one gender know this, in many homes, both partners are guilty.

Some weaponize sex, withholding it as punishment.

Others neglect emotional closeness until desire dries up completely.

Then both carry the corpse of the marriage, pretending it’s still alive.

Maybe the tragedy isn’t just that couples stop touching each other.

Maybe it’s that we live in a culture where talking about it is more shameful than living through it.

Because here’s the bitter truth.You can survive without touch   but you cannot truly live without it.

If intimacy is the heartbeat of marriage, then every sexless union is living on borrowed time.

Pretending it’s fine doesn’t save it. It just delays the funeral.

The post Silent Divorce: Why sexless marriages are the elephants in our bedrooms, by Stephanie Shaakaa appeared first on Vanguard News.