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The sexual revolution that began in the Sixties resulted in one of the more liberated generations in history. Since then, the culture has steadily shed one taboo after another, leading to its present state of all sex, all the time. Mainstream TV shows and movies with explicit sex scenes, personal ads, dating services, nudity, a multibillion-dollar porn industry – the message is clear: If you aren't getting it regular, there is something wrong with you.

The pressure becomes even more intense if you're in a marriage – sex was why people used to get married in the first place, remember?

The persisting, pervading belief in that idea is perhaps what prevents so many people today from admitting, often even to themselves, that alack of physical intimacy with their spouse has become a fact of life.

“For us, it went from five nights a week before we were married, to once every five weeks afterwards, to once every five years after the kids arrived, to zero,” says Richard, a man in his mid-50s.

“It was like the story of the boiling frog. At first, you don't notice as the water gets warmer – as the sex gets less frequent. Time passes and then, without really seeing it coming, there you are: dead. You have no sex life and you can't even remember why it stopped.”

Because the subject is so painful, Richard did not want his real name used, and indeed no one interviewed for this article would go on the record with their story (all names have been changed).

In the culture at large, however, the sexless marriage has become a major topic, spawning a mini-industry of books, studies, therapies, online forums, advice columns – and the occasional tell-all.

One new book, just out in Britain, by a woman calling herself Carrie Jones, openly describes her sexless marriage, stating that she and her banker husband have been celibate for four years. In Cutting Up Playgirl: A Cheerful Memoir of Sexual Disappointment, Ms. Jones asserts that motherhood and sex are intrinsically incompatible.

She describes her book as a “Frigid Jones' Diary,” explaining to one newspaper that “I want to tell other women that they are not alone in not wanting to have sex with their long-term partners.”

She has also been clear about her long-range plan: to leave her husband in search of sexual fulfilment once the children are grown.

Who knows what Ms. Jones's real motivation is in writing a book in which she is blunt to the point of cruelty about her spouse?

But she may be doing a service by saying out loud what so many of us only allow ourselves think: The sexless marriage is rampant.

Dr. Phil, a reliable barometer of the zeitgeist if nothing else, says we're dealing with “an undeniable epidemic.”

A Google search of “sexless marriage” drew more than four million hits, while “fulfilling marriage” drew just over half a million.

Nor is anyone pretending it's anything new. According to a book blurb from The New Yorker for Mating in Captivity: Reconciling the Erotic and the Domestic, by Esther Perel, what we're looking at is “one of the most time-honoured institutions in human history: the sexless marriage.”

Ms. Perel, who is a Manhattan therapist, hit a nerve, and pay dirt, when her book came out and became a mini-phenomenon almost instantly.

She says her popularity at parties, and pretty well everywhere else, was never higher than when people found out that she was researching a book on sex and marriage. “People talk to me,” she writes. “Of course, that doesn't mean they tell me the truth. If there's one topic that invites concealment, it's this one.”

Now, 18 months later, her book is about to be published in 21 countries.

Ms. Perel certainly wasn't the first to notice that sex and marriage don't necessarily live in the same house. Cruise the relationship section in your local bookstore and you'll find titles such as He's Just Not Up for It Anymore : Why Men Stop Having Sex and What Women Are Doing About It (which estimates that 20 million marriages in the U.S. are sexless), The Sex Starved Marriage , After the Glass Slipper and Sexy Mamas.

Ten years ago, Denise Donnelly, a sociologist at Georgia State University and the author of Lives of Quiet Desperation: Involuntary Celibacy in Western Society, estimated that 16 per cent of couples have sex less than once a month.

In Japan (2005), one researcher described the situation as “dismal,” telling The Guardian that “if you don't have sex for a month, you probably won't have it for a year.” Last spring, the Japanese Ministry of Health and Welfare reported that almost 35 per cent of married couples had not had sex in more than a month and another study found that 26 per cent of women had not had sex with their husbands for a year or more. There's a sex clinic on the outskirts of Tokyo where clinicians set up women with “sex volunteers” – men who will meet them for discreet trysts because their husbands won't go near them.

The topic comes up in advice columns such as Ask Amy and Dear Annie that respond to letters with lines like “Craving intimacy in Indiana” and “My daughter's husband rejects her sexually.”

There is even a medical term for not getting laid. According to the American Psychological Association, if you're not sexually active (when you could be), you may have hypoactive sexual desire disorder (HSDD). Lack of desire has been medicalized, just like shyness, which is now considered a “social anxiety disorder.” And if both spouses have jobs outside the home, you're part of a demographic group known as DINS – double income no sex.

The long goodbye

One of the more common types of abstainer is the overwhelmed mom – more than 40 per cent of women in one study said they were just too tired.

“My desire definitely has gone down as I've aged,” says Elaine, a married mother of one. “It's not just the kid, it's not just the emotional imbalance, it's also your body and what you're going through. Time pressure is another factor. It's very easy to start seeing it as one more thing I have to do. And it shouldn't be that way. It should be a pleasure you share with each other.”

Her sex life began to languish after the birth of her child; it was difficult and afterward she found sex painful. That and exhaustion created a rift between her and her husband. “It wasn't a situation that was by mutual agreement. He's still angry I've pulled away.”

Although she still loves her husband and isn't leaving, she says, they have become locked in a cycle that is difficult to break. “To be honest with myself, I do feel that I'm missing something. I want that intimacy. I want it emotionally and I'd like to have it physically as well, but I don't want it at the cost of sacrificing myself to a situation that's not true to me, engaging in sex with someone I'm really angry with, or who I feel is not behaving like a grownup, or is not living up to responsibility.”

For Richard, the lack of sex in his marriage eventually led to divorce, even though the problem was never discussed.

“We couldn't talk about sex, period. She did not like it – not even sexual references, or jokes or double entendres. Any of the fun that can go with sex. Sex is about intimacy. At its best, it's about love and passion. But it can be fun and funny and dirty and exciting too. It was none of those things for her except maybe dirty – and not in a good way.”

Nor did he feel comfortable discussing it with anyone else: “Two things happen when men get married and stop having sex. They either talk about it all the time because that's all they can do, or they stop talking about it altogether. It's weird. … Everyone knows no one else is having sex, but no one says anything. It can actually be kind of funny.”

Both Richard and Elaine fit the cultural stereotype of sex-desiring men and withholding women – remember the scene in Annie Hall when Alvy and Annie are each talking to their analysts about how often they have sex? He says, “Hardly ever. Maybe three times a week.” She says, “Constantly. I'd say three times a week.”

In reality, however, it can just as easily be the wife who is craving sex while her husband remains “frigid.”

“I have been married nearly 24 years to a man with a very low sex drive and very little interest in sex. No, he is not having an affair and he is not gay. I knew I had a much higher sex drive than he did when we married,” wrote one woman in an online forum on a marriage website called 2-in-2-1. “Yet at the time I thought it fairly shallow of me not to marry him just because of that. … It is a very lonely place to be … in a marriage without intimacy. We are sibling-like, not really like a married couple.”

Another woman reports that near the end of her mostly celibate marriage, when her husband finally proposed sex as a way to save their relationship, she refused. After years of sexual rejection, she said, “I was too angry to forgive him.”

What lies beneath

For couples who want to stay married, and want to have sex again before they die, therapy may help – if they're able to talk about the problem. According to Vancouver sex therapist Pega Ren, “Our whole society is afraid to talk about sex, except other people's. We talk about sex as a topic, but we don't talk about sex as personal responsibility and personal enjoyment. We don't talk about what we want, we don't ask for what we want, we don't appreciate what we get. And so we have a great deal of sadness about our personal experiences of sex.”

Sex therapists say that when a couple comes to see them, a conversation about sexual problems usually evolves into a discussion of other problems. In some cases, one or both partners – though unable to admit it – actually want a divorce, and are avoiding sex either because they're in denial or because it's part of a larger, passive-aggressive battle plan.

But among couples who want to work on their marriage, says Beth Mares, a psychotherapist in Toronto, a common problem is communication. Many of the couples she deals with, she says, do not know how to negotiate for what they want. Even a guy who is fearlessly eloquent in the boardroom may have no idea how to ask for what he wants sexually.

As Ms. Mares says, “Some people are very assertive in the outside world, and that helps because they've got the skill, but they've got an emotional block. Usually people don't even know it's there.”

Desperate measures

But what happens when therapy doesn't work? For example, Ms. Jones, the author, says she was sick of the advice doled out by “agony aunts” and therapists to “go and work at your marriage.”

“But I didn't want to work on mine,” she says bluntly. “I wanted someone to say, ‘Actually, perhaps nothing will make you want to sleep with your husband again.' ”

Ms. Mares acknowledges the problem: “It's hard to get your body to lie. You can fool yourself about a lot of things, or just accept things because you're used to them or that's what you grew up with in your family of origin, but it's hard to get your body to be sexual when you're just not feeling that way.”

For some, the answer is to choose sheer pragmatism.

One woman who didn't want sex was told by her therapist that if she wanted her marriage to last, and if she wanted her husband to be faithful, she would have to acknowledge his desire for sex, and accommodate him.

“For a lot of men, sex is a great way to create and build intimacy,” says Richard. “Having sex can be a great ice-breaker. For women, it seems sex is the result of intimacy … so you get this vicious cycle. Let's say it starts with the woman feeling some distance from the man. So she won't have sex. No sex for him means increasing the distance, which means she pulls back more. They are caught in this sex-death spiral. However it starts, it ends with a very cold bed.”

Other sex-deprived spouses seek relief elsewhere. One woman who did not want to live without sex was advised by her therapist that if she wanted to stay married, and if sex with her husband was not an option, she should consider having an affair.

One man says he works out in the basement at home and that's all the “action” he gets.

Another says, “You suck it up and get on with it. If the statistics are right, half the time you go outside the marriage for sex and I guess the rest of the time you create a more intimate relationship with your right hand.”

Reality and perception

Not every sexless marriage is in need of repair. A British poll found that only 7 per cent of Britons think sex is the most important aspect of a relationship, while 59 per cent said trust, and 20 per cent said conversation and communication topped the list of priorities.

“We go for months,” says Lydia, who has been married, and faithful, to her husband for 22 years. “Then one of us will say, ‘Hey, we haven't done that in a while,' and then, maybe we'll get around to it. But it's not an issue.”

They still love spending time together, they still go out for dinner “à deux,” she still laughs at his jokes.

But the pressure to equate a good marriage with a satisfying sex life remains.

Alfred Kinsey, the grandfather of all sex researchers, reported that the average 50-year-old was having sex once a week – a “fact” that makes anyone who is not feel inadequate.

On top of that, regular sex is touted as being good for your health, with various studies saying that sexual frequency is related to – among other benefits – fewer colds and flus, reduced risk of heart disease, weight loss and avoidance of depression. According to researchers at the Royal Edinburgh Hospital in Scotland, it can even make you look younger.

Proper levels of intimacy are also required by society, it seems. Influential social commentators such as Caitlin Flanagan, author of To Hell with All That: Loving and Loathing Our Inner Housewife, take issue with the notion that it's okay to be in a sexless marriage, even if both parties agree.

“Once children come along, it's easy for parents to regard each other as co-presidents of an industrious little corporation,” she wrote in an Atlantic Monthly article. “Certainly, all sound marriages benefit from sudden and unexpected infusions of goodwill – What luck! Here we are, so many years later and still as happy as ever! – but the element that regularly restores a marriage to something with an aspect of romance rather than collegiality is sex.”

The heart of the matter

It may be that we aren't being realistic about what kind of relationship we want with our partners over time. Or perhaps it's time to examine our ideas and expectations of the institution of marriage itself.

“Maybe sex isn't something you can do part-time,” says Marilyn, who has come to accept her sexless marriage. “Maybe it does fade away.” For her, living platonically with someone she loves dearly is more important than sexual gratification.

Similarly, Michele Weiner Davis, a marriage therapist and author of The Sex Starved Marriage, admits that she and her husband have struggled with balancing their sex life. “Human beings are incredibly complex,” she writes, and when people become intimate, “they do so for a variety of reasons besides seeking sexual gratification.”

Ms. Weiner Davis suggests that most marriages do better if the partners are having sex, but she also says a sexless marriage can survive if it's based on mutual consent.

In the end, with no simple solution in sight for those in an unbalanced union, it seems to come down to one choice: Do you want sex? Or do you want marriage?

If nothing else, the public debate has revealed a truth that many people have known privately for a long time: The two don't always go together.

Cate Cochran is the author of Reconcilable Differences: Marriages End. Families Don't. She lives in Toronto. This article is the first in an occasional series on Mythbusting: How our most rigidly held beliefs about marriage and family are breaking down in the face of new realities.