I recently interviewed Demeter Delune, a prolific sex writer on Medium, about her own experience with a sexless marriage. What’s so striking about Delune’s experience is that so often we imagine women driving sexless marriages, denying their husbands sex.
Delune shows that this just isn’t true. Men also pull away sexually from their wives.
In Delune’s case, she told me during our interview that when she first met her husband, they couldn’t keep their hands off each other. The problems didn’t start until after they got married.
That’s when their sex life tapered off. Delune points to numerous problems her now ex-husband had:
He started smoking a lot of pot, and unbeknownst to me, was taking benzos more than what he was prescribed. We stopped sleeping in the same room together. He would fall asleep in his chair in the living room and I stopped waking him up to come to bed.
Then he got this grand idea to clean out our garage and turn it into a “man cave” and that was pretty much it. I rarely ever saw him from that point on. He would eat out there, sleep out there, play video games, etc.
Delune recounts that was also when he started watching a lot of porn and engaging with other women online. In short, he walled out Delune emotionally and physically.
The worse thing about it was that when Delune tried to get her husband to have sex with her, he ridiculed her for wanting sex “so much.”
[I was] told I should stop acting like “a man” about it. I was also told to just take care of myself if it was such a problem.
For anyone who’s even been in a sexless marriage, you know how easy it is for the partner who doesn’t want sex to shame the partner who wants it. In Delune’s case, she was the wife being ridiculed by her husband just for wanting intimacy.
If you want to read the whole story you can do so by clicking on the link below.
And if you want to learn more about Demeter Delune and her writing, I really recommend you subscribe to her own newsletter: Discourse With Demeter.
Besides being a great writer, Delune is one of the nicest writers on Medium. Unfortunately, she’s going through some tough times.
If you want to know what I’m talking about, I suggest you dig into the work of her husband, Damien. He also writes on Medium and his stories are often trending there.
And don’t forget to show Delune some love by tipping her through her virtual tip jar on Ko-Fi. Oh, and she also has a Just For Fans!
Sex-Starved, my memoir-in-progress
In other news, a lot of you know I’m writing the story of the aftermath of my own sexless marriage. Instead of telling the depressing story of my life while I was married, I’m highlighting my tales of my dating life after I divorced my husband.
Sex-Starved is the story of my insatiable need for sex once I left my marriage. And guess what, I’ve only posted two chapters, and this project is already ranked #58 out of 3.3K memoirs on Wattpad and #318 for stories about sexuality, out of 8.2K.
I think it’s worth you giving a gander. I’ve received some great feedback from my readers about how much the stories turned them on.
For now, it’s free to read. Don’t hesitate to shoot me an email if you have a comment or a suggestion about my book-in-progress: mysteriouswitt (@) gmail.com
Thank you so much for everything—especially for subscribing to this newsletter.
Thank you so much for the shout-out! I enjoyed our conversation about this, and will be writing more about it in my newsletter this Friday. I also need to make it over to Wattpad to check out your memoir in progress. It's given me an idea about writing down some of the crazy stories I have to tell about the first year I was divorced from my first husband and getting back into sex and life in general <3