Long-term relationship suddenly became sexless after marriage — is this something that can realistically be fixed?

Seeking Advice

With a long-term relationship, there are always details that will be left out of a short description like this, but here is a rough breakdown of what’s happening.
Years 1–3: Dating, horny, couldn’t keep each other’s pants on. Madly in love with each other even through hard times.
Years 3–4: Engaged. We slowly weaned off sex to make it feel more special again after we got married (with some religious guilt contributing to this as well).
Year 4: Married, and suddenly she doesn’t want sex. She has been openly communicative that she doesn’t have the same drive she used to. We have ~1–2 intense arguments per week because of unresolved needs, and the timing of this — essentially starting right after we got married — has been really difficult for me to reconcile.
There is also seemingly always a “reason” she doesn’t want sex.
At first, she made it seem like it was because I had watched porn about a year ago, right around when we stopped having sex. She said it turned her off or made her think I was thinking about other girls while we were having sex. For context, my wife is beautiful and quite literally my dream girl, and I have never communicated otherwise.
We went to therapy (and still are) and have been working through that for months. Right when it feels like we’re making progress on that issue, suddenly it becomes the fact that she hates coming home to a dirty house and that makes her not feel in the mood. So I start excessively cleaning, especially our bedroom, since she indicated that was the room that made her feel the most stressed and therefore least interested in sex.
Then she made a comment about my breath and how it “literally kills her,” so I start brushing my teeth, flossing, and using mouthwash multiple times a day and ALWAYS before I get home from work.
There have probably been a few other things, but the general point is that there always seems to be something else that I’m doing wrong or something else that needs to change.
And to be clear, I don’t believe my wife owes me sex. I’m not looking for ways to convince or pressure her into having sex with me. I understand that nobody should have sex when they don’t want to.
What I’m struggling with is that sexual compatibility is a major part of a marriage for me, and our sexual relationship now is radically different from what I understood it would be when we got married.
Everything else in our marriage is going great, even according to her. She texts me throughout the day telling me how much she loves our life, and I genuinely believe she means it. I still love her to death.
But this has become a HUGE struggle for me.
I have calmly communicated to her that if someone had told me before marriage that sex would essentially disappear, it might have changed my decision about getting married to them — or at minimum, I would have wanted to know that this was likely to be our relationship.
She gets very offended when I say this, and it usually turns into an argument.
I think the hardest part for me, beyond even the lack of sex itself, is that I sometimes feel like I was unintentionally misled. I don’t necessarily believe she consciously manipulated or “tricked” me. I just feel like I entered the marriage expecting one kind of relationship based on our first several years together, and then something changed very dramatically almost immediately after getting married.
So I’m trying to understand what is actually going on here.
For those who have experienced something similar, is this something that can realistically be rebuilt, or should I be seriously considering that we may simply be sexually incompatible?
We are both young, and I have a very high sex drive. I don’t want to throw away a marriage over something that could potentially be fixed, but I also don’t want to spend years trying to fix myself and chase increasingly specific reasons for why my wife doesn’t desire me if the underlying issue is something much deeper.
Any input is appreciated.

Posted Aug 27, 2026, 1:00 PM UTC

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