A midlife sexual reckoning

Miranda July's new novel, All Fours, suggests a 'sexless marriage' can be the first step on a path to awakening

Celibacy is having a moment. As I wrote in my piece on the “sexless marriage” for The New York Times Magazine, Americans are having less sex on the whole, and many women who are not married, from the boysober to the 4B-ers, are using rejection of compulsory sex and sexuality as a political tool. Even Julia Fox sees celibacy as a way to 'take back control' in an era of reproductive violence against women.

Almost nowhere in our cultural lexicon, however, does the possibility of intentional celibacy in marriage exist. One of many sections I had to edit out of my piece for The Times was a chunk unpacking the cultural trope of the “sexless marriage,” an image and an idea that is used to shame women who don’t put out for their husbands, to blame wives for husbands’ non-consensual affairs, and most of all, to sidestep deeper questions about gender and power in marriage, monogamy and the moralization of infidelity, and the broader history of marital sex—which is one of violation, ownership, and control.

Marrying for love is a relatively recent historical phenomenon, and the idea that monogamous marriage can provide lifelong good sex is even newer. In her book on the history of marriage, Stephanie Coontz argues that while the nineteenth century introduced the idea of love into marriage, the twentieth century introduced the idea of mutually good sex. But marital rape was not criminalized nationwide until 1993, and even today, those laws are not always upheld.

In the 90s, sexual duty was also, in some ways, re-institutionalized in the field of couples therapy, which sought to optimize marriage by optimizing intimacy. Psychologists John Gottman and his third wife Julie, who specialize in things like “divorce prediction,” emphasized the importance of physical intimacy in long-term relationships. John Gottman’s book Why Marriages Succeed or Fail came out in 1994, suggesting that just as marriage was becoming more consensual for some, the culture was also becoming more paranoid about divorce.

Since then, we’ve seen relationship theories like Gary Chapman’s "love languages," which has roots in Southern evangelicalism, and outlines five romantic preferences— words of affirmation, quality time, physical touch, acts of service, or receiving gifts. It remains a popular shorthand for couples discussing conflicting attitudes toward intimacy and romance. (The internet likes to claim that all men’s love language is touch/sex, while women always want something else; I can’t find any real research backing this, because love languages are obviously not scientific categories, but anecdotally, seems true?)

Plenty of relationship advice pieces on forcing yourself into 6-second kisses and 5-minute hugs are still published regularly. For those who aren’t having much sex, there’s also digital commiseration. There are Reddit and Facebook communities for people “suffering” in sexless marriages where books like The Dead Bedroom Fix circulate. Some posts sound like those that appear in incel forums; in the popular Dead Bedrooms Redditt, men complain their wives are depriving them. Other members, including women, discuss methods for dealing with partners who have low sex drive or who don’t want to have sex, from visiting sex workers to reading erotica.

There’s a cultural life to the sexless marriage trope, too, in popular representations of marriage. The original 1973 version of Ingmar Bergman’s miniseries Scenes from a Marriage depicts a couple who seems content, until it’s revealed that the husband, Johan, is unsatisfied with their shared sexual life, which he says suffers from Marianne’s “devastatingly high standards.” Johan and Marianne’s relationship eventually implodes in scenes that prefigure more recent cinematic depictions of marriage, such as Marriage Story, the 2021 remake of Scenes from a Marriage, and Anatomy of a Fall, each of which depict unnervingly long, winding arguments about sexual repulsion, rejection, and general sexlessness.

When the sexless marriage isn’t a precursor to explosive betrayal or emotional torment, it’s comedy. In 2010’s Date Night, married couple Tina Fey and Steve Carell forgo sex after Fey’s character’s drooly nighttime mouth guard kills the mood. Later, Fey’s character finds out her friends are divorcing. She sympathizes with their craving for more sexual excitement, which her marriage certainly lacks, too— then is shocked to learn the divorcees were having sex twice a week, which seems to her like… a lot.

The so-called “sexless marriage” may be a sad sitcom joke, but it’s also understood as an inevitability. Part of the uncomfortable humor of marital sexlessness, after all, is its ubiquity. When I put out a call for my Times piece to speak with couples who aren’t having much sex in their marriages, one respondent said, “Isn’t this all marriage?”

The ubiquity of the trope itself— its pitiable misery forever betrothed to its humor— suggests more than a light dose of heteropessimism about marriage. That is: a dissatisfaction with the confines of heterosexuality, laced with cynicism and complaint, a “performative disaffiliation” from straightness, but not much real change or sense of agency. Heteropessimism is a term often used pejoratively, but it’s complicated, if only because redefining or reclaiming one’s sexuality and/or one’s attachments to major cultural institutions just isn’t easy work.

Enter this book!

The unnamed female narrator in Miranda July’s new novel, All Fours— a mother, wife, and artist who resembles July in that cheeky autofictional way— demonstrates for readers in the earliest pages just how fuzzy and inscrutable the outlines of one’s own cruel optimism or pessimism can be. The narrator is unsure what exactly unsettles her so about her domestic life, but she knows she feels “haunted, fluish with guilt about every single thing” she does or does not do. She is living with someone (her husband, a cis man named Harris) who isn’t very conflicted about home life, doesn’t believe the things she says and pretends to empathize with her to avoid looking like “the bad guy”, and who is “openly rewarded for each thing” he does, while she is “quietly shamed for the same things.” He’s not a bad guy, but motherhood has shoved sexism in her face, and not his; a “latent bias, internalized by both” has come between them now that they are parents.

The narrator is also concerned about her lackluster, “mind-rooted” sex life. She’s having sex with her husband, in the beginning of the book, about once a week, but she sees it like exercise— something she does because she should, not because she wants to, and mostly “to get out ahead of the pressure.”

Like the term “touched out,” the “sexless marriage” hides all such confusion about what happens between straight people as they age in a marriage, all these layered entanglements, shifting desires, changing relations with the world. Both of these phrases are just stand-ins for diverse states of complaint, dissatisfaction, and uncertainty about entire institutions; motherhood, marriage. They obscure the granular details of the big stuff. That is, the small stuff that happens at home, in moments of intimacy, the stuff of our lives. They’re catch-all catchphrases, but they serve a function, too, in that they name general states of crisis, confusion, pause, and retreat from the other. They also flatten. Because each of these phrases, in their own way, flag moments of potentiality. States of being in which we might affirm the institution that is hurting or distancing us from others, or step back, re-assess, and make another choice.

But locating what exactly one is attached to that’s causing strife (motherhood? marriage? homemaking? heterosexuality? and what particular version of each? how related?), what one needs space from (sex or men? marriage? this guy or all?), much less naming what else you might want or need to do differently in your life, and what’s preventing you from turning desire into something you have—again, not easy tasks, lots of stuff going on there. It’s no wonder it takes so many women approximately four decades to begin to unpack all this shit.

“There was no way to fight back against this, no one to point a finger at, because it came from everywhere,” July writes. At least, this is where the narrator’s story begins. But it’s not where it ends.

July’s novel has been called the first great perimenopause novel— and it is. It’s also a novel about one woman’s midlife reckoning with desire and creativity. It’s a story about what we once called marital “sexlessness” and where that might lead now.

The beginning of the book is heavy with that unstated pressure to just get the fucks done and dusted, so Harris’s dick will quit “whistling impatiently like a teakettle.” But when the weekly sex fizzles out, the disciplinary moment that, for most women, usually follows the dry spell—best case (still not great!), this looks like acquiescing, engaging in obligatory or unwanted sex, giving a hand-job or blow-job to get him off your back as some women put it to me in my research, pushing past yearnings and losses lurking underneath that sexual pause, and/or denying the distance that has grown between husband and wife—she doesn’t do that. July’s protagonist stops forcing sex with her husband, and flees, embarking on a truly unhinged journey in which she follows her desires ruthlessly.

What I love most about this novel is how it speaks to the total absurdity of trying to relocate one’s sexual desires in midlife. The book is sexy, yes. It will turn you on. You might hump the floor while reading. But also, it’s completely absurd, irreverent, nonsensical, weird, kinky. There’s a wild scene of domestic connection between husband and wife that includes dog shit. There’s awkward, pathetic masturbation, and unexpected, angsty, morally fraught trysts. There’s some fresh nonsexual but still somehow very hot intimacy. Just wait for the tampon.

Midlife reckoning stories of the kind the novel taps, those that give voice to women’s second adolescence, their sexual renaissance, often feature women fucking younger men (see most recently, The Idea of You), or a few new guys (see all divorce books and films written before the recent decade). July’s book directly subverts such narrative expectations, exponentially queering desire throughout the book, as our protagonist realizes that the stirring she felt during all that bland, infrequent marital sex was not the desire for another male partner or even an escape from her family or home or motherhood, but rather a face off between remaining forever stuck in her own unnamed, unexplored longings and a life lived in pursuit of continual surprise.

It’s not that our protagonist lacked desire (or what we sometimes refer to vaguely as “libido”), or even that domestic overexposure has sapped her physical attraction to her husband. It’s not even close to that simple. Sure, she fears the loss of her own wanting, and her desirability, as menopause looms. But it hasn’t happened yet. She’s still got it— though what “it” is and what she wants to do with “it” are part of the questioning she undertakes.

Her brief period of celibacy does not spell doom, in other words, but possibility. It allows her to begin to explore how compulsory heterosexuality has distanced her from her own desires throughout her life, landing her in a place where she can no longer name what she craves. It’s the pause and the longing, then the noticing and the asking, that allows her to look around, for the first time in years, and really see, really rediscover the whole wet world around her, into which she wades full force.

Then, the hard work begins of figuring out not how to leave, not how to stay, but how to reshape and rewrite it all. Extracting herself from the sexual obligations of marriage is just the first step in a total sexual awakening, out of the dream, and into reality.