Meet the married couples who never have sex but insist they're happy

When married couples live like brother and sister. No sex for years and they insist they are happy. Are they deluded - or just honest? Read and tell us what you think...

Most evenings, with their little girl safely tucked up in bed, Charlotte and Chris Everiss (pictured right) enjoy a kiss and a cuddle on the sofa in front of the television.

Happily married for a decade, the couple cannot bear to even imagine their lives without one another. Yet, astonishingly, they haven’t made love for more than two years.

Both insist that their marriage, which followed a two-year courtship after meeting on a dating website, is stronger than most. It’s just that sex, they say, is not important to their happiness.

‘We still turn each other on but we don’t want to take it any further,’ says Charlotte. ‘We don’t have the time or the energy.

‘I find it hard switching off knowing that our four-year-old, Addison, is in the next bedroom. I think if Chris really missed sex he would tell me, or I’d catch him watching porn on the internet as a substitute.

‘But he doesn’t seem to want to go back to having sex, either.
‘We sound like Darby and Joan, I know - even though I’m only 34 and Chris is 40 - but that, to us, is contentment.'


Charlotte and Chris, it seems, aren’t the only ones whose sex life has dwindled to nothing. A recent survey estimated that 15 to 20 per cent of couples have sexless relationships - defined by experts as making love fewer than ten times a year - while around 5 per cent go without altogether.

Actress Helen Mirren spoke for many of these couples earlier this year when she said: ‘I think the power of partnership in marriage is under-recognised in our society. That’s what makes marriages  work, not sex.’


In a sex-obsessed society, where everyone - young, old, male and female - seems to be boasting of how many times a week they ‘do it’, it may come as a relief to many that couples like Charlotte and Chris are happy to admit that sex plays no part in their marriages at all.

Most couples who find themselves at a point where sexual intimacy has died tend to confide their predicament to no one at all. But today three brave couples reveal to Femail how they have learned to live contented lives without sex.

You don’t need a degree in psychology to work out why Charlotte, a social media consultant from Great Wyrley, Staffordshire - who in the early years of her marriage made love to her husband three times a week - may have problems surrounding sex.

Three years ago, when their daughter was 18 months old, Charlotte almost died after an ectopic pregnancy resulted in her having a partial hysterectomy during a six-hour operation. Since then, she and Chris have made love only once, around ten months after her loss, an encounter from which she derived no pleasure.

Chris is understanding about her aversion to sex. ‘It can be hard knowing that our cuddles will never lead to anything more intimate,’ he says. ‘Charlotte is a gorgeous woman and I’m still very attracted to her, but she nearly died and I count my blessings every day that she’s even still here.’

‘I have an hour-long commute at either end of my working day so, to be honest, most of the time I’m too tired for sex anyway.’

Chris, a digital marketing manager, says he doesn’t discuss with friends the absence of sex from his marriage, but believes it is more common than people admit.
‘I don’t know that we’re all that different from other couples, we’re just more open about it,’ he says.

In all other respects, the Everisses have an enviable lifestyle. They live in a beautiful, four-bedroom detached home, have a Mini Cooper convertible and a VW Golf parked on the driveway, and enjoy several foreign holidays a year.