On a Wednesday in Denver, Hannah went to bed at a quarter to ten with a library book, and Luis stayed up with the second half of a game he did not care about. He heard her lamp click off through the wall. He did not go in. Neither of them had said anything about it, that night or any night before, and by now they had a routine for not saying it.
What Is a “Dead Bedroom”?
Couples use the words for a bed where sex has stopped, or nearly stopped. Kristin Davin, writing for Choosing Therapy, describes a “dead bedroom” as what “occurs when sexual intimacy between partners becomes infrequent or stops altogether,” and she calls it an informal term. Her examples are a couple who have sex only on holidays, or a couple who used to have sex several times a week and have now gone months without. Her advice is to say what you feel and want in a way the other can hear, and to get help when the two of you cannot.
The Gottman Institute has not studied the so-called “dead bedroom” under that name. But over four decades of research into what makes relationships succeed or fail, Drs. John and Julie Gottman have looked closely at what keeps sex, romance and passion alive in long marriages, and at what wears them down. One way to see Hannah and Luis through a Gottman lens could be to begin with a couple in their sixties who were still laughing about a bed.
The Friendship Factor: Andy and Marcia
In the Love Lab, Andy and Marcia, a couple in their sixties, were asked whether they had needed to adjust to each other’s personalities. Both of them burst out laughing. There had been the nougat, the first year they were married, when Marcia tried to light an electric stove with a match and the pot set like cement. There had been the student bed that sagged in the middle, so that whoever rolled away afterward rolled back. Sex, Andy said, patting her leg, they had enjoyed from the start. Then he remembered the night she had said, so sadly, that they had not made love, and how he had told her there were limits to what a man could do. They were off again.
That interview is one of many things Gottman’s lab measures, and among the things his team listens for in it is what he calls Love Maps: how well each partner knows the other’s inner world. Andy and Marcia’s seemed detailed. Couples who have lost touch, Gottman writes, tend to tell their history in a guarded and impersonal way, with nothing particular about each other in it; in his description, they no longer have a love map of each other, or the one they have is out of date. A map can be redrawn. Gottman treats it as an exercise a couple can repeat, and one place to start is here. How a couple talks about its own past is, in his research, a strong sign of its future. In his words: “94 percent of the time, couples who put a positive spin on their marriage’s history and their partner’s character are likely to have a happy future as well.”
Why would an interview about the past say anything about a bed in the present? Because friendship, Gottman writes, fuels the flames of romance. Happy marriages are based on a deep friendship, in his research, and couples who maintain it have a marriage far more passionate than couples who punctuate their lives with romantic vacations and lavish anniversary gifts but have fallen out of touch in their daily lives. He puts a figure on it. The determining factor in whether partners feel satisfied with the sex, romance and passion in their marriage, he writes, is, by 70 percent, the quality of the couple’s friendship. The sex therapist Bernie Zilbergeld reached the same place from the other direction. He studied 100 couples over 45, half of them satisfied with their sex lives and half not, to learn which techniques kept passion alive with age. Technique, to his surprise, made no difference. The couples still having sex had a closer friendship, and they had made sex a priority.
What Wears Passion Down
Gottman is blunt about distance. In a long relationship, he writes, emotional distance does nothing for sex of any kind. It does the opposite. Then a child is born, and distance arrives on its own. When his team followed newlyweds into their third year, only 33 percent of the new parents were satisfied with their sex lives. Those were the only couples who had found time alone together and talked about something deeper than the diaper pail. They had closed the distance instead of keeping it, and two randomized clinical trials have since confirmed it: parents who take time to connect emotionally have more sex. Nicole Schiener writes about that research, and what to do with it, in Keeping the Passion Alive After Children Arrive. Revealing lingerie can jump-start a romantic evening, Gottman writes; revealing yourself keeps passion glowing through the years.
Sexy Game of Hearts
For anyone who wants to grow closer.
Impersonal Sex and Personal Sex
Gottman draws a line between two kinds of sex. Impersonal sex is built on a particular attraction, a body part or a scent, and needs no emotional bond. It has its appeal, he writes, and as a scientist he does not judge anyone for enjoying it. Personal sex is built on the bond between two people. Most married couples, in his experience, want a strong erotic life and a deep emotional connection, and they want both from the same person. The third-year parents who were still happy in bed kissed more and touched more outside the bedroom. When some of them played at being strangers who picked each other up in a bar, that was erotic fun between two people who knew each other deeply, the opposite of impersonal sex. Put romance and passion together, Gottman writes, and you have the opposite of impersonal sex: intimate trust.
Personal sex has to be talked about, and many couples stall there. Shame and fear of rejection sit under the fumbling for words, Gottman writes. The culture does not help; the sex manuals sit on a different shelf from the relationship books. His answer is what he calls intimate conversation. Put your feelings into words. Ask open questions. Follow with the kind of statement that deepens the connection. Show empathy. At one of the two-day workshops he teaches with Julie, a long-married couple, Sherry and Hunter, used it on a sex life that had stalled. He wanted more. She wanted him to notice what she needed. When he asked what he could do to seduce her, she told him he could start by asking what she needed, and that being asked was a wonderful first step. Gottman gives couples questions to start with. Is there a way of touching you that I have forgotten, and could you give me a refresher? What would be a good way to handle it when one of us wants sex and the other is not interested right now?
If the two of you have stopped altogether, Jordan Rullo lays out a path back in Can a Sexless Marriage Be Saved? If one of you keeps reaching and the other keeps retreating, Terry Gaspard describes The Pursuer-Distancer Dynamic. If the whole relationship has gone civil, we wrote about that too.
A Ritual for Saying No, and Why It May Lead to More Sex
Gottman has also looked at the moment one partner wants sex and the other does not. In the usual scene, he writes, the one who is turned down sulks, sighs, argues, accuses, criticizes or ignores the other. Each of those is a punishment, and the partner who said no wants sex less the next time. If a couple is to have sex often, Gottman writes, neither partner can meet the other’s no with anger, rejection or punishment. There can be no cost to saying no. The one who declines should, if anything, get a small reward.
He worked this out in game theory, but his example is an old joke: not tonight, I have a headache. The reply that keeps a sex life alive, in his example, is closer to poor you, I understand, I love you, than to the complaint that you always have a headache. The difference, in his model, between a couple who make love a little more than once a month and a couple who make love about twice a week comes down to one variable: how it feels to say no.
So Gottman suggests that couples agree on a ritual for inviting sex and for declining it. He borrows one from the sex therapist Lonnie Barbach, a scale from one to nine, where one means no thanks and nine means oh yes. One partner says they are at an eight right now. The other says five, and maybe the two of them could kiss a little and see where it goes. On that scale a refusal stops being personal.
Can a “Dead Bedroom” Come Back?
Gottman research has never used the words, so any answer here carries that caveat. It has measured the friendship underneath the sex, and it has modeled what happens when a no is punished. So the questions for a couple in Hannah and Luis’s position may be the questions Gottman would put to any couple. Do the two of you still know each other’s inner worlds, or only each other’s schedules? When one of you says no, what does it cost? Has either of you said out loud, in words, what you would like more of?
One way to describe what Andy and Marcia seemed to have, in Gottman’s terms, is intimate trust: romance together with passion, a strong and at times almost obsessive interest in your partner. The lingerie, he writes, can start an evening. Revealing yourself keeps the passion going for years, and that, within his framework, may be where a couple like Hannah and Luis would begin. Gottman’s research suggests where to look, and the place may be nowhere near the bed.
That Friday, Hannah went to bed at a quarter to ten again, and Luis turned the game off. In the dark she said she had liked it, last winter, when they went to bed at the same time. He said he had too.
A note on sources. The Gottman research and quotations in this article come from Dr. John Gottman’s The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work (the friendship and passion finding, Love Maps, the oral history interview, and the ground rules for talking about sex), What Makes Love Last? (personal and impersonal sex, the third-year parents, intimate conversation, Andy and Marcia, and why some couples stop having sex) and The Science of Trust (the oral history interview and the game theory of saying no). The definition of a “dead bedroom” is Kristin Davin’s, for Choosing Therapy. The one-to-nine scale is Lonnie Barbach’s, as Gottman presents it.
Frequently Asked Questions
A “dead bedroom” is a relationship in which sex has become rare or has stopped altogether. Kristin Davin, writing for Choosing Therapy, calls it “an informal term and not a clinical diagnosis.”
Davin gives two examples: a couple who have sex only on special occasions or holidays, and a couple who used to have sex several times a week and have gone several months without. The change from the couple’s own usual pattern is what counts; there is no official number.
The Gottman Institute has not studied the so-called “dead bedroom” under that name. In Dr. John Gottman’s research, the couples whose sex lives stayed good had a closer friendship, made sex a priority and talked about it. He teaches intimate conversation for that talk, and he suggests a ritual for inviting sex and for saying no without any cost to the one who declines.
Not necessarily. In Gottman research, partners’ satisfaction with the sex, romance and passion in their marriage rests, by 70 percent, on the quality of their friendship. A “dead bedroom” may be a sign to tend the friendship first, and a couples therapist can help the two of you start the conversation.
