A post appeared in the LDS Dating Midsingles group this week that cut straight to the bone. A man asked, essentially, how long a spouse has to withhold sex before it becomes acceptable to seek "alternative avenues." The post gathered 93 comments in a matter of hours.
The responses split predictably. Some commenters told him he was in the wrong group. Others called it abuse and said divorce was the only answer. A few women pushed back hard, asking what he had done to make his wife feel unsafe. Several men complained about having to "dance like a peacock spider" to access their "conjugal rights." One commenter admitted she was scared to ever date again after reading the thread. Another simply wrote: "NEVER."
What struck us was not the heat of the debate but what almost nobody said. Almost nobody asked the question underneath the question. The man wanted to know when it was okay to go around the problem. Almost no one helped him see the problem clearly in the first place.
We read it. We had thoughts. Here is what we would say if we were sitting across from him.
The Question You Think You Are Asking
Scott
Let me be direct with you. The question "how long until I can look elsewhere" is not really a question about sex. It is a question about pain. You are hurting. You feel rejected. You feel invisible in your own marriage. And you want someone to tell you that your pain is valid enough to justify whatever comes next.
Your pain is valid. But valid pain does not automatically unlock the exit door you are looking for.
Here is what I have learned from my own failures: when you start negotiating timelines for workarounds, you have already left the relationship in your head. You are not asking how to fix this. You are asking how to survive this while staying technically married. Those are not the same thing.
The honest question is: "Am I willing to do the hard work to repair this, or am I looking for permission to leave?" Either answer is acceptable. But you have to know which one you are actually asking.
What "Withholding" Usually Means
Laurie
One of the most loaded words in that entire thread was "withholding." It implies intentionality. It frames your wife as someone who has something you deserve and is deliberately keeping it from you.
Sometimes that is true. There are people who use sex as a weapon or a bargaining chip, and that is a form of relational cruelty. If that is happening in your marriage, it needs to be named and addressed, probably with professional help.
But far more often, what gets labeled "withholding" is actually withdrawal. Withdrawal happens when someone feels unsafe, disconnected, exhausted, or unseen. It is not a strategy. It is a symptom.
One woman in the thread asked a series of questions that deserve repeating: Are you acting like another child she has to parent? Do you walk around sulking or angry? Are you good at sex, or is it an experience she dreads? These are not accusations. They are diagnostic questions. If you cannot answer them honestly, you do not yet understand the problem you are trying to solve.
Scott
I want to add something here because I saw a lot of men in that thread bristling at the idea that they might be part of the problem. One guy complained that married women make men "dance like a peacock spider" for something unmarried women give freely.
That comment tells me everything I need to know about how that man thinks about sex. He sees it as something women dispense and men earn. That is a transactional frame, and it poisons everything it touches.
Sex in a healthy marriage is not a transaction. It is a shared experience that both people want. If your wife does not want it, the question is not "how do I get what I am owed." The question is "what happened to the wanting."
The Safety Problem
Laurie
Several women in the thread brought up safety, and they were dismissed or ignored. One commenter put it plainly: women are accused of withholding sex while men are not accused of creating relationships where women cannot feel safe being physical.
I want to explain what safety means in this context because I do not think most men understand it.
Safety is not about physical danger, though sometimes it is. More often, it is about whether a woman feels emotionally held. Does she feel like her husband sees her as a full person, or as a need-meeting machine? Does he show interest in her life, her thoughts, her stress, her exhaustion? Does he touch her in ways that are not about sex? Does she feel like she can say no without punishment, whether that punishment is sulking, cold distance, or an argument?
When a woman does not feel safe in these ways, her body shuts down. It is not a choice. It is not manipulation. It is a nervous system response. You cannot negotiate or demand your way past it.
Scott
And I want to say something to the men who feel defensive right now.
I am not saying you are a bad person. I am not saying your needs do not matter. I am saying that if your wife has stopped wanting to be close to you, the answer is almost never "she is broken" or "she is punishing me." The answer is almost always "something in our relationship is not working, and her body is telling the truth about it."
That is hard to hear. It was hard for me to hear in my own marriage. But it is also an invitation. If the problem is in the relationship, then the relationship can be repaired. That is better news than "my wife is just withholding from me for no reason."
What the Church Cannot Fix
Scott
I noticed several commenters in the thread pointing toward church solutions. Talk to your bishop. Honor your covenants. Endure to the end. These are not bad suggestions, but they are incomplete.
Your bishop is not a marriage therapist. He may be wise. He may be kind. But he is not trained to help you navigate sexual trauma, attachment wounds, or the complex dynamics of a marriage in crisis. If you are struggling at this level, you need a professional who specializes in couples work.
And the "endure to the end" framing, while spiritually meaningful, can become spiritually abusive when it is used to tell someone they must stay in a situation that is destroying them. Endurance is a virtue. But endurance without agency is just suffering with a religious label.
Laurie
I also want to gently challenge the framing that your temple worthiness depends on never addressing this need. Several commenters implied that any form of self-care is off-limits, full stop.
The church's actual guidance on these matters is more nuanced than the comments suggested. What you do in your own marriage, in conversation with your spouse and your own conscience, is between you and God. The rigid, shame-based framing that says any acknowledgment of sexual need is sinful does not help people build healthy marriages. It just drives the conversation underground where it festers.
The Conversation You Have Not Had
Laurie
One commenter wrote something that stuck with me: "Men need intimacy to connect. Women need connection to have intimacy." That is an oversimplification, but there is truth in it.
If you are the person wanting more physical closeness, you may feel like you cannot connect without it. If your spouse is the one withdrawing, they may feel like they cannot offer closeness without connection first. This creates a painful loop where both people feel starved and both people blame the other.
The way out of that loop is not negotiation. It is curiosity. It is sitting down and asking, with genuine openness: "What would need to be true for you to want to be close to me again?" And then listening without defending, without arguing, without making it about your pain.
That conversation is terrifying. It requires vulnerability. It risks hearing things you do not want to hear. But it is the only path that leads somewhere worth going.
Scott
I will add one practical note. If you have that conversation and nothing changes, or if your spouse refuses to have it at all, that is information. A marriage where one person will not engage with the other's pain is a marriage in serious trouble. At that point, the question is not "how do I get my needs met elsewhere." The question is "is this marriage viable, and if not, how do I leave with integrity."
Leaving with integrity means not cheating. Not lying. Not building a case for why you were the victim. It means being honest about what you tried, what failed, and what you need going forward.
For the Person Who Is Scared to Start Dating
Laurie
One commenter wrote that she was getting divorced and had not started dating yet, and that reading this thread made her scared out of her mind. She ended by saying maybe she would just be single the rest of her life.
I want to speak to her directly, and to everyone reading who feels the same way.
The thread you read was not a representative sample of how relationships work. It was a pressure cooker of pain, defensiveness, and unprocessed grief. The people who are doing well in their relationships are not posting in that thread. They are out living their lives.
The fact that you can read that thread and feel disturbed by it tells me something good about you. You recognize dysfunction when you see it. That is a skill. It will serve you well.
Dating after divorce is hard. It requires learning new things about yourself and unlearning patterns that no longer serve you. But it is not hopeless. There are good people out there who have done their own work, who know how to communicate, who understand that intimacy is something you build together rather than something one person extracts from another.
You are not behind. You are not broken. You are just beginning again, and beginning again is one of the bravest things a person can do.
And when you are ready to go deeper, we will be here.
- Scott & Laurie
Weighing in from the lowest tier of the Celestial Kingdom, where we learned that the question underneath the question is always worth asking.