A Sexless Marriage

By Shawna Hunter

A retired nurse, a mother of two, and a loving husband Suzanne has it all. All except a sex life. With the nest about to empty, Suzanne's attentions are on her husband and those well-earned autumn years, but suspicion is forming. Are things where they should be? Is he happy with their life? And, if not, what can they do to work on a problem that

• Language: English
• Publisher: Kingston Publishing Company
• Release date: Apr 7, 2023
• ISBN: 9781645334880

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Copyright

A Sexless Marriage is a work of fiction. All names, characters, locations, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

A SEXLESS MARRIAGE: A NOVEL

Copyright © 2023 by Shawna Hunter

All rights reserved.

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Published by Kingston Publishing Company

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Table of Contents

Copyright

Table of Contents

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3

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Extras

About the Author

Also by the Author

About the Publisher

1

Suspicion

There was a time that I, Suzanne Collins, was a nurse practitioner working at a very well-to-do medical practice. Then came love, marriage, a baby carriage and all the usual trappings of this thing we call life. Love happened when I met George. He worked in mergers and acquisitions for a management firm downtown. He needed a girlfriend. One to keep him out of trouble when he came in for a few broken bones from a misadventure, and I’d just broken up with my boyfriend. One thing led to another and soon I found myself playing naughty nurse in a Niagara Falls hotel room. Well, okay, that might have been a few days after the wedding, not the night itself, and I wasn’t really a naughty nurse so much as an over-excited newly wed, but still.

That baby carriage turned into two when Shelly came along about a year later and Michael an in-advisably short time after that. We were the perfect little wasp family, despite the hard times. We had the white picket fence, the nightly meals together at the dinner table, the happy little home when COVID hit. Then, like the rest of the world, life changed. I went back to work through the worst of it. George fell into online stock trading to ease the boredom, Michael buried himself in video games, and Shelly snuck off to get knocked up by her boyfriend. Thankfully, she had the good sense to undo that mistake before the supreme court lost its mind.

Now we’re back to…well, not normal but something approaching calm in this upside down world of ours. The kids are finally back on track and looking at colleges, George is back to work having thankfully avoided the lure of crypto, and I am back at home. As feminist and empowered as it sounds, there’s a simple joy in having nothing to do by tidy up the house and remember to close the blinds before I take my clothes off. Not that anyone would really care to look. I’m a forty-never-you-mind-year old mother of two. What has my body got to get excited about? Still, George does insist that my dirty blonde, loose clay over bone body is a treasure. He’s often telling me that he’s all for my traipsing around the house in my worn-out old bra and panties, just so long as I don’t let the neighbors see me. He claims it’s a jealousy thing. Likes to do that Fifty Shades ‘protecting what’s mine’ line like it’s some huge turn-on all these years later. At least he’s still funny, and just as fit as he ever was. Hell, the touch of gray in his hair even makes him look distinguished. Lucky bastard.

Colleen down the way is having an affair. I often catch her closing her blinds when I close mine. Always when the husband and kids aren’t home, and we have the houses to ourselves. The difference is I’m doing it because I like to be a bit of a slob. My outfit is what a mom should wear. Beige bra that has looked cigarette stained since I bought it, drab panties that sag from just under my belt line to just above my thigh. A far cry indeed from my sultry neighbor, one whom I might add goes on and on about how she fancies herself a MILF when you get enough wine in her. She’s got a lacy little lingerie number on that I’d have grounded Shelly for so much as checking the price tag of. She doesn’t even have the sense to hide it under a house coat before the blinds are closed. I, of course, do have that sense. No one needs to see what all the mileage has done to my once athletic form. Well, okay, George does but he still claims to like the view. I bet, however, that he’d enjoy my view of Colleen much more. Say what you want for her morals, the old gal is crushing her yoga classes.

Trying to ignore the disappointing comparison when I hit the couch, I check my phone. The girls from the clinic are still in a group chat on Facebook. We like to pretend that when we watch our shows, we’re watching them together. Today it’s a daytime talk show. The kind of thing that mixes a little home-care advice with a little cooking instruction and a dash of sauciness to make you feel like you’re an adult. Today they have a woman on. A social worker and family therapist, she’s on to discuss her personal topic of interest…a sexless marriage. The chat, of course, lights up with comments. Nurses have always been incurable sex gossips. Probably because we don’t get out much. We jump at the chance to mix that with dishing on the marriages of everyone we know. Yeah, this is made-for-moms TV at it’s finest. Of course, nobody but Shawna, discusses their own marriage. It’s always a friend of a friend or the neighbor down the street. Still, it staves off boredom.

The most interesting takeaway, for me, is just how normal the therapist claims this to be. It’s perfectly natural, she claims, for partners in long lasting relationships to find their sex drives out of whack. One partner wants it more than the other and thus feels unsatisfied. It’s especially common after having children, when sex often declines in a relationship, and it’s not really a problem until the marriage becomes sexless. That is, when one partner feels so unsatisfied that it’s as if they never have sex, while the other is totally oblivious and feels like they have sex all the time. Apparently, this can lead to unspoken hostility, frustration, a loss of intimacy in other areas of their lives and in the all-too-common extreme it leads to affairs and divorce. All the girls jump on that, of course. Those who are less satisfied make jokes about the pool boy while those who are more satisfied make jokes about what they’d do if they found a secret second cellphone. Shawna even suggests that I should pay close attention to what George’s secretary looks like. Thankfully the hrmf noise I make doesn’t make it into the chat.

To avoid the stress of that comment, I kind of zone out of the chat. Suddenly, I feel like I’m sitting in the audience on the show. So many of the anecdotes being shared resonate with me, and that’s never a good feeling. The first is a story about a man who found his wife rebuffing his every touch. He’d go to pinch her butt, or grope her breast. Little pervy ways for a husband to show his wife that he’s still sexually attracted to her. Like me, she would always react to these little touches by slapping his hand away and telling him to behave himself. The thing was, he had been doing these things in an attempt to initiate sex. He felt unsatisfied, and was trying to spice things up by trying to prompt her to do it in the kitchen or to get a little naughty in the laundry room. By rebuffing him so predictably she had inadvertently told him that she was no longer interested in him. The woman he cheated with, well she didn’t mind the odd little grope one bit. Another one was about a couple where the man had lost all sexual interest after his vasectomy. She