Sex Talk: Is your marriage killing you?

One wife, after reading up on different resources and consulting her doctor, is convinced that due to her aversion to sex, her brain had subconsciously decided to put up ‘defence mechanisms’ to make her look undesirable in her husband’s eyes.

“When we first married, I was a 70kg young woman deeply in love with my husband. But I don’t know what happened a few years down the road, especially after we’d had our fourth child; I just became intensely tired of, and uninterested in sex and would feel bitter and inconvenienced when my husband made a move in that direction,” the wife said, requesting anonymity.

“In retrospect, it is about that time that I also started gaining insane amounts of weight, to a point where making love with my husband was a clumsy affair…yet I was not bothered.”

When they finally sought counselling to save the marriage, that is when she started to understand what was happening; like a waterbuck that emits a pungent, oily secretion that makes it stink and its meat unpleasant to predators, her body was also making up its own defence mechanism against unwanted attention from a spouse.

“I was not eating abnormal portions of food, but the weight kept coming up to a point where it became worryingly unhealthy.”

In seeking help for the weight, a doctor advised her to deal with the root cause first; “that an underlying issue was making me produce a lot of cortisol [the stress hormone], making it hard for me to lose the weight even when I tried to work out or diet”.

Her big stressor was sex, and that is how the couple ended up at a counsellor’s, and, indeed, she has started losing the weight once the couple figured out how to make the lovemaking mutually enjoyable again.

Various online resources agree that stress and emotional distress that might underlie a hatred for sex can lead to weight gain or loss through a neurological response. I have friends and acquaintances that I can tell are getting good sex or not, going just by physical appearance.

Those I am comfortable with, it is a running joke about how they obviously ‘got some’, and they never deny it. Some people lose a lot of weight and look emaciated when their marriages are failing, while others pack on weight in response to depression and rejection.

Analyse your sex life and what it has got to do with your current health indicators, and it will make sense. Do it and act upon your findings, before that marriage kills you, my friend.

Haven’t you ever wondered why, while some widows/widowers wither away and threaten to die too after the loss of a spouse, others seem to flourish and add a bounce to their step even amidst their grief? One clue: cortisol levels.

The hormone’s levels can drop significantly where the marriage was toxic and the deceased took with them a big chunk of that stress, or spike where the marriage was beautiful and loving and the bereaved spouse feels lost, abandoned and clueless in the wake of his/her loss.

Great sex is supposed to alleviate your stress and even help release oxytocin – the happy hormone – leaving you satisfied, glowing and happily married.

But once you let the sex deteriorate to such bad levels that the idea of being intimate with your spouse gives you hives, then it joins your list of stressors, releasing cortisol in huge amounts and leaving you looking and feeling like a wreck.

Remember, cortisol also fans unhealthy cravings during the quest to feel better, while blocking the body’s efforts to shed the weight. Be mindful. Fix what needs fixing for your health and sanity’s sake. So many things may already have you in a chokehold; don’t add your sex life to that list.

caronakazibwe@gmail.com