by Dr. Lori Davis, NP | Certified Sex Counselor | Relational Desire Coach

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There is a word that comes up in my office a lot. In marriages, in affairs, in the middle of arguments that have been circling for years.

The word is withholding.

It is almost always said about the partner who wants sex less. He says she is withholding. The word feels like a description. It is not. It is a verdict. And it is a very old one.

Where the word comes from

In this context, withholding implies you are holding back something that belongs to someone else. That framing matters, because it is doing something before you say another word.

The moment you call your partner’s no withholding, you have already decided the sex was yours. The argument is over before it starts.

That logic has a long history. Under coverture, the common law doctrine that shaped marriage in England and America for centuries, a wife had no separate legal existence. William Blackstone wrote in 1765 that her very being was suspended during the marriage. She became her husband in the eyes of the law.

In that world, sex was not something a wife gave or refused. It was already given, permanently, at the altar. In 1736, the jurist Matthew Hale wrote that a husband could not be guilty of raping his wife because she had already given consent, which she cannot retract.

Permanently.

That was not a fringe idea. It was law. Marital rape was not a crime in all fifty states until 1993. That is within the lifetime of most couples I sit with.

So when you use the word withholding, you are not making a small observation about your Tuesday nights. You are reaching for something four hundred years old that says her body came with the marriage and her no is a breach of contract.

That is the weight the word carries. I am not going to help you say it more gently. I am going to ask you to drop it.

What the no is usually about

Underneath the word, there is real pain. Wanting your partner and not feeling wanted back is genuinely hard. I am not dismissing that.

But withholding tells a specific story about that pain. It says your partner is doing this to you, on purpose. That is almost never what is true.

A no is usually made of other things. It can come from what your partner learned long before they met you about whether their desire was safe, or whether their body was theirs to offer or to protect. It can come from what has built up between you. Old fights, initiations that landed as pressure, times they said yes when they meant not really. It can come from how desire works for them. For a lot of people, wanting does not arrive on its own. It needs to feel safe first. That is not a malfunction. It is just how they are built.

The person being called withholding are often suffering themselves.  They are carrying shame about a wanting they cannot locate, guilt about a partner they cannot reach, a disconnection from their own body that no one is asking about. And they are being told that all of that is a form of cruelty. They are often angry and tired of how their partner reacts to their no, while also desperately wanting to find their way back to wanting, just to end all this misery.

And sometimes she cannot tell you any of this. Not because she is shutting you out, but because she does not have the words yet. A lot of people carry things in their bodies long before they can name them. If she seems withdrawn and you cannot get a read on why, that is not a wall or withholding. It is a signal that you both need more support to be with it. That is what good couples work is for.

What the story costs you

The story that your partner is withholding tells you they are your adversary. And victims do not try to understand their adversaries. Why would they?

So the first thing the story costs you is curiosity. You stop wondering what is going on for your partner and start building a case. Questions that could actually help — what does sex feel like for you lately, what would make you want to reach for me — start to sound like accusations. “What is wrong with you?” “Why are you like this?” The tone shifts even when the words don’t, and your partner feels it.

The story also costs you patience and warmth. Both of those are exactly what a stuck sex life needs, and both of them are very hard to access when you feel wronged.

And here is where it gets circular. You feel hurt, so you pull back or push harder or go cold. Now your partner is hurt and defensive. So, they are even less likely to move toward you. And you have more evidence that they don’t care. The story writes itself, and every chapter makes the next one worse.

This is not about blame. It is just what happens when the story takes over. It shuts down the very things that might actually change something.

A different question

When a no comes and you feel the old story starting, slow down. There is a gap between receiving the no and reacting to it. Most people skip it. Do not skip it.

Notice the question forming in your mind. It is probably some version of: why are they doing this to me? That question has no good answer. It keeps you in grievance and makes your partner your adversary.

Try a different one. What is this no telling me about where my partner is right now?

That question requires you to hold your partner as someone with their own interior life. Their own history with desire. Their own experience of this relationship that may look very different from yours. It is not a technique to eventually get to yes. It is what it actually means to be with someone.

That is where desire begins.

Is their an exception?

Sometimes people push back here. What if my partner is actually contemptuous? What if they are cold and critical and walled off?

That is a real situation and it deserves real attention, probably with a good couples counselor.

But it does not change the argument. Even contempt does not make sex something that was owed. Whatever is happening in your relationship, your partner’s body was never part of the contract. The word withholding gets this backwards. It starts from the assumption that you had a claim, and they refused it. You didn’t. Nobody does.

The kind of sex worth wanting is freely given. Dropping the idea of withholding will help you get there faster.

Drop it

Every time you say withholding, you put your partner in the wrong and yourself in the role of the person wronged. No desire has ever come back in that room.

Drop the word, and something that the word made impossible becomes possible. You stop looking at a debtor. You start looking at the person you married, who has an inner life and a history and a body that has always been their own. That might mean you have to have hard conversations on both sides.

That is where great sex actually starts.

Working with me

If the story about your partner’s no has been running your sex life for a while, it is worth looking at what it has cost you both, and what becomes possible when you tell a different one. I work with couples to change the narrative, the moves, and the climate, so that desire has a real chance to come back. In person in Ithaca and virtually anywhere in the US.