Articles, Intimacy & Connection
You know, I get asked some version of this question a lot. And I want to answer it honestly, not just reassuringly.
The technical answer is: a long time. People stay in marriages without intimacy for decades. I have sat with couples married thirty, forty years who could not remember the last time they felt genuinely close. The marriage lasted. But here is the real question underneath yours, and I think you already know it: lasted how, exactly?
Because there is a difference between a marriage that endures and a marriage that lives.
When intimacy goes missing for a long stretch, what you often end up with is two people running a very efficient household together. They coordinate schedules. They parent. They show up at family dinners. Everything looks fine from the outside. But inside, both people feel a quiet ache they have stopped even naming because naming it feels dangerous, or hopeless, or just exhausting.
That is a marriage surviving on obligation and routine rather than genuine choice and connection. It functions, but it feels hollow. Both partners are performing the relationship more than living it.
And here is what twenty years of sitting with couples has taught me: that hollowness does not stay neutral. It moves in a direction. Slowly, people start protecting themselves more. They stop risking vulnerability. They become roommates, or polite strangers, or eventually adversaries.
I have seen marriages where the lack of intimacy becomes a kind of slow poison. One partner starts an affair. The other retreats into work or parenting or hobbies. They develop separate lives that barely intersect. The marriage certificate still exists, but the actual marriage died years ago.
But I have also seen couples who recognized the warning signs and decided to fight for something different. They got uncomfortable. They had hard conversations. They rebuilt intimacy from the ground up, sometimes after years of distance.
So instead of asking how long it can last, I would gently turn the question back to you. What brought you to this question today? Is intimacy missing right now? Because that tells me something much more important than any timeline I could give you.
The absence of intimacy is not a verdict. It is a signal. And signals are worth listening to.
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Figs is a licensed marriage and family therapist with 16+ years of experience working with couples. He’s the co-founder of Empathi, host of the “Come Here to Me” podcast, and author of an upcoming book on relationships and the systems that shape how we love.
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Fiachra "Figs" O’Sullivan is a Certified EFT Therapist (ICEEFT), a renowned couples therapist, and the founder of Empathi.com. He believes the principles of secure attachment and sound money are the two essential protocols for building a future filled with hope. A husband and dad, he lives in Hawaii, where he’s an outrigger canoe paddler, getting humbled daily by the wind and waves. He’s also incessantly funny, to the point that he should probably see someone about that.
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