How do you deal with being bisexual or gay in a sexless relationship?
As a therapist for gay men, I regularly have conversations about sexless relationships.
Sometimes the relationship has been dragging on like this for years. It might have started as a slow drift, sex becoming less and less frequent until it simply stopped. Or perhaps intimacy ended suddenly, after illness, a diagnosis of HIV, an incident, or a betrayal. For many older gay men, HIV shut down their sex lives altogether, conditioning them to associate sex with fear and shame. Some men tell me about relationships that were never particularly sexual, while sex became more important to them with the years.
Living this way feels deeply unsatisfying. Some experience a sad isolation while coupled, or grief for the sex life they wanted. While younger men celebrate sexual liberation, older men can feel trapped in a confinement of fear, unable to speak to their partner or understand how they ended up in a sexual deadzone.
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How did you get here? Read on for more about how a sexless relationship becomes established, and how to find your way out of it.
How Long Has This Been Going On? Cheating in a Sexless Relationship
Living in a sexless relationship doesn’t necessarily mean no sex at all. Often it means a silent conspiracy: one or both partners discreetly finding satisfaction elsewhere, careful never to let the other find out. The word “cheating” gets attached to this, but it is usually something gentler than betrayal, a strategy for staying rather than a plot to leave.
Underneath the silence is usually love, not malice. No one raises the subject because no one wants to be the one who hurts the other. So the couple sits at an impasse, each protecting the other from a truth neither will speak, and both unhappy.
Sometimes I speak with men whose lives have taken a turn their partner knows nothing about: into chemsex, or into an affair. Discovering this can land as a second betrayal, one stacked on top of the first, and it takes real care to navigate.
In these situations, couples therapy is usually not the first step. The first step is for one partner to get clear about what he wants: the preferred life, the thing he is yearning for. Accepting that sex is a reasonable need, even within a sexless relationship, is a step towards working out a strategy for talking to your partner. Hearing your account and helping you build that strategy is where a good gay therapist comes in.
HIV, Anticipatory Trauma and the Sexless Relationship Refuge of Older Gay Men
Before we get to the path forward, let’s look at the impact the fear of HIV has had on the lives of older gay men.
In Australia, there is a kind of watershed age for deep-seated HIV-related fear, somewhere around 40 to 45 and older (as at 2026). Men over this age carry what researchers call anticipatory trauma. You grew up in an era where the stakes of intimacy were life and death. That level of hypervigilance during your formative sexual years leaves a lasting psychological imprint. It shapes how you view trust, physical intimacy, and gay community more broadly.
A 30-year-old gay man in Australia has never known a world where HIV couldn’t be managed with modern medicine. His sex life was shaped by PrEP and dating apps, not by funeral attendance and terrifying TV commercials. Bisexual and gay men born before 1971 didn’t just grow up with fear, they experienced a profound, collective trauma. They watched friends, partners, and entire social networks fall ill and die within months. For these men, a fear rooted in grief and loss has sometimes kept them trapped in sexless relationships.
Those born from around 1972 to 1986 entered adulthood at the absolute peak of the epidemic’s terror. In Australia, this era was defined by the 1987 “Grim Reaper” campaign, deliberately designed to frighten the public into taking safe sex seriously. Many young gay and bisexual men who came of age in this period remain afraid of rejection and ashamed of sex, and find it hard to talk about the most personal parts of their intimate lives. The trauma of those formative years stayed hardwired into their psychology.
Men born in 1986 or later generally have a different experience. They became sexually active as treatment was making HIV manageable, and are more likely to see it as a preventable, treatable condition rather than a death sentence. The breakthroughs of U=U, Undetectable equals Untransmittable, and PrEP, Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis, have levelled the playing field of gay men’s sex lives. This is even more true for those born from 2000 onward: PrEP has been easily accessible since 2018. These younger bisexual and gay men generally don’t carry the fear of HIV that can get in the way of negotiating sex and relationships.
That’s the inheritance some men are still carrying into the bedroom: not a diagnosis, but a reflex. A body that learned, decades ago, to treat desire as danger.
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The Path Forward: Forward Therapy for a Sexless Relationship
Authenticity is the buzzword of the era for bisexual and gay men. But a lot of what we see on social media about authenticity carries a subtle scent of narcissism, or at least an absence of empathy. How can therapy offer a way forward from the compromise and dissatisfaction of a sexless relationship, towards happier, healthier sex lives for both partners?
The healthiest relationships make room for each partner to prioritise his own needs. I know this runs counter to the idea of ‘being there for the other’, of taking care of your partner. But speaking up for yourself doesn’t have to mean neglecting someone you love. As a gay men’s therapist, I hold that the relationship to start with is the relationship to yourself, and for many men, that starts with overcoming the feeling of not being enough. RuPaul puts it plainly: you cannot love someone else unless you possess that love for yourself first. Most psychology practitioners would agree our relationships with other people are only as healthy as the relationship we have with ourselves.
There’s a reason flight attendants tell you to fit your own oxygen mask first. Not because you matter more than the person next to you, but because you’re no use to them unconscious. The same logic holds in love. Generosity towards a partner that starves the self isn’t generosity, it’s a slow kind of disappearing. If you are generous with yourself, you can be generous with others. This is a better way forward than either selfishness or selflessness, which are usually treated as the only two options.
But a sexless gay relationship doesn’t always involve cheating. For some men, staying in the relationship seemed to require giving up sex altogether, and giving up sex with others completely. This can be deeply unsatisfying. It’s where the phrase “trapped in a sexless relationship” comes from. It’s usually only when a man sees that he is choosing, not merely enduring, that the door opens. Not trapped after all, but staying, and staying is a decision, one that can be revisited, argued with, or spoken aloud.
A therapist can support you through that kind of change. The first step is awareness. So if you are reading this and realising you have been making choices rather than simply being trapped, that realisation is itself the first step. At Forward Therapy, we talk not only about the emotional fallout from these choices, but about strategies for taking action: strategies for stepping into a different life, for raising issues and negotiating needs with a partner, or simply for building enough awareness to name the dissatisfaction, identify the choices in front of you, and find the courage and the words to speak up about what you need.
Relight My Fire: From Domesticity to Desire
For gay men, reigniting a sexless relationship is possible, if it’s what both partners want. But it means refocusing on intimacy and closeness instead of performance. Good sex shouldn’t be held hostage to requirements like mutual orgasms, penetration, or even hard erections. Redefining sex as an emotional conversation between bodies can ease the performance anxiety and pressure many men feel. Finding your way back to each other might mean scheduling intimacy for times when neither of you is distracted or exhausted from work. Lowering the expectations you place on yourself and your partner can help you find your way back to pleasure. Sexual intimacy tends to go better in relationships that make room for vulnerability, and less room for competition.
For men whose nervous systems were disrupted by the fear of HIV, becoming comfortable with PrEP or understanding U=U can be a genuine gamechanger. If your body is still stuck in a stress response wired in the worst years of the epidemic, it may take time, patience, and understanding to become at ease with the very different sexual landscape that exists today. HIV hasn’t disappeared, but the technology of protection has made that landscape far safer. Older men can take that knowledge and let it recondition their psychological response to sex.
Domesticity is something else that can get in the way of the erotic. Living with a partner long-term has a very different flavour to dating someone. Shared space breeds familiarity, and familiarity, in turn, can disrupt excitement. Partners can start to feel like family, which is lovely, and also a kind of risk for ongoing desire. Finding ways to explore adventure within a long-term relationship is essential to growth, for both individuals and for the relationship itself. Gay and straight couples alike discover this. Over time, we risk becoming like furniture in our partner’s life unless we keep introducing something new and unfamiliar into the connection.
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Opening Up to Gay Open Relationships or Polyamory
There’s a lot of talk about polyamory these days, and for many younger men, it’s an exciting concept. It isn’t new. Queer, bisexual and gay men have practised polyamory throughout history, particularly during the sexual revolution of the 1970s, before HIV shut that exploration down for a generation. Now, in an era of greater safety and more open dialogue about poly relationships, many gay men want in, and they’re looking for the formula.
Polyamory has no formula, whatever the internet promises. What works for one couple can undo another. If two people struggled to negotiate one relationship, a constellation of relationships multiplies the difficulty as often as it multiplies the joy. Those with more relationship experience often find it easier to navigate, which makes it a little paradoxical that it’s often younger men who are most drawn to the idea. As a gay therapist, I keep coming back to the same point: the most important relationship is the one with yourself. Not just self-esteem, but overcoming not feeling good enough, how you back yourself, encourage yourself, and prioritise your own needs so that you can be more present for others.
There are many ways gay and bisexual men move forward in open relationships after therapy. Some choose to only play together, sharing a dating profile and agreeing that their relationship takes priority over anyone else they meet. Others play separately, with boundaries in place to protect the primary relationship. And some agree to stay together as domestic partners in a shared life even without sex between them, while supporting each other in having a sex life with people outside the relationship. Stay together but not play together. It’s possible to have your cake and eat it too.
Time to Say Goodbye: Separating from a Gay Sexless Relationship
Realising a sexless relationship isn’t salvageable can bring distress, sadness, shame, fear, even resentment.
Separation is difficult. It can stir up regret and criticism, along with worries about the future and feeling lonely as a gay man. When assets need to be divided, financial fears come to the fore. Then there’s the insecurity of attachment, and the uncertainty of going forward alone.
Finding respect for each other instead of blame takes intention. It also means accepting that relationships aren’t about finding your ‘other half’ or your ‘soulmate’, but about growing alongside another person who is also whole in himself. Looking for someone to complete you, rather than complement you, is often the seed of a codependent relationship, and it’s worth recognising that any relationship, and the growth it once offered one or both of you, might simply have run its course.
Individual therapy can help you find the clarity and courage to prioritise your own needs while still holding understanding and care for your partner. Couples therapy through an organisation like Relationships Australia can help a couple separate more amicably, with love and empathy intact. Think of it as an investment, in your own wellbeing, your partner’s, and in the future of your connection to each other. That might end up as friendship, being exes, co-owning pets, or co-parenting children you’ve raised together.
The biggest myth about couples therapy is that it exists to keep relationships together. Certainly, in my work with people carrying religious trauma, I’ve seen that a Christian counsellor or a psychologist with a religious affiliation might lean towards preserving a marriage over ending it. But secular counsellors like myself support whatever is best for the relationship. If even one partner is adamant it’s over, there’s no question: the relationship needs to end. A good couples counsellor can still help you end it amicably.
When it comes to a sexless relationship, compromise isn’t the best way forward. Negotiation is. And authenticity is paramount. Being honest about your needs, and leading the way towards that negotiation, is one way a gay counsellor can help you move forward with self-compassion.
Not every relationship that ends has failed. Some have simply finished the work they came together to do. Grieving that is different from grieving a failure, and naming the difference is often where healing begins.
If this is where you find yourself, you are welcome to contact me to find a way forward.