Restoring Intimacy
Sex without connection: the retreat into physical intimacy
Some couples still have regular sex, but feel lonelier than ever. They share a bed, perhaps even affection, yet something vital is missing. What once felt like desire now feels like duty. The gestures are familiar, but the intimacy is gone.
When emotional connection fades, sex can become a performance. It’s an act of maintenance rather than meaning. The body becomes the last place we try to find one another when words and emotions have failed.
Just like processing any big news in life, coming to terms with a neurodivergent (ND) diagnosis can vary. For many people, it can provide a sense of intense relief and vindication. It can even be empowering. Everything starts to slot into place, you gain more understanding and self-compassion, and you can take steps to manage it. It’s only the beginning of the journey, but at least it’s the end of being in the dark.
For others, it’s not quite that simple. You might heavily suspect or outright know you are neurodivergent, but either can’t or have no interest in pursuing a formal diagnosis. This can be for several reasons and is a valid choice. Although diagnosis can open doors to resources, information, and support, it’s not a straightforward decision for everyone.
Functional intimacy
In therapy, many couples describe their sex life as “fine.” Functional. Predictable. Neither partner is in crisis, but neither feels deeply met either. Sex can become a routine gesture to reassure one another that the relationship is still alive. Even when the spark, curiosity or safety that once fuelled it has dimmed.
This kind of sex isn’t “bad.” It can even be comforting. In my recent ‘Reframing Intimacy’ blog we talk about “good enough sex”. It is one of my favourite phrases. Every couple defines it differently. What’s important is having realistic expectations, especially during the ‘drudgery years.’ Post-50, there may be more time and energy for exploration, but only if the foundation has been sustained.
However, if functional sex becomes the main way partners seek reassurance, it stops being a way to connect and starts being a way to avoid tackling emotional distance.
Sex as self-soothing
It’s common for one or both partners to use sex (or masturbation) to regulate emotion rather than to express desire. Pornography, fantasy, or even habitual sex can all serve this purpose.
For some, porn use isn’t primarily about lust. It’s a way to manage stress, calm racing thoughts, or escape performance anxiety. It offers control, predictability, and no demand for emotional attunement.
In those moments, sex functions as a coping mechanism rather than a relational experience. It soothes, but it doesn’t connect. Over time, this can create a growing gap between physical release and emotional intimacy. Both partners feel unseen, but can’t quite put their finger on why.
When structure feels safer than closeness
For others, kink or alternative sexual practices provide a sense of safety and clarity that emotional intimacy doesn’t. Explicit negotiation, clear boundaries, defined roles. These can offer relief from ambiguity.
When approached with mutual respect and care, such practices can be profoundly connecting. But when they replace emotional risk with behavioural control, the couple may feel intensity without true vulnerability. The sex feels charged, even consuming, yet it doesn’t satisfy the deeper hunger to be known.
The mismatch problem
One of the most common sources of disconnection is a mismatch in what sex means to each partner.
- One person might need emotional closeness to feel sexual.
- The other might need sex to create that closeness.
Without understanding this difference, both partners can feel chronically rejected. The first experiences the other as distant and unfeeling; the second experiences constant pressure to perform intimacy they don’t yet feel.
In therapy, it often helps to slow down and explore what sex represents for each person – comfort, reassurance, excitement, validation, escape. When couples start naming these meanings, the conflict becomes less about frequency or style and more about emotional safety.
The empathy gap
When emotional expression enters the room, some partners instinctively pull back. They may love deeply, but find raw feelings overwhelming. Tears, anger, or need can feel unfathomable, even threatening.
This isn’t always coldness; it’s often fear. Many people grow up without the language to handle vulnerability, so they default to problem-solving. They fix rather than feel. The partner seeking empathy experiences this as distance, while the one withdrawing feels flooded and ashamed. Both end up protecting themselves from the same fear: that intimacy will hurt.
The result is a closed circuit. Two people defend against pain instead of leaning into understanding.
How emotional disconnection shows up in sex
When empathy and safety erode, sex becomes another site of tension.
- Some partners retreat entirely.
- Others seek more sex in an unconscious attempt to bridge the gap.
- Still others pursue intensity. Rougher, faster, louder. This can be to feel something through numbness.
Physical intensity is not the same as emotional depth. The body may act out what the heart can’t say. Without the capacity to speak about fear, rejection or shame, couples end up performing connection rather than experiencing it.
Rebuilding emotional connection
Restoring emotional and sexual intimacy isn’t about more sex or different experiences – it’s about slowing down enough to notice what sex is standing in for.
A few starting points couples can explore, sometimes with a therapist:
- Pause before or after sex to check in emotionally: “How are we feeling towards each other today?”
- Name the function: “Are we using sex to connect, to comfort, or to distract?” None of these are wrong, but awareness brings choice.
- Relearn touch. Gentle, non-sexual contact – a hand on the back, a shared moment of stillness. This rebuilds trust in the body.
- Talk about avoidance. What feels risky to bring up? What’s easier to act out than to say?
- Reframe differences. Different arousal processes or sensory needs don’t mean incompatibility; they mean you’re learning each other’s language.
True intimacy is built from curiosity, not compliance. Couples who learn to be curious again about what turns them on, scares them and soothes them will begin to rediscover both emotional and erotic connection.
The deeper truth about intimacy
Intimacy isn’t the act of sex itself, but the meaning behind it. When emotional connection returns, sex becomes more than release or reassurance – it becomes communication.
When couples start to understand what their bodies are really saying, they often find that desire was never gone; it was simply waiting for safety.
Because the most intimate act isn’t physical at all. It’s allowing someone to see you – without performance, without armour, just as you are.
