Headlines
Sexless Marriage will Affect Your Mental Health
By Adeoye Oyewole (adeoyewole2000@yahoo.com)
For most married couples, the bedroom is a place of privacy and sexual intimacy. But many who have been married for a while know that this is often not the case.
Sometimes and for a long period, the bedroom can become a lonely place. To be clear, a sexless marriage is a marital union in which little or no sexual activity occurs between both spouses. A Newsweek magazine survey found that 15 to 20 per cent of couples are in a sexless union.
Studies have even showed that about 10 per cent of couples below the age of 50 have not had sex in a year. The definition is often broadened to include those where sexual intimacy occurs less than 10 times per year.
In addition, less than 20 per cent of them report having sex a few times per year, or even monthly, under the age 40. This definition takes into consideration the fact that partners may have varying sexual drives, but not as bad as having sex only 10 times in a year.
It is difficult to obtain statistics about couples in Nigeria, but sexless marriages may be common among our modern, educated couples. Our religious and socio-cultural values that accommodate polygamy and forbid divorce may mask research findings and inadvertently encourage marriages, even if it is sexless.
If you are in this category, there is no shame. What you need is help before it begins to affect your mental health.
The major causes of sexless marriages are psychological, but a few are understandably due to some biological and clinical situations that could be handled medically, such as vulvae pain syndromes, fragile vagina tissues from low levels of oestrogen, prostate difficulties in men, post-heart attack or stroke states, chronic arthritis, chronic low back pain, side effects of medications and diabetic complications.
There are also clinical psychological states such as depressive illness, chronic fatigue syndrome, hypoactive sexual drive, gender identity problems or body image difficulties. However, more than 90 per cent of the causes of sexless marriages are due to issues in the psychodynamics of the marital relationship.
A partner may have feelings hurt repeatedly, get turned down too many times, get disrespected and erect a wall that does not allow issues to be resolved promptly. These unresolved conflicts can generate a state of permanent hostility that blocks sexual expression.
The partner, who behaves in a passive-aggressive manner, may block sexual intercourse as punishment or protection from hurt inflicted by the mate. The perceived rejection may lead to loss of interest in sexual communication, which may be complicated by loneliness, anger and lowering of self-esteem in the spouse who feels that basic sexual human needs are deliberately frustrated by the rejecting partner.
Other causes of this resentment may be due to perceived imbalance of duties and responsibilities, including moral, religious and financial issues. This may get complicated when extra-marital affairs set in, which may lead to reduced sexual interest in the estranged spouse and, if the affair is discovered, the innocent spouse may cease to want to be intimate with the offending spouse.
This may manifest as restricted, formal and coarse communication as partners treat each other with contempt. Couples in this situation are definitely in mental distress or already mentally ill, hence they require professional help.
Those deeper feelings of resentment must be uncovered and dealt with as they practise active listening and try to communicate creatively in the process of discovery. You may think you have a right to be resentful of the way you have been treated, and while it might seem natural, resentment creeps into everything you do.
Every time you talk to your spouse, every action you take can be so tainted with this resentment that it becomes a psychological burden. The path to recovery is that you make a conscious effort to do everything for the benefit of both of you, and not just yourself. You must be honest and, without hatred or fear or anger, confront the problem of sexual intimacy together.
The bedroom should be a peaceful and relaxing place by keeping it free of clutter. To bring the spark back, you can go on dates, do fun things together, especially things that ignite mutual passion and excitement.
There is a need for the services of a professional marriage counselor, who will help couples to navigate and elicit hidden resentments and resolve. Such a counsellor will also help to identity faculty communication styles that may have shut down sexual intimacy and suggest new patterns and also appropriately refer those with mental health issues.
A successful marriage requires commitment, effort, compromise and forgiveness. Sexless marriage can impair wholesome development of children in the home because of discordance in communication. In addition, less than 20 per cent of them report having sex a few times per year, or even monthly, under the age 40.
The facility of education and financial empowerment of our modern wives may serve as templates for more conflicts leading to ego-stalemates that may injure sexual intimacy. Our relatively lower rates of divorce, even among our educated couples, compared with the western world, may find compensation in sexless marriages as a manifestation of emotional divorce.
Abia State Governor, Dr. Alex Otti, on Sunday paid a solidarity visit to the Leader of the Indigenous Peoples Of Biafra (IPOB), Mazi Nnamdi Kanu, at the Sokoto Correctional Centre, Sokoto State, where he was to begin serving his life sentence.
Governor Otti, according to a statement by his Special Adviser on Media and Publicity, Mr Ferdinand Ekeoma, and published on social media, encouraged Kanu, during a meeting held behind closed doors, to remain strong, assuring that the engagements he started over two years ago, which the IPOB leader has been aware of, have been intensified in spite of what happened.
The Governor enjoined Kanu to remain calm, but strong, assuring that the issue will be resolved administratively and that he will regain his freedom.
Governor Otti expressed joy that the Sultan of Sokoto is on the same page with him on the need for Kanu’s freedom and de-escalation of tension, and informed Kanu that the Sultan of Sokoto had on a lighter note told him that Kanu is now his subject and he was going to turbane him, an information that got the IPOB Leader laughing loudly.
Responding, Mazi Kanu, who was beaming with smiles and in high spirits, thanked Governor Otti for the visit, and stated that he wasn’t surprised that the Governor quickly came visiting, because he had done the same thing in the past.
He told the Governor that he is very proud of his giant strides in Abia based on the feedbacks he gets from home about the state since he assumed office, a feat he said is replicating what Late Dee Sam Mbakwe did as Governor of Old Imo State, which has kept him permanently immortalised, and called on the Governor to continue to serve the people diligently.
The IPOB leader told Governor Otti that he is only interested in good governance and anything that could better the lot of the people, and prayed God to continue to be with the Governor and his team as they serve the people of the state.
Governor Otti was accompanied on the visit by the Attorney General and Commissioner for Justice, Mr. Ikechukwu Uwanna, SAN, the Special Adviser to the Governor on Media and Publicity, Ferdinand Ekeoma, and some top Sokoto State government officials, including Commissioners and advisers.
Also present during the visit was Kanu’s younger brother, Prince Emmanuel Kanu.
Cameroonian opposition figure, Anicet Ekan, on Monday, died in detention in Yaounde, the vice president of his party told AFP.
“Anicet Ekane died this morning in Yaounde, where he had been transferred after his arrest at the end of October in Douala,” Valentin Dongmo of the African Movement for the New Independence of Cameroon (Manidem) party said.
The exact circumstances of the 74-year-old’s death remain unclear.
The left-wing, nationalist politician was arrested in Douala on October 24, on the eve of the publication of presidential election results that returned 92-year-old Paula Biya to power for an eighth mandate.
Ekane was close to fellow opposition figure Issa Tchiroma Bakary, who contested Biya’s 43-year grip on power in the October 12 election.
“Anicet Ekane was arrested in Douala and then transferred to Yaounde, where he was held at the State Defence Secretariat (SED). It was there that his health began to deteriorate,” according to Dongmo.
“We repeatedly alerted the authorities, including the military court administration, requesting that Anicet Ekane be transferred to a hospital with the appropriate facilities for better care, but our requests did not receive a favourable response,” he said.
Manidem had denounced the “arbitrary” arrests aiming to “intimidate” Cameroonians.
Born in Douala in 1951, Ekane joined the Union of the Peoples of Cameroon (UPC) party in 1973 — which he then quit to create Manidem in 1995.
In February 1990, he and other members of the Yondo Black group were arrested. He was condemned in a military trial before being pardoned several months later.
Ekane led Manidem for several years and ran as its presidential candidate in 2004 and 2011.
His death has triggered a groundswell of reactions on social media.
AFP
Headlines
Pastor Bakare Advises Tinubu to Apologize to Traumatized Communities, Accept Responsibility for Failure
The Lead Pastor of the Citadel Global Community Church, Tunde Bakare, has urged President Bola Tinubu to publicly apologize to communities devastated by insecurity.
Bakare made the call on Sunday during his State of the Nation Address in Lagos, saying the gesture would mark a commitment to justice and national healing.
The cleric acknowledged that the president had taken initial steps to address the crisis but insisted that deeper action is required to restore confidence.
He said the government must first accept responsibility for decades of failure to protect citizens from terrorism, banditry and other violent crimes.
Bakare said the plan should include a Victims and Survivors Register, a national apology to affected communities after three months, and midterm compensation, stressing that accountability is crucial to restoring public trust and ending the cycle of violence.
