When a couple gets married, they can enjoy sex within the confines of a wholesome, monogamous relationship and the act of sex come with a guaranteed 200% high. Or, at least, this was the "Promise" that was given to me. Growing up in the South, the zeitgeist was clear: sexual acts are to be saved for marriage. That one thing was agreed upon by all. Beyond that, there were all kinds of varying thoughts on just how "intimate" unmarried couples should be.

The Promise that was given was that when you were married, sex would be plentiful, wonderful, and guaranteed. All this was said with a knowing smile, nudge, and a wink to punctuate the Promise with absolute assuredness.

This Promise was so universal that not only the boys knew of it, but the girls as well. For 5 years, I dated the woman who was destined to be my first wife. We did not have pre-marital sex until the last year; until we were engaged to get married. Even then we abstained as much as our hormones would allow. We could do this because of the Promise. Mindi, my first wife, reiterated her faith in this Promise often. A solid Southern Baptist, she would quote bits of scripture, remembered Sunday School lessons, and even secular conventional wisdom to offer as proof for the endurance of the Promise. She once read to me a quote from Dale Carnagie, who opined that there were different kinds of death — one was when a husband and wife stopped having sex every night. She bought into this and even feared this notion of "dying."

So it was even more of a surprise to me when we did stop having sex every night, shortly after getting married.

Bear in mind here at this time I equated sex with intimacy; they were one and the same. I did not separate the two in my mind since I could not imagine being intimate with any woman that I was not prepared to have sex with. While I was often intimate with Mindi, we did not often engage in intercourse. But the result was the same to me: what we were doing was sexual.

However, now that we were newlyweds, I planned on taking full advantage of situation and enjoying the rewards of my faith in the Promise as much as I could. When it became clear to me that we had failed the Dale Carnagie test, I knew there were explanations as to why. Stress, perhaps. Medications, depression maybe (Mindi left a job in a different city to move to my hometown when we were married); the list goes on. I had faith in God and in the Promise to the extent that the only possible explanation for not having sex had to be some exterior cause.

But, of course, the cause was within the marriage, itself. All kinds of warning signs were ignored the entire time Mindi and I dated. Subsequently, when after only 3 years of marriage she had an affair, it became clear to me that there were some cracks in the shiny outer veneer of the Promise.

Our marriage ended after 5 years... the last year went completely without sex or intimacy or anything resembling a healthy married lifestyle. We parted friends and I lost track of her some 5-6 years later.

I dated my second wife, Amanda, for 4 years prior to marrying her. In spite of having a very long distance relationship for the first 3 or so years, she and I did have a healthy sex life and I finally felt that the cracks within the Promise were healing and that all would be well.

Amanda and I were soul mates from day one. She could not be more different from Mindi than if I handpicked all of her personality traits. A New York Jew, Amanda's best strengths had to do with her focus, creativity, sense of humor, intelligence, attitude,... everything about her amazed me. Unlike me, she did not believe in the Promise, never worried about it, and seemed healthier as a result. And we enjoyed each other's company. However, in my mind, the Promise was being kept.

And, of course, it then began to erode,... right after we began living together, coincidentally. The same pattern started to repeat itself... not frequently, at first, but subtly, and increasingly as the months went by. And again I looked at the external factors.

This time, the external factors were more convincing than before. Amanda suffered a lot of joint pain. At first, she was plagued with tendonitis in her wrists and it hurt just to hold hands or hug. She tried a variety of medical solutions over several years with no less than 15 different healers, doctors, holistic practitioners, and therapists. She was eventually diagnosed with fibromyalgia and depression and now takes a rainbow of brightly colored pills daily to treat her physical ailments.

She is much better. The aches and pains are still with her, but she tolerates them well. She is a leader in the community, a university professor, and is well respected by her peers, and beloved by her students. She is a loving mother of our only child, and is extremely mindful of keeping her mother/daughter relationship a top priority. She is still an amazing woman.

But she has no interest in intimacy.

She blames the pills and the pain. Who am I to say differently? Because of the hurt it would cause me, I cannot go into the great amount of detail to paint a picture of how much I worked to make intimacy fun for her. Nor can I discuss the many, many hours spent on trying to "work through" our problem. I explained my "needs" as well as I could only to feel guilty for having a sex drive that I could not control. And then I would feel bad for making her feel guilty as well.

After 7 years of this, I tried "substitutions." I tried merely communicating on a gut level with Amanda; sharing feelings, hopes, dreams, all that stuff. She resisted this (still not sure why) and even became angry with me for "bothering" her. So I looked outside the marriage. I flirted heavily with coworkers, I went to a few adult clubs, I would go 'on-line" at night and get involved in risqué chat rooms with women whom I knew only as a "screen name." Each activity left me with a dull ache in my heart... they would all just strengthen my sense of loneliness.

I became quite depressed and asked my family doctor for antidepressants. He did not ask why. At first they helped... perhaps because I needed them to help. However, in a period of about 2 years, we had to keep increasing the dosage and changing the prescriptions until I finally I was prescribed Effexor, which, ironically enough, is what Amanda takes. It has definitely helped with the depression, but it has not cured anything. It has merely given me strength to face the day.

Amanda and I have have sex less than 6 times a year (the very definition of a "sexless marriage"); a "quickie" is all she can tolerate. She does this for her own guilt and to satisfy some unwritten law that wives are supposed to pleasure their husbands. That is how it goes now if it is done at all. Afterwards, I usually feel like somehow I had raped her or forced her to do something against her will.

I began exercising to take my mind off of it. That is the only thing that helps. TV is nothing but shows of happy people having too much sex. No fiction novel is complete, it seems, without a few graphic descriptions of sex. I avoid both as much as possible. I avoid going outside — unless it is to go fishing — just to keep from seeing women. When I am in public, I remove my glasses so I cannot make out the details of the people I see.

I have considered suicide. But I really don't want to take my own life as much as I just wish I was dead. Being dead, while quite selfish, is the best plan because it would solve all my problems. I have no fear of dying, but I don't want Amanda or our child to have to suffer the results of me taking my own life. If my death were natural, they could grieve naturally (albeit prematurely). However, my "prayers' for a sudden, painless, heart attack have been denied,... possibly due to the number of "conditions" I placed on it (must be while fishing, neither our child nor Amanda should witness it, should be during the winter so I don't decompose too much until I'm found, I can't fall into the water because I don't like the idea of floating face down, etc., etc. While I'm not afraid of death, I have some control issues about presentation). Nope, suicide isn't really an option.

Then I heard about "chemical castration."

I spent a lot of time researching chemical castration as an alternative to this lifestyle. I want to be as resistant to sex as my wife and not have it be a factor in my life anymore. The data and evidence I have found to support the idea seems good. The benefits far outweigh the side-effects in my mind. There are several ways to go about chemical castration and there is a short list of treatments available. I choose the drug androcur based upon the availability of it and the limited number of side effects. The problem, however, is that there is resistance in the medical profession for this sort of solution. And the only way to get the medication, which can be expensive, is through a doctor's prescription. Everything I've read so far seems to indicate that this is not an easy solution to achieve.

The great American resistance to lowering libido

At this moment, I have a point to make. But first I have an argument to defuse.

Whether we were designed intelligently or if we evolved from apes, humans have always had only a handful of basic drives: eat, sleep, shelter, procreate,… maybe even in that order.

Sleeping and shelter I don't intend to discuss here, but ever since someone figured out how to fasten wood together, shelter has just been getting better and better. Sleep is still a mystery to me, but most of the time it takes care of itself.

That leaves eating and perpetuating the species.

Eating has only recently become easier, and, even then, only if you live in advanced societies and you happen to have money or food stamps. But in the recent past (and in some modern parts of the world today), you had to spend the better part of the day either growing, gathering, or hunting for your meals. There wasn't this thing of getting up in the morning and wondering if you will have your eggs over easy or scrambled. If you didn't have either a chicken, a McDonald's or a Kroger's, then you got up and went looking for that egg.

This was life for us for THOUSANDS of years. The vast majority of humans on Earth didn't waste time or waste food. We hunted, we gathered, or we starved. Starvation was always a reality and our brains and bodies became hard-wired to avoid it. The brain recognizes the signals of starvation and it immediately kicks the body hard to go out and get food before you die.

Fast-forward to the past several decades or so, and our culture began to experience something that it didn't have before: food in abundance. And not just abundance, but inexpensive abundance. Government subsidized abundance. Abundant food, well preserved, prepared in a variety of ways, and served frozen, fresh, or straight out of the microwave.

Now we have a nation of obese people, and partly because we transitioned so fast and so completely that our brains never developed a way to click off the starvation defense.

People overeat fattening foods and then go on diets and suddenly that piece of brain that is used to keeping us alive becomes over-active. The dieter losses weight out of sheer will power, and then gains back all the weight plus an extra 20 lbs. should famine ever happen again. The brain has conquered the starvation and helped us pack on some extra fat should we need it again.

Now, the last drive I want to discuss then is sex. We are driven to have sex. And to enjoy it, too, or else I'm sure we would have died out as a species long ago.

For centuries we made babies for all kinds of reasons; more boys to tend the farm, protect the home, hunt for food, fight in the armies. More girls to tend the families, become family and farm-animal healers, prepare the meals, and make more babies. The chances of your baby surviving were not good so you made as many as you could.

Our brains are hard-wired to have sex. It is no wonder that men get accuse of "thinking with their dicks" because it just so happens that the correlation is there. If you are a follower of Maslow, you can imagine that after the man settles the shelter, sleep, and food needs, then, by golly, the next thing is to build the clan (and then worry about belonging, self-esteem, self actualization, etc., but I digress).

Fast forward to today. In our society we have babies because we love babies. That's it.

But we don't raise the size of families that we once did just 3 or 4 generations ago. (Please bear in mind, I'm discussing a western culture here, and intentionally not discussing faith groups or non-eurocentralized cultures. I'm referring to the average American Joe and Jane. I have dozens of friends, most of them married, and there isn't a single group of them that have more than 3 children.)

So, the argument that I want to defuse has to do with sex in our modern society. Sex is no longer a way to make babies. It is something we do because we are driven to do it. We AVOID making babies almost every time we have sex. And when one of us wants to stop having sex, then WE LEAVE THEM because the drive is so strong that we cannot help but to "think with our dicks" (or whatever the female equivalent for this might be).

We are gluttons for sex to the point that it is on all the TV shows, movies, music videos, books, etc.,... and none of it has anything to do with having babies! It has everything to do with self-indulgence. And when we cannot indulge ourselves in the relationships we have, we have new relationships. This is all fine and dandy unless you love someone who just doesn't have the desire to indulge themselves in that fashion.

What then to do?

So now, here is my point: we need to have the option of a diet for the sexual appetite.

But this gets me back to my earlier point about the medical community and its opposition in general to eliminating a "drive" that they feel should be enhanced. A diet from sex is frowned upon by our society. And chemical castration is unthinkable to most everyone I've talked to. There isn't a doctor in town that would put me on androcur, for instance, for the purpose of my "sexual diet." Instead they would rather try to treat my wife with bottles of pain medication, or have us go into sexual therapy, or try a variety of other "solutions."

But not destroy a perfectly good sex drive.

I have been told that I'm insane, that I'm unhealthy, and that I'm just plain wrong for "putting up" with a sexless marriage. I've been told to leave my wife or, better yet, "get some on the side." Now what is the health benefit of that, I wonder?

So I've taken matters into my own hands. I did the research and found a source for androcur (I can order it online overseas from New Zealand!) and I'm changing myself because changing others is beyond my control.

And just how does my wife feel about it?

In discussing a sexless marriage, chemical castration, and its impact on me, I feel I should also discuss the impact on my wife. Unfortunately for her (perhaps) is that I have to speak for her,... she still has no clue about what I am doing.

Prior to my decision to start taking androcur, my life was miserable. I craved intimacy to the point of obsession. For lack of that, I craved death to the point of obsession. The combination of desire and despair occupied my mind all day. However, over the years I worked very hard to hide this from everyone.

My wife isn't an idiot,... she knew I was suffering. She knew I felt rejected. And she felt terrible guilt at that for years. Then later the guilt began to turn into resentment. After I ran into that I began to learn to hold in my feelings. It wasn't easy, but I slowly realized that any complaint or concern on my part was not going to improve the situation -- but rather it would just cause my wife to feel more guilt/resentment. If anybody was to change it would have to be me.

When I realized this, my wife became a much happier person. We still didn't have sex, but at least the tension between us had eased up. It wasn't long, however, before it was me who began to feel resentment. Along with my other feelings, I bottled this up but you can imagine the mental health issues this caused in me.

Enter the androcur.

Now my mental health is much improved because the longings, the desire, the resentment have all been turned down to their lowest levels. And I can tell there is a definite improvement in me because there is a definite improvement in her.

One day at a time,...

So now I am happy, healthy, and content in my relationship with my wife. I am at my 4th month of self medicating with androcur and my dosage is a relatively low 75mg. The only side effects I've had thus far have all been good (I was bald for years and now I have a head full of short soft brown hair). And Andrea is happy with me and feels no pressure nowadays to fulfill "the promise" of performing some marital duty of having sex with me. Life is good.

This sort of treatment falls under the category of lifetime commitment. I don't know if I can stick with it that long (I would hope that in 30 more years my sex drive would die a natural death). Androcur stays in your system for a while, but if you stop taking it eventually the effects will ebb away.

But I am in it for the long haul. I can't imagine going back to a lifestyle where I pray to die on a daily basis. I can't imagine leaving my wife or having an affair. But I can be totally happy with a sexless marriage — IF I can stay chemically castrated in spite of the American ideal of endless sex for all.