Climbing into the super king-sized bed, with its luxurious Egyptian cotton sheets and spectacular sea view, my husband and I began kissing.

With my mother-in-law at home caring for our two children, we had escaped to a spa hotel on the Cornish coast to celebrate our 15th wedding anniversary.

After an afternoon lazing by the pool, followed by a romantic meal and a good bottle of wine, you’d assume an evening of intimacy was next on the agenda. After all, for most couples the chance to reconnect sexually without the distractions of everyday life or small children clambering into your bed would be a key reason to book a night away. However, the moment I felt my husband Tom begin to ‘stir’ down below, shall we say, we mutually pulled apart and drifted off to sleep.

Neither of us pursued things further, because for the past three years our marriage – although filled with love and affection – has been a wholly sexless one. Of course, there are plenty of couples at our stage of life – we’re both 41 with busy jobs and children aged ten and seven – for whom sex is not top priority.

But for us, it’s not even at the bottom of the list; at my insistence it’s been struck off it completely. And not just on a temporary basis. Three years ago I told Tom I never wanted to have sex again.

Although my husband has gone along with it, I realise it deprives him of any sexual intimacy, which is perhaps selfish of me.

It’s a part of my life I keep secret, even from my sisters and closest friends, because despite the fact my marriage remains a strong and happy one, there’s so much stigma around celibate relationships.

I don’t want to be judged or thought of as ‘odd’.

It wasn’t an easy decision but, for me, it’s just what feels most natural and right. So much so I was prepared to risk my marriage for it.

Right from the start I never felt that sex was the most important part of our relationship.

Tom and I met at university when we were 21. We were both on sports socials: me with the hockey team, he with the football club.

Tall, fit and funny, from the get-go being with him felt right and we also shared lots of interests, including running and travelling.

He was my first ever boyfriend. As a teenager, I was a bit of a geek and grew up in a strict Christian family, so I was very sexually inexperienced. I’d been on some dates and had a few kisses in nightclubs, but nothing serious.

I enjoyed kissing Tom, him holding me in his arms. I didn’t feel wild with lust about him, but I assumed that would come.

A few months later I lost my virginity to Tom and, while he was gentle and considerate, the thunderbolt of passion still didn’t strike.

At first, I told myself it was because it was my first time. But as the months went by and we did it more often I came to realise that sex just wasn’t something I was enthused about.

It wasn’t unpleasant or upsetting sleeping with Tom, but I craved his company and the feeling of love and security he gave me more than I did sex.

When friends, after a few drinks, talked about how turned on they got with their boyfriends I couldn’t relate. Sex was something I did because Tom wanted to – and because I felt I should.

I struggled to orgasm – I could count on one hand the number of times I’ve managed it during our years together – but I was good at faking it. I focused on giving Tom pleasure and trying to enjoy the intimacy of the moment.

And I loved the pillow talk and cuddles afterwards. That was when I felt my deepest connection to him.

I suppose it was fortunate that while Tom – who wasn’t a virgin – enjoyed sex, he wasn’t a man who wanted it all the time. If he had been, I don’t imagine our relationship would have lasted.

As it was, with his average libido and my non-existent one, we were able to make it work. We were together for five years before marrying in 2010 and fell into a pattern of sleeping together around every two months, which was OK for me.

We never discussed our sex life. If Tom noticed that he always initiated relations, he never said anything.

I did worry about my lack of sexual desire, though, and found it confusing. Kissing, cuddling up together on the sofa, holding hands on a walk … I was as likely to initiate those moments as Tom was and thoroughly enjoyed them. But with foreplay and penetration, I could muster no real desire, beyond wanting Tom to be satisfied.

Was it my upbringing – with sex viewed as solely for making babies and certainly not a woman’s pleasure? I even pondered if I was asexual. If I’m honest, I still don’t know the answer.

But we both wanted children and when we were trying for a baby I did feel more enthusiastic about sex. At least it had a purpose now.

Our first daughter was born in 2015, when I was 31, and I enjoyed the excuse of pregnancy, and then being postpartum, to take sex off the agenda for more than a year. After that it was about once every three months.

Tom was very understanding. We were like many parents, for whom sex gets put on the back-burner, especially in those gruelling early years of child-rearing. I was exhausted juggling parenting with my work in healthcare, just as Tom was working in financial services.

I remember once, as we wearily climbed into bed, Tom joked how we’d become those stereotypical tired parents, too shattered for a sex life and fantasising only about eight hours of solid sleep.

But while most couples look forward to the day they can reboot their sex life, secretly I didn’t care.

We would have probably continued having sex, albeit infrequently, had it not been for the traumatic birth of our second daughter in 2018.

I had a normal pregnancy but my labour was very fast and she was a big baby. I tore and also bled heavily. She struggled with her breathing for a few moments after the birth and it was terrifying, watching helplessly from the hospital bed as a team of medics and midwives surrounded her, blood everywhere.

I needed surgery to repair the tear, a blood transfusion and was diagnosed with PTSD in the aftermath.

Trying to recover while also caring for two under-fours took me to the absolute limits of my physical and mental strength.

Sex, unsurprisingly, couldn’t have been further from my mind.

During counselling for PTSD, my therapist reassured me that it was completely normal to feel an aversion to sex after such a difficult birth. I didn’t tell her I’d never been very interested in sex.

For me, this experience had only solidified the lack of interest that was already there.

It was late 2020 before I slept with Tom again, when our youngest was two years old. It was after a friend’s 40th birthday party. We fell into bed a bit tipsy and when Tom reached for me, I thought: ‘Yes, it’s time we should do this again.’

There had been a few occasions previously when he’d suggested it and I’d told him I wasn’t ready, which he’d accepted without question. Now I felt guilty about depriving him any longer – but something was different this time.

Whereas before, I’d at least been able to focus on the positives of satisfying Tom and enjoying the closeness to him, now it was mentally unbearable.

It wasn’t him – I had never stopped fancying Tom – I just didn’t want any sex. I felt so upset. No wife should be counting down the moments until her husband orgasms. I put it down to the birth trauma and hoped, with time, I would go back to being happy to play my part in the bedroom in the name of a healthy marriage.

But my feelings didn’t change. Tom and I slept together twice more before I realised I simply couldn’t go on.

I agonised over sharing the truth with him but knew I had to be honest, even if it spelled the end of our marriage.

It was one Saturday evening, after we’d put the girls to bed and opened a bottle of wine, that I confided in my husband that I wanted us to be celibate.

There we were, both 38, to all intents and purposes a totally average couple in our lovely home, beautiful children asleep, and I had dropped a bombshell on our life.

It was horrible. Tom was horrified to learn I’d been enduring sex for his sake and devastated I’d kept this part of me secret from him for all 17 years of our relationship. It was, without doubt, the most difficult time of our marriage.

I felt I’d deceived him about who I really was and he felt sick that there were so many times he’d slept with me without us being on the same page sexually. At one point he even asked if I felt he had unintentionally raped me, and my heart broke as I desperately reassured him it had never been like that.

We considered couples therapy, but neither of us felt comfortable opening up to a stranger about something so personal. During one emotional conversation, of which there were many in the weeks that followed my confession, I said I would understand if Tom wanted to leave me, if he felt he simply couldn’t accept a sexless marriage, particularly given we were both still young, and if he stayed with me he faced decades of celibacy ahead.

I told him repeatedly that it didn’t mean I’d stopped loving him. To me, sex and love had never been entwined and the absence of one wouldn’t impact the other. The question was, could he feel the same way? Only he knew.

Over those weeks, we weren’t cold with one another but there was a distance, both physically and emotionally.

In front of the children we carried on as normal, but I was terrified that maybe Tom would leave – and it would all be down to me.

Eventually he told me sex didn’t need to be a part of our relationship and he didn’t want our marriage to end because of this. He insisted he would rather not have it, than for me to do it only to please him.

I felt relief and gratitude – I know not all men would agree to a sexless marriage – but I also felt intense guilt.

After all, this wasn’t his choice but mine. That was three years ago and since then we’ve been a celibate couple.

In the very early days, I considered whether I should at least offer to pleasure Tom in other ways. If I could no longer endure penetration, should I try to offer some sexual pleasure?

We talked about it while we were ‘settling in’ to this new way of being a couple. But Tom said that now knowing I’d never really enjoyed these acts either, he didn’t want me to put myself through it just for him – nor would it be pleasurable for him knowing I was only doing it for his sake.

And the truth is, I was relieved. I just wanted us to get to a place of love and affection, without anything overly sexual.

Today, our marriage is still one of affection and physical closeness. We kiss, we cuddle up together on the sofa, we hold hands when we go for a walk – we just don’t have sex.

For me, those actions provide the closeness I used to get from sex. They satisfy me and have definitely allayed any fear I had that we’d end up like siblings or housemates.

I’m happy, but since those initial conversations we haven’t talked about our sex life again, so I have to just trust Tom is happy too.

Now we find joy in the simple moments, like Tom nuzzling my neck and whispering that he loves me, or a lingering kiss.

Compared to other couples we know, I think we’re really quite romantic, and perhaps the absence of sex means we try harder to demonstrate our feelings in other ways. But the sacrifice Tom has made for me is always at the back of my mind. There have been times when we’ve been kissing in bed, for example, and I feel him getting aroused. Mutually we’ll simply pull away from one another, but his desire is still there, having to be suppressed.

I don’t know if he masturbates or watches porn; I don’t feel I have the right to ask what he does to ‘replace’ our sex life when I was the one to take it away.

Of course, I’ve reflected on whether I’ll ever feel differently about sex. Will I wake up one morning and discover I have the libido that’s been missing all my adult life? Honestly, I doubt it. I think this is just who I am.

The birth trauma I suffered may have heightened the situation, but my feelings about sex were always there, for reasons I may never understand.

While this is a part of me only Tom knows about, I have wondered if there are other women who feel like I do about sex but have never been able to admit it.

Do they, like I did for so many years, still keep it from the man they love and continue to go through the motions sexually, in the name of a ‘normal’ marriage?

I have older female friends and colleagues who have, when tongues have been loosened by wine, admitted that as the years have passed, menopause has hit and marriages have got a bit stale, their sex lives have waned, and none have ever seemed that bothered. Some have jokingly said it’s a relief – but maybe they’re not joking at all.

I don’t miss having to pretend I’m enjoying myself in the bedroom. Mostly, I feel relief to be in a marriage without sex, albeit there’s always that niggling worry that one day Tom will change his mind about living this way.

I’ve asked myself how would I feel if he had sex with someone else? Could I be a wife in an open marriage?

I know I couldn’t cope with Tom being intimate with another woman. I don’t want to have sex with him – or anyone – but I don’t want him to have sex with anyone else either, for fear he’d develop feelings for her.

For Tom, sex and love were always linked in a way they never were for me. I realise some people will think that’s unfair and selfish of me but I can’t change how I feel. With or without sex, I want him to be mine and only mine.

I hope he still feels close to me. Rather than feel less close to Tom since we stopped sleeping together, I actually feel even more bonded to him.

After all, if he’s prepared to live like this then his love for me must be very deep.

• Molly Ryddell is a pseudonym. All names and identifying details have been changed.
• AS TOLD TO EIMEAR O’HAGAN