A 29-year-old woman writes to me, telling me how she hasn't had sex for over a year with the devoted boyfriend she has lived with for the past three years.

"We sometimes try to have sex, but he always loses his erection before he sticks it in. He says it's only a temporary thing and he'll soon get better, but I'd feel better for both our futures if he'd get a doctor to check him out," she says.

The Japanese Society for Sexual Medicine defines sexlessness as being when a couple has gone without sexual contact for at least one month without extenuating circumstances, and the likelihood of having sex in the future remaining unforeseeable. Sexual contact can be anything from petting to oral sex to lying naked in bed with someone else, so it doesn't necessarily mean coitus: as long as there is some degree of physical contact, it's not really possible to say a couple is sexless.

But, as far as I could tell from the woman's letter, it's not really possible to say whether she and her boyfriend have any sexual contact, even if they do go everywhere together. But as she says they haven't had sex for more than a year, it's only natural that she has worries about the future of a relationship she says is entering the marriage preparation stage.

According to a 2001 online survey the Asahi Shimbun newspaper conducted on the sex lives of 1,000 couples, the main reasons sexless couples gave for their condition were:

"It's a bother" (20.5 percent);

"Too tired from work" (15.7 percent);

"Sex disappeared following childbirth" (15.7 percent);

"Hobbies are more fun" (9.6 percent); and,

"I've come to feel like my partner has become more like a blood relative" (7.2 percent).

Even though the woman who contacted me still hasn't married her long-time boyfriend, they have lived together for three years, so they are well accustomed to daily life together. I wonder whether one of these factors mentioned above hasn't come into play in their relationship? (By Dr. Kunio Kitamura, exclusive to the Mainichi)

Copyright 2005-2006 THE MAINICHI NEWSPAPERS. All rights reserved. Mainichi features the best news in Japan, current news in Japan, Japan news in English, Japan business news, Tokyo Japan news, and Japan entertainment news. Mainichi News is syndicated in accordance with editorial regulations: personal and noncommercial purposes.

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