Sex. And the absence of a healthy sex life can lead to its dissolve. Bettina Arndt, an Australian sex therapist of 35 years, noticed an ongoing trend. The married couples lining her waiting room were mainly complaining of the same marital gripe – the disappearance of sex. She then set about doing research to figure out what was happening, reports Jennie Curtin in the Brisbane Times.                      

The result: the book Sex Diaries, which comprises the candid sex-life diaries of 98 married couples, who chronicled daily activity with their spouses for up to a year.

It reveals what happens when one partner, more often the male in this book, is consistently refused sex by a spouse.

"The problem is where there is one person who wants it, yearns for it, physical intimacy, and is being rejected," Arndt told Michael Lund in a Courier Mail article."Listening to these men tell me about how miserable it makes them to never feel wanted by their partner, to never feel desire, to never feel like a real man and to be constantly rejected – 'she makes me feel like a thief' one man said – is just so heartbreaking."

In her research, Arndt found that male spouses tended to have higher libidos than their female counterparts which often led to the unraveling of what were once intimate relationships. She did also report that 10 of her female diarists were the ones in their marriages whose sexual advances were being denied. (Over the course of her study, four of those women left their partners, reports Lund, signaling that females may more readily leave an unsatisfying marriage, whereas males may be more apt to stay.)