When Sexual Avoidance Becomes a Silent Choice
“In the face of discomfort, avoidance feels like control. But over time, it becomes its own kind of prison. ”
There is a pattern I often see in work with individuals around sexual concerns. Someone arrives saying they assumed things would improve on their own. They believed desire would return with time or that their comfort with intimacy would increase after stress passed or that their avoidance would make sense once life settled down. Then they look up months or years later and realize nothing changed. In some cases things feel worse. The absence itself has taken on a shape.
From an existential sex therapy perspective this moment is significant. It is the point where the person recognizes that avoiding the problem did not place them in neutral. It placed them in a direction. Sexual avoidance often feels passive, but it functions as a choice. It is a way of managing vulnerability, fear, shame or uncertainty. Time cannot resolve what avoidance keeps out of awareness.
Many people avoid sexual contact or sexual desire for reasons that have little to do with libido. Some feel pressure to perform. Others feel uncomfortable being seen. Some do not know how to talk about what they want. Others are afraid of discovering that they want something at all. Instead of confronting these tensions, the person waits. They hope that desire will reappear or that comfort will return. This waiting is understandable. It is also costly.
Avoidance is rarely mere procrastination. It is a strategy for protecting the self. In existential terms, sexuality exposes us to freedom. Sexual desire reminds us that we are embodied, choosing beings who must navigate vulnerability. Sartre wrote about the unease that freedom produces and this unease is often visible in the erotic. When sex feels overwhelming, the simplest solution is to retreat. The retreat feels safe, but over time it becomes its own trap.
In therapy individuals sometimes discover that sexual avoidance has become part of their identity. They say things like, “I am just not a sexual person” or “I prefer not to think about it.” These stories are not false, but they are incomplete. They often cover a quieter truth: that avoiding sexuality protects against exposure. Exposure to longing. Exposure to disappointment. Exposure to being known.
Existential sex therapy does not ask the person to push through avoidance. It asks them to understand it. What does sexual contact represent. What does desire demand. Where does shame attach itself. What would it mean to choose intimacy rather than wait for it. These questions shift the frame from pathology to meaning.
There is no requirement to pursue sexual activity. Many people live contented lives without it. But there is a distinction between choosing celibacy or choosing asexuality and collapsing into avoidance. The first involves agency. The second involves fear disguised as indifference. The work in therapy is to determine which is present.
This is where the idea of choice becomes important. What we do not change we continue to live with, and in that sense we choose it. When someone avoids sexual experience for a decade without examining why, the avoidance becomes part of the architecture of their life. It shapes relationships. It shapes self-esteem. It shapes how the person encounters their own body. None of this is neutral.
To recognize avoidance as a choice is not to place blame. It is to return agency to the individual. Agency in existential thought is the starting point for change because it acknowledges freedom. Freedom is uncomfortable, but it creates possibility. A person cannot decide to engage sexually until they recognize that they have been deciding not to.
Sexual avoidance does not need to be condemned or corrected. For some it may remain the truest expression of their lived experience. But for others it is a signal. A signal that something meaningful sits beneath the silence. In those cases the task is not to find techniques or increase frequency or optimize performance. The task is to turn toward the avoided territory with curiosity.
Intimacy begins long before physical contact. It begins with the willingness to face what we have been postponing. In that sense the movement out of avoidance is not a sexual act. It is an existential one.