Love's starvation.

• Author: Weiss, Douglas
• Position: ON THE COUCH - Romance and intimacy in couples

AGAIN, ANOTHER NICE COUPLE walks into my office. They both are professionals, attractive, intelligent, have two children, and look pretty normal. The problem is that they are riving a different life than they portray. No, they are not double agents or swingers, but they are riving a lie. Their secret is that they are not loved by each other.

This is a life where the spouse is married yet often feels alone. This desolate lifestyle is being lived by millions of couples across the U.S. You and I might ask ourselves: why get married if you were not going to love your spouse? Why marry a person and trap that individual in a marriage where you make no time for the supposed love of your life, create distance, use anger or criticism to hurt your spouse and avoid intimacy continually? In some marriages, withholding physical intimacy also is part of this equation.

This is known as intimacy anorexia. It only appears inside of a marriage or long-term committed relationship. To everyone else, these people look and act quite normal, even engaging. However, when they go home, they are disconnected and even avoidant of any real intimacy with their spouse or partner. They prefer a book, television, their cell phone, work, computer, almost anything else that helps them avoid connecting with their spouse. Their spouses feel unwanted, unnoticed, hurt, resentful, and angry. They have to beg to be loved, heard, seen, or touched. In public, the offending spouses pretend to be affectionate and caring but, at home, rarely a praise or any touch is given. Sounds crazy, right? Intimacy anorexia is rampant and either spouse can have this issue. Similar to other addictions, there is a lot of denial surrounding this condition. Intimacy anorexia is the active withholding of emotional, spiritual, and physical intimacy from a spouse or primary partner.

In Intimacy Anorexia: Healing the Hidden Addiction in Your Marriage, four causes for this behavior are listed. The first is sexual trauma. The individual who experiences this may conclude that intimacy (not just sexual) is not safe--or even painful. This person, at his or her very core, can avoid real intimacy due to this trauma. Not all survivors of sexual abuse become intimacy anorexics. However, it can be a significant factor.

The second cause is the inability to attach to the crossgender parent during childhood. The opposite gender parent could have been hostile or emotionally unpredictable. The parent also could have...