Content warning: This article discusses sexual coercion, manipulation, and reproductive coercion. Please take care of yourself while reading, and come back to it when you’re ready.
When most people think about sexual coercion, they picture stranger danger scenarios or dramatic movie moments. It can and does happen across all kinds of relationships, short-term, casual, new, and everything in between. But this article focuses on long-term relationships specifically, because that’s where it so often hides in plain sight. When someone is your partner, your spouse, the person you share a bed and a life with, coercion can be especially difficult to name, and even harder to believe.
As a psychosexual and relationship therapist, this is something I see in my work regularly. People come in confused, carrying shame, wondering if what they’ve experienced even “counts.” It counts. And you deserve to understand it clearly.
This article is going to walk you through what sexual coercion actually looks like in the context of a long-term relationship, why it’s so difficult to identify, and what you can do about it.
How Common Is Sexual Coercion?
Before we get into the examples, it’s worth pausing on the scale of this. Research from the CDC’s National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey found that approximately 1 in 6 women and 1 in 10 men have experienced sexual coercion in their lifetime. More recent data from Basile et al. (2022) puts that figure even higher, at 1 in 4 women and 1 in 9 men. It’s worth noting these are US-based studies, as equivalent UK-wide prevalence data at this level of detail doesn’t yet exist, but there’s no reason to think the picture here looks dramatically different.
In England and Wales, there were 49,557 recorded offences of coercive control in the year ending March 2025, up from 45,310 the previous year. Analysis of police data suggests that 76% of coercive control cases happen within an intimate partner context.
These numbers are almost certainly an underestimate. The majority of people who experience sexual coercion never name it, never report it, and often spend years not entirely sure what to call it. If that’s you, you are not alone, and you are not imagining it.
What Is Sexual Coercion?
Sexual coercion is when someone uses pressure, manipulation, guilt, threats, or persistence to get a sexual partner to engage in something they haven’t freely and enthusiastically consented to. It sits on the spectrum of sexual violence, and while it isn’t always physical, it is always harmful.
Importantly, coercion is not just about what someone does. It’s about the conditions it creates: a dynamic in which one person doesn’t feel safe, comfortable, or free to say no without consequence.
Why Long-Term Relationships Make It Harder to Spot
Here’s the thing about long-term relationships: they come with history, love, shared finances, children sometimes, and a whole lot of complexity. That complexity can make coercive behaviour much easier to miss or minimise.
There’s also a cultural script that many of us have absorbed, often without realising it, that says long-term partners (especially in marriages) have some kind of ongoing obligation to have sex with each other. That script is harmful, it’s inaccurate, and it creates the perfect conditions for coercion to feel normal.
Research also suggests that in long-term relationships, fewer communication cues around consent are offered or sought, meaning coercive patterns can become more entrenched over time without either person fully registering what’s happening.
If you’ve ever thought “maybe I’m being too sensitive” or “we’ve been together so long, is this really a problem?” these are often signs that the behaviour has been framed to you as something you should just accept.
You don’t have to accept it.
Examples of Sexual Coercion in Long-Term Relationships
These aren’t hypothetical edge cases. These are the real, everyday patterns that come up in therapy rooms, and in the lives of people who had no idea there was a name for what they were experiencing.
Emotional Pressure and Guilt-Tripping
This is one of the most common forms, and it’s tricky because it wears the costume of emotional vulnerability.
Examples include being told “if you loved me, you wouldn’t say no,” a partner sulking, going silent, or withdrawing warmth after you’ve declined sex, being made to feel guilty for “not meeting their needs,” or having your refusal framed as a relationship problem: “this is why we’re in trouble.”
Emotional intimacy and sexual intimacy can absolutely influence each other in healthy relationships. But using love or connection as a bargaining chip for sex is not healthy, it’s pressure.
Persistence and Wearing You Down
This one often gets dismissed as enthusiasm or high sex drive. It isn’t.
If a partner asks repeatedly after you’ve clearly said no, wakes you up for sex after you’ve already declined or fallen asleep, or continues physical initiation after you’ve moved away or gone quiet, and interprets your non-resistance as a green light, that is coercion.
Consent isn’t the absence of a “no.” It’s the presence of a genuine, enthusiastic yes. Silence, stillness, or giving in from exhaustion are not yes.
Entitlement Based on Role or Relationship Status
“You’re my partner, you’re supposed to want this.” “It’s your duty as my spouse.”
These kinds of statements position sex as something that is owed rather than chosen. In some cultural or religious contexts, this sense of obligation can be deeply embedded and genuinely difficult to unpick, which is worth acknowledging without judgement.
Financial control can also feed into this. If one partner controls the money and the other feels economically dependent, saying no can feel genuinely unsafe. That power imbalance is important to name.
Minimising and Gaslighting
Being told “you always do this,” “you’re so frigid,” or “it’s not a big deal, it’ll only take a minute” are all ways of making your discomfort seem like the problem.
Gaslighting in this context means having your experience of the situation reframed so that the coercive behaviour gets repositioned as normal relationship compromise, and your reluctance becomes the thing that needs fixing. Over time, this erodes your trust in your own instincts.
Using Substances
Encouraging a partner to drink before initiating sex, or initiating sex when a partner is intoxicated or half-asleep and relying on their impaired ability to resist, is a form of coercion that is also, depending on the context, a legal matter.
This one is worth being really clear about: a person who is significantly drunk or asleep cannot give meaningful consent, regardless of how long you’ve been together.
Threats, Explicit or Implied
“If you don’t, I’ll find someone who will.” “I don’t know how much longer I can stay in a relationship like this.” Using knowledge of your insecurities as leverage.
These may not always be delivered dramatically. Often they’re quieter, more deniable. But their function is the same: to make saying no feel like a risk you can’t afford to take.
Gradual Boundary Erosion
This pattern is particularly insidious because it happens slowly. Certain acts or frequencies get gradually normalised over time. Previously agreed limits get quietly dismissed (“that was ages ago, we’ve moved past that”). You stop objecting not because you’re comfortable, but because objecting has started to feel pointless.
This is sometimes called “boiling frog” dynamics in therapeutic contexts, where the change happens so incrementally that it’s difficult to pinpoint when it started.
Reproductive Coercion
This is a serious and specific subset of sexual coercion that deserves its own mention.
Reproductive coercion includes removing or sabotaging contraception without consent (known as stealthing, which is now recognised as a form of sexual assault in England and Wales), pressuring a partner to continue or terminate a pregnancy, or using pregnancy as a tool of control.
It affects people of all genders, though research consistently shows it disproportionately impacts women and people with uteruses in heterosexual relationships. It can be incredibly isolating and is worth speaking to a professional about.
You Do Not Owe Anyone Sex. Ever.
Let’s be really direct about this, because it needs saying clearly and without caveats.
You do not owe your partner sex. Not after a nice dinner. Not because they’re stressed. Not because it’s been a while. Not because you used to have more sex than you do now. Not because you’re married. Not because you said yes last time. Not for any reason.
Your body is yours. That does not change when you enter a relationship, when you move in together, when you get married, or when you’ve been together for twenty years. Commitment is not a transfer of ownership over someone’s body. It never was, even if a lot of cultural messaging has suggested otherwise.
The “but they have needs” argument
This comes up a lot, and it’s worth addressing head-on. Yes, sexual needs are real. Mismatched libidos are genuinely one of the most common challenges in long-term relationships, and they deserve to be talked about openly and worked through with care. That is a completely legitimate thing to bring to couples therapy or to a psychosexual therapist.
But having a need does not entitle someone to have that need met by a specific person, at a specific time, regardless of that person’s feelings. Adults are responsible for managing their own unmet desires in ways that don’t involve pressuring or manipulating someone else. Full stop.
The commitment argument doesn’t hold either
There is a long history, legal and cultural, of treating marriage or long-term partnership as implicit ongoing consent to sex. In England and Wales, marital rape was only criminalised in 1991. 1991. That is not ancient history. Many people alive today grew up in a world where the law itself said a spouse could not be raped.
That framing was wrong then and it is wrong now. Consent is required every single time, in every relationship, at every stage. A previous yes does not cover future encounters. Agreeing to be someone’s partner does not mean agreeing to every sexual encounter they want for the rest of the relationship.
What about when one partner genuinely wants more sex?
It is completely normal for partners to have different levels of desire, and that difference is nobody’s fault. Responsive desire, the experience of desire that arises in response to the right conditions rather than spontaneously, is very common and often misread as low libido or lack of interest. Hormonal changes, stress, mental health, medication, relationship dynamics, and life stages all affect how we feel about sex at any given time.
None of that means the person with lower or different desire is doing something wrong. And none of it creates an obligation.
What it does create is an invitation for honest, kind, pressure-free conversation. That conversation might involve exploring what conditions help desire to emerge, what each partner needs emotionally, or whether working with a professional could help. What it should never involve is one person feeling cornered.
When coercion has been happening for a long time, it can be hard to reconnect with what you actually want
One of the quieter impacts of sustained coercion is that it can completely disconnect a person from their own desire. When sex has been something you’ve submitted to rather than chosen, it can feel impossible to know what you’d want if the pressure were removed. That disconnection is real, it’s understandable, and it can be worked through. Reclaiming a sense of agency over your own sexuality is possible, and support is available.
This Happens Across All Relationships
Sexual coercion can occur in any relationship, regardless of gender, sexuality, relationship structure, culture, or background. It is not limited to heterosexual couples or any particular community. Same-sex relationships, polyamorous structures, and relationships across all cultural contexts can involve coercive dynamics.
If you’re from a cultural or religious background where certain ideas about sexual obligation are deeply embedded, the layers involved can be especially complex to navigate. That complexity is valid, and good support should always be culturally informed.
What Can You Do If You Recognise This?
First: you’re not overreacting. Recognising coercion doesn’t require it to look like violence.
If you’re in a safe position to do so, naming what is happening to a trusted person can be a useful first step. That might be a friend, a GP, or a therapist.
Working with a psychosexual and relationship therapist can help you process what you’ve experienced, untangle the impact it’s had on your sense of self and sexuality, and figure out what you want to do next, whether that’s working on the relationship or leaving it.
If you’re not sure where to start, your local sexual health services can also be a point of contact for support and onward referral.
If you feel you are in immediate danger, please contact the police or a domestic abuse helpline. In the UK, the National Domestic Abuse Helpline is run by Refuge and is available 24 hours a day on 0808 2000 247.
FAQs
Can sexual coercion happen in a relationship where you love each other?
Yes, absolutely. Coercion can exist alongside genuine love and affection, which is one of the reasons it can be so confusing to identify. Love does not cancel out harm. Coercive behaviour is often rooted in a partner’s own unresolved needs, patterns, or beliefs rather than malice, but the impact is real regardless of intent.
Is sexual coercion the same as rape?
Sexual coercion sits on the spectrum of sexual violence but does not always meet the legal definition of rape or sexual assault, which requires specific acts without consent. That said, some coercive behaviours, such as stealthing or initiating sex with someone who is unconscious, do meet that threshold. Coercion that doesn’t reach that legal bar can still cause significant psychological harm.
What if my partner doesn’t realise they’re being coercive?
This is more common than people think. Many coercive behaviours are learnt patterns or reflect internalised beliefs about relationships and entitlement. Lack of awareness doesn’t eliminate the impact, but it is relevant if a relationship is something you want to work on. Couples therapy with a specialist psychosexual therapist can help explore these dynamics in a structured, supported environment.
How does sexual coercion affect mental health?
The impact can be significant and wide-ranging. It commonly includes anxiety, depression, a complicated relationship with your own sexuality, low self-worth, and symptoms consistent with trauma. Many people also describe a loss of trust in their own perceptions of what is and isn’t acceptable, which can take time to rebuild.
Is it still coercion if I eventually said yes?
Yes. If a yes only came after persistent pressure, guilt, fear, or exhaustion, it was not freely given. Consent that results from wearing someone down is not meaningful consent.
Can men and non-binary people experience sexual coercion?
Absolutely. Sexual coercion can be experienced by anyone, regardless of gender. Men and non-binary people are significantly underrepresented in reporting and research, largely due to stigma and the cultural script that men always want sex. This silence does not reflect reality. Anyone can be coerced, and everyone deserves support.
Do mismatched sex drives mean coercion is inevitable?
Not at all. Mismatched desire is extremely common and can be navigated with honesty, patience, and mutual respect. The difference between a couple working through desire differences and a coercive dynamic is consent, pressure, and whether both people feel genuinely free to say no without consequence.
References
- Smith, S.G., Zhang, X., Basile, K.C., et al. (2018). The National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey: 2015 data brief. CDC. https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/pdf/2015data-brief508.pdf
- Basile, K.C., et al. (2022). National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey: 2016–2017 report on sexual violence. CDC. https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/pdf/nisvs/nisvsreportonSV.pdf
- Rape Crisis England and Wales. (2023). What is sexual violence? https://rapecrisis.org.uk/get-informed/about-sexual-violence/
- Office for National Statistics. (2025). Coercive control offences, England and Wales. https://www.ons.gov.uk
- Women’s Aid. (2025). Coercive control. https://womensaid.org.uk/information-support/what-is-domestic-abuse/coercive-control/
- Basile, K.C. (2002). Prevalence of wife rape and other intimate partner sexual coercion in a nationally representative sample of women. Violence and Victims, 17(5), 511–524. https://doi.org/10.1891/vivi.17.5.511.33717
- Garcia-Moreno, C., et al. (2006). Prevalence of intimate partner violence: findings from the WHO multi-country study on women’s health and domestic violence. The Lancet, 368(9543), 1260–1269.
- Willis, M. & Jozkowski, K.N. (2019). Sexual consent in long-term relationships. Journal of Sex Research. https://doi.org/10.1080/00224499.2018.1518834
- Refuge. (2024). National Domestic Abuse Helpline. https://www.nationaldahelpline.org.uk
- Crown Prosecution Service. (2023). Rape and sexual offences: Consent. https://www.cps.gov.uk/legal-guidance/rape-and-sexual-offences-chapter-3-consent
- Planned Parenthood. (2024). What is reproductive coercion? https://www.plannedparenthood.org/learn/relationships/sexual-consent/what-is-reproductive-coercion
- R v R [1991] UKHL 12 (marital rape ruling, England and Wales). https://www.bailii.org/uk/cases/UKHL/1991/12.html
