http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26161185/displaymode/1098/

Suppose you were married in June, all blushing with wedding night anticipation, but now find yourself in August still waiting for the train to enter the tunnel or the Apollo rocket to shoot into space.
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They do — more often than you might think. Dr. Domeena Renshaw, a psychiatry professor at Loyola University Health System outside of Chicago, has treated hundreds of unconsummated unions.
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The stand-off can be the result of physical problems, poor knowledge about sexual functions, religious conservatism, or other complicated emotional reasons, they say. Anxiety — no mystery why — often builds, so much so that couples can go years without ever having intercourse.

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More than 50 years later, it still isn’t uncommon for doctors to tell women to “just have a glass of wine and relax.” But alcohol and Barry White songs aren’t always the solution.

The female half of Renshaw’s couple who had been married 23 years, for example, suffered from extreme vaginismus, an involuntary clamping down of the muscles so the vagina is sealed tighter than the White House Situation Room. Renshaw treated them through a combination of counseling and gradually coaching the woman on how to insert first her own finger, then her husband’s finger, then his penis. “By week four of the seven-week treatment, they had come to the point they had intercourse,” Renshaw recalls.

Other women suffer from vulvodynia, an often unbearable pain when the genitals are touched. Men can have erectile dysfunction.

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Taking the pressure off
Often, however, unconsummated marriage isn’t really due to the workings of the penis or vagina. For example, medical reports show such marriages are more common in countries with strict religious cultures. A clinic in Istanbul reported treating 404 unconsummated marriages in just four years. An Iranian hospital evaluated 200 cases in two years.

For some men in these cultures, the wedding night is something like being thrown in to pitch for the Chicago Cubs with the score tied in the bottom of the ninth and the bases loaded. “The main factor associated with an unconsummated marriage was the intense social pressure to accomplish hasty coitus with an unfamiliar woman (some men having had no social contact with their new bride), and in the presence of relatives waiting nearby for evidence of the bride’s virginity and confirmation of coitus,” one Iranian doctor reports.

That sort of pressure could wilt any guy.

Women raised to place most of their self-esteem and identity in virginity can have a tough time “taking on a new role as a married woman and a new identity as a sexual human being,” Rosenbaum, who often treats Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox Jews, says. Their nervousness and anxiety can create vaginismus.
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The good news is that treatment usually works. Renshaw, for example, boasts an 80 percent success rate at the low, low price of just $1,400.
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Brian Alexander is the author of the new book “America Unzipped: In Search of Sex and Satisfaction.”