Traditional marriage is a covenant where parties pledge to give to the other what is needed. We’ve lost the idea of marriage as two people working for the common purpose of building a family and a home, furthering the life of their people another generation, exhausting themselves, laughing, crying, and enjoying each other in every way, as they do it. Feminism has killed all the magic and romance of marriage with its dour obsessing over consent, labor, remuneration, etc., turning wives into lawyers and men into beggars. Away with all of it.

If you have spent any amount of time at all observing online discussions or popular teaching in the churches about marriage relationships, especially in regard to intimacy, you have likely noticed that the default setting for all discourse is that what women need from men is completely reasonable and can never be denied them, but what men need from women is a gross imposition and Herculean task they should never be obligated to perform. In one such recent online pontification from a woke pastor, the claim was made that “Husbands are never entitled to have sex with their wives. I don’t care if it’s your wedding night, your anniversary, or your birthday. Love is patient.” Rhetoric like this abounds from pastors across the theological spectrum, usually to a chorus of ‘stunnings’ and ‘braves.’ 

Now, I have developed a heuristic to quickly sniff out if a statement about marriage or sex roles is accurate or just another attempt to manipulate Christians into adopting contemporary, unbiblical attitudes. That heuristic is this: “Can I apply this statement, mutatis mutandis, to the other sex with the approval of the party making it?” If not, then it’s probably not a biblically sound idea, and we are being played. 

So upon reading the above claim about sex and entitlement, I immediately applied Mallard’s Razor©. It is generally agreed that husbands are more needy in the realm of conjugal relations and wives are more needy in the realm of emotional support. So I shot back to the author, “Wives are never entitled to have emotional support from their husbands. I don’t care if it’s been a hard day, you are overwhelmed, or you really just need to be heard. Love is patient.” The response from the author, and a great many others, was both predictable and telling. Of course, they would not have it. The idea that a husband could withhold emotional support from his wife provoked an enraged response, with a flurry of accusations about how much of an incel and spousal abuser I must simultaneously be. Mallard’s Razor: Don’t get on Twitter without it.

I could go off from here into various aspects of the digital battle that ensued, as many came to defend my exposure of the original statement, and all manner of silly cavils about men and sex were thrown out against us. But I want to focus on one idea that kept coming up in the arguments. Multiple times in the replies to my post I’ve now been told that emotional intimacy is definitional to marriage, while sex is optional. Thus, it would be faithless, a dereliction of duty, for a husband to not render emotional support to his wife if she needed a sounding board or a shoulder to cry on. At the same time, a man has no claim at all upon his wife sexually, it seems. This idea is, in the words of quite a few angry people, “very rapey.”

And here, any competent Bible student can see that the feministic stance on the sexual and emotional obligations of spouses is exactly the reverse of the case, if anything. The Bible, and the Christian tradition as a consequence, clearly holds that sex (and the fruit that ordinarily comes from it) is the primary, distinctive feature of marriage. Marriage is designed to be the place where sex happens. Marriage and sex are not the same thing, but the latter is a necessary condition and the primary reason for the former. Marriage is meant to channel the incredible power of human sexuality into a constructive force- biologically, psychologically, and socially. When the heat of sexuality is allowed to run outside of marriage, it is inevitably a destructive fire. And of course, having a marriage without sex, is like building a forge to do basket weaving. So it shouldn’t be controversial to say that by design sex should be happening in marriage. Which means spouses owe conjugal relations to each other. They are in fact entitled to sex with their mate.

The Westminster Confession of Faith says “Marriage was ordained for the mutual help of husband and wife [which could possibly entail sex], for the increase of mankind with legitimate issue, and of the church with an holy seed [which definitely entails sex]; and for preventing of uncleanness [again, definitely entails sex].” (24.2) If all someone is looking for is good advice or help around the house, other arrangements, from friendships to hiring a handyman, will do. But marriage has more in view than that. If you think this is just some extreme Puritan take, the words of the Book of Common Prayer (1662) give us the same three purposes: 

“First, it was ordained for the procreation of children, to be brought up in the fear and nurture of the Lord, and to the praise of his holy Name. Secondly, it was ordained for a remedy against sin, and to avoid fornication; that such persons as have not the gift of continency might marry, and keep themselves undefiled members of Christ’s body. Thirdly, it was ordained for the mutual society, help, and comfort, that the one ought to have of the other, both in prosperity and adversity.”

For Puritan and Cavalier alike, marriage has the same purposes. And of course, these are all purposes clearly drawn from Scripture, notably 1 Corinthians 7:2-5:

“Nevertheless, to avoid fornication, let every man have his own wife, and let every woman have her own husband. Let the husband render unto the wife due benevolence: and likewise also the wife unto the husband. The wife hath not power of her own body, but the husband: and likewise also the husband hath not power of his own body, but the wife. Defraud ye not one the other, except it be with consent for a time, that ye may give yourselves to fasting and prayer; and come together again, that Satan tempt you not for your incontinency.”

With the above in view, a marriage where sex is withheld by one party permanently, apart from reasons of physical or other impairment, is tantamount to abandonment and grounds for divorce. In the aftermath of the online spat noted above, a wise person suggested that just as porn use can rise to the level of divorceable adultery, denial of conjugal relations can rise to the level of divorceable abandonment. Again, Mallard’s Razor is useful here. I wonder how many evangelical feminists that chafe at the idea that a wife otherwise capable of rendering due benevolence who persistently refuses to do so is in violation of the marriage covenant and liable to be divorced would fully support a wife divorcing a husband with a porn addiction. So then, without ongoing conjugal generosity, a marriage is effectively killed. It is a form of desertion.

Let me briefly note that unwed people who cannot or will not have sex with their espoused when married should not be permitted to wed at all. Without any consummation, there is no marriage. This was uncontroversial in past ages, when the idea of a merely companionate, non-sexual marriage was unthinkable (I hope those who hold to the perpetual virginity of Mary can at least agree that hers would have been an utterly unique situation). Let me also add that nothing I have said thus far should be taken as applicable to those, who for reasons of infirmity, after marriage, have lost the ability to safely engage in sexual intercourse.

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