Recently I got in a conversation on social media about the necessity of sex to consummate marriage. Is it a marriage if the couple never sleeps together? It has been the almost universal opinion of the church for two-thousand years that if a couple does not sleep together, it is not a marriage. Even more recently, my wife had a friend get married, but the husband refused to sleep with her. She went to the state and got the marriage annulled. Note she did not get a divorce. Why? She was never married to begin with. My thoughts on this issue were spurred by this quote from Jim Newheiser’s book, Marriage, Divorce, and Remarriage: 

A marriage is valid when a covenant of companionship is made between a man and a woman who present themselves forward to the community as being married…While sexual union is ordinarily part of marriage, a couple can be truly married without physically consummating the marriage.

Can a couple be married in heart only and not also in body? A blog post is insufficient to answer this question. But here is a basic outline why without sex there is no marriage.

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