Sex Myth 3 - All marriages have been consummated

Do you think "All marriages have been consummated" is a myth or truth ?

Meaning of consummated - make (a marriage or relationship) complete by having sexual intercourse.

For a marriage to be considered legitimate by many faith and cultural traditions, it must be consecrated by an official in a public ceremony and consummated through sexual intercourse. For example, a marriage may be annulled by the Pope if the marriage is ratum et non consummatum (Code of Canon Law, n.d.) and can be voided by many governments if it’s not consummated (e.g., in the United Kingdom; Matrimonial Causes Act, 1973). As you can imagine, there’s often a deep sense of shame, anxiety, and alienation for couples who haven’t consummated their marriage. Thus, it’s difficult to estimate how many couples haven’t consummated their marriages, but it’s believed that approximately 1.5% of marriages aren’t consummated within a year of the wedding and 0.75% of marriages remain unconsummated for the remainder of the marriage (B. W. McCarthy & McCarthy, 2003). Of course, the idea of a marriage not being consummated is not new. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1831) describes one of the briefest fictional marriages that wasn’t consummated. Victor and Elizabeth are unable to consummate their marriage because the monster apparently rapes and definitely murders Elizabeth on their wedding night honeymoon in the Alps. In Middlemarch (1872), George Eliot captured the sadness, frustration, and anger that can occur when the hopeful expectations of a Roman honeymoon are met with the disappointment of being in a sexless marriage. In the novel, Eliot describes the bride, Dorothea, alone in Rome trying to understand what this means for her marriage and her life:

However, Dorothea was crying, and if she had been required to state the cause, she could only have done so in some such general words as I have already used: to have been driven to be more particular would have been like trying to give a history of the lights and shadows; for that new real future which was replacing the imaginary drew its material from the endless minutiae by which her view of Mr [sic] Casaubon and her wifely relation, now that she was married to him, was gradually changing with the secret motion of a watch‐hand from what it had been in her maiden dream.

We’ll not dwell on the fact that a visitor who interrupted her crying would become her next husband. In real life, George Eliot was no stranger to the unconsummated marriage. At the age of 60, she married John Cross, who was 20 years her junior. The story goes that when it came time to consummate their marriage, while honeymooning in Venice, the groom leaped from their hotel room into a canal rather than have sex with his bride. The story that he preferred to jump into a canal (and asked the passing gondoliers not save him from drowning) because he wasn’t up to the sexual demands Eliot placed on him makes for a better – if apocryphal – story than that he was suffering from depression. We may never know his real reasons for jumping off their balcony. In any case, scholars seem to agree that their marriage remained unconsummated for the entirety of their six‐month marriage, which ended with Eliot’s death (Maddox, 2009). Setting aside the infamous leap into the canal, the prize for most famous unconsummated marriage goes to John Ruskin and Effie Gray, who were married on April 10, 1848. Following their wedding, they went to honeymoon in the Scottish Highlands. As Gray noted in a letter to her father, “I had never been told of the duties of married persons to each other and knew little or nothing about their relations in the closest union on earth” (James, 1947, p. 220). However, as Helena Michie (2006) noted, it was one thing for a lady of this time to be ignorant of the mechanics of sex, but Ruskin was more worldly. So, what caused him to refuse to consummate their marriage? As it happens, there’s a surprisingly large literature on their marriage and the reasons Ruskin gave Gray for not consummating it. These included, the fact that, as an art critic, Ruskin was used to the idealization of women’s bodies, including most representations of nude women having no pubic hair (this could also be said of representations of women’s bodies today, e.g., Schick, Rima, & Calabrese, 2011). Gray described Ruskin’s reaction to her body on their wedding night in the same letter to her father:

For days John talked about this relation to me but avowed no intention of making me his Wife [by consummating their marriage]. He alleged various reasons, hatred to children, religious reasons, a desire to preserve my beauty, and finally this last year told me the true reason (and to me this is as villainous as all the rest) that he had imagined women were quite different to what he saw I was, and that the reason he did not make me his Wife was because he was disgusted with my person [on our wedding night].

Scholars have debated the six‐year marriage between Ruskin and Gray that ended in divorce in 1854. Some have argued that he was put off by her pubic hair and other features of sexual maturity that were inconsistent with the perfect and pubescent forms that Ruskin studied in his scholarship of fine art, while others felt he simply didn’t want to have children (Lutyens, 1972). While it’s tempting to spend more time understanding the reasons why a couple in Victorian times might have an unconsummated marriage (for a detailed account of the Ruskin–Gray honeymoon as well as that of another Victorian couple, see Michie, 2006), let’s move on to the present.

Reasons for unconsummated marriages

As with Victorian times, there are still marriages that remain unconsummated. One of the earliest studies I could find on the reasons for unconsummated marriages was from a book with a title that reflected a focus on finding fault with wives rather than husbands: Virgin Wives: A Study of Unconsummated Marriages (Friedman, 1962). Two years later, another study with almost the same name (Blazer, 1964) was conducted in which 1,000 married women who reported being virgins (corroborated by a gynecological exam and their husbands) and who were physically capable of vaginal intercourse were asked “Why are you still a virgin?” The most common answer was fear that intercourse would be painful (see Figure 3 for all of the answers displayed proportionally). The fear of pain during intercourse (known as dyspareunia) is consistently ranked as the primary reason for unconsummated marriages in other studies (C. Ellison, 1968), including in studies conducted in other cultures (Al Sughayir, 2004; Bayer & Shunaigat, 2001; Özdemir, Şimşek, Özkardeş, İncesu, & Karakoç, 2008). For many women this fear is based on their suffering from vaginismus, which is when vaginal penetration is painful or impossible. For some women, this occurs exclusively during sex, but other women can’t insert tampons or have vaginal examination (for more on the diagnosis of vaginismus, see Reissing, Binik, Khalifé, Cohen, & Amsel, 2004). The good news is that there are empirically supported treatments for vaginismus and dyspareunia (e.g., Gindin & Resnicoff, 2002; Van Lankveld et al., 2006). Although fear of vaginal pain is the primary reason cited for not consummating marriages, men aren’t off the hook. Erectile dysfunction and premature ejaculation are also cited in nearly all of the studies of unconsummated marriages (e.g., Ribner & Rosenbaum, 2005). In fact, prior to the “married virgin” studies, one researcher in India concluded that problems with the men accounted for nearly all of the cases in which the lack of sex was unintentional (Pillay, 1955). Again, here the news is good. There are effective treatments for both erectile dysfunction and premature ejaculation (Metz & McCarthy, 2003, 2004). Although I have broken down the reasons for unconsummated marriages into female and male sexual problems, it’s a fool’s bargain to treat sexual problems in intimate relationships as either his problem or her problem. It’s clear that the effective approaches to working with couples who haven’t consummated their marriage is to treat it as an issue within the couple, not one partner or the other (B. W. McCarthy & McCarthy, 2003; Rosenbaum, 2009). Finally, it’s also worth noting that there are cultural and contextual influences at work here. Growing up in a culture that is strident in prohibiting premarital physical contact or even communication between genders appears to put people more at risk of being in an unconsummated marriage. Such cultures are also likely to reinforce perceptions of sex as dirty and sinful. Similarly, conservative cultures are less likely to have comprehensive sex education and more likely to have arranged marriages. People in conservative cultures also tend to marry at a younger age. All of these factors can produce spouses with little or no idea as to what to expect sexually from marriage. The anxiety and psychologically wrought experience of having sex with a spouse for the first time becomes all the more intense in situations when one or both of the partners lack the knowledge and experience to make sex an enjoyable experience. The problem can be even more intense for adolescent girls who end up in arranged marriages to older men. Worse still, there are some cultures that require some evidence that the marriage has been consummated (Bayer & Shunaigat, 2001). So the pressure on young brides and grooms in these cultures is enormous. In many conservative and religious cultures, a couple having difficulty consummating their marriage for more than a few weeks are encouraged to seek help from a member of the clergy, who may not have the expertise to deal with these issues. Thus, while not new, the problem of unconsummated marriages in conservative cultures has begun to receive more attention and been labeled a “crisis” by some (Al Sughayir, 2004; Özdemir et al., 2008; Ribner & Rosenbaum, 2005).

Conclusion

Although there are relatively few unconsummated marriages, there are more than most people realize. What are the factors that lead a minority of couples to fail to consummate their marriages? Couples who marry young, whose marriages were arranged, who had little or no contact prior to their wedding, who have genital pain or other physical impairments, who have little sexual knowledge, and whose communities require proof of consummation are more likely to delay consummation for weeks or permanently. The internal and external pressure of being in an unconsummated marriage can lead to anxiety, anger, and shame. This type of pressure is perhaps what prompted George Eliot’s groom to leap from their honeymoon suite into a Venetian canal rather than consummating his new marriage with his famous wife.