The Marital Debt

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It sure hasn’t “disappeared from Catholic consciousness” on this forum. It seems like every week some guy is posting about it.

Thank you Jesus for granting me 23 years of a good marriage without either one of us ever feeling a need to bring up this concept.

P.S. I will grant that the article posted here is one of the more reasonable ones on this subject I’ve seen, fwiw.
 
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good article, just a little simplistic.

Anyway invoke marital debt in times of disharmony will noy solve the problem. And each spouse should remain free, and not feel obligate to answers the other request.

I see more the “marital debt” as a moral code to agree to avoid suffering by preventing potential conflicts.
 
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My wife isn’t Catholic, so I wouldn’t dare bring the concept up… even if there have been times where we go without for 3-4 months. I would feel like a complete a**hole if I insisted or pressured for more using Catholic theology as my weapon.
 
“You know honey, the guys on the forum say you need to give it up whenever I want or you’re going to hell…”

Yeah, wouldn’t go over well.
 
I pretty much told my husband when we got engaged that I hoped he wasn’t going to think that once we were married he could just go demanding sex any old time he felt like it. At that point we were already in our early 30s and had been around the block a number of times so to speak and I knew he wasn’t that way, so he chuckled at the statement same as when I told him that he better not be planning to have a joint bank account and take all the money out and disappear with it.
 
If people want to bring up the marital debt in a one-sided way, they probably also need to start practicing mutual marital continence during all historical fasting periods of the Church. Which included several days of every week.

Seriously, though, the moral theology of marriage is not simple.
 
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These threads hurt my heart a bit.
There’s so much sexual brokenness out there and I don’t think it’s getting any better.

We’re fed so many false images of how bodies are supposed to look, how sex is supposed to happen, how emotions are supposed to work.
Or we come from wounded families and have no good role models of how to behave as spouses.

I recently had a friend confide to me it’s been a very long time since she and her DH had sex. I mean, measured in years. She sticks with him because of commitment to him and to the kids, but she feels incredibly rejected (he’s the one who’s denying her) and she feels like the best years of her life are passing her by…
Makes me wonder how many other of my friends are going through this
 
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Catholic couples will want to follow Catholic beliefs. The marital debt is a catholic belief. The fact, for example, that one of the two don’t want to follow it, doesn’t change this.
I was going to post this same article during the next week myself, because many Catholic married people don’t actually know about this. It is better to have the truth than otherwise.
 
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To be honest, I am not at all interested in engaging in sexual congress with someone whose participation is based solely on acquiescence to the marital debt.
 
It reminds me of a friend of a coworker who was telling us about the time he and his wife were trying very diligently to conceive without much success. The guy shook his head sadly. “I never thought I would even think such a thing,” he remarked, “but one day my wife said that the time was right and that they should try again tonight. “I thought, oh no, not again!”
 
True it wouldnt go over well but I always wonder if the other party ever feels like a jerk when they dont satisfy a reasonable spouse…
 
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I think a loving spouse would at some point at least. I doubt one would just say no for fun, but because of good reasons.

Not married so I don’t have first hand experience, but I would imagine someone would rather not have sex than to have sex with someone who isn’t enthusiastic about it. I feel like the latter makes the spouse look like a sex object.
 
mdgspencer said:
Catholic couples will want to follow Catholic beliefs. The marital debt is a catholic belief.
Click to expand...
How about the couple forgets about “Catholic beliefs” for a moment and just actually talks to each other and communicates with each other about what is going on with each of them, sexually? Which is also what the article is more or less suggesting.
 
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