Sexual problems in marriage: non-consummation.

The inability of a married couple to enter into the physical relationship of sexual intercourse has seemed to lawyers so striking a negation of the contract and ends of marriage that courts have been willing to accept evidence of this occurrence as grounds for annulment. Apart from the medico-legal context, doctors were for long hesitant in their approach to non-consummation. They did not encourage early referral, their treatments were piecemeal and their aims uncertain; they tended to overlook not only warnings before the marriage and residual handicaps after its consummation, but also abnormalities in the marital partner and in the mutual relationship. In the last 15 years, however, there has been a convergence of clinical approaches to the unconsummated marriage and a concentration on the disordered interactions within it. This paper views nonconsummation as a symptom and sign of marital pathology, and attempts to identify those components of its treatment which play an important part in the successful outcomes that have been reported.