France is to enshrine in law the end of so-called “conjugal rights” – the notion that marriage means a duty to have sex.
A bill approved on Wednesday in the National Assembly adds a clause to the country’s civil code to make clear that “community of living” does not create an “obligation for sexual relations”.
The proposed law also makes it impossible to use lack of sexual relations as an argument in fault-based divorce.
Though unlikely to have a major impact in the courts, supporters hope the law will help deter marital rape.
A huge victory for the assexual community.
assexual
That extra S kinda changes things.
There isnot point to marriage at this point lol
Did not think today was the day id come across an argument in favor of marital rape today. You either do not understand what you are talking about or you are a genuinely horrible rancid person.
…what do you think the point of marriage is (or was)?
You know you can have sex with someone without being married. The two concepts aren’t actually requisite of each other.
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impossible to use lack of sexual relations as an argument in fault-based divorce
Is it an acceptable argument in other kinds of divorce? Ive never had to look into it so I don’t know nearly any of the rules, also not French, but that seems like a pretty good excuse to me?
The other kind of divorce is no-fault divorce. You don’t have to give a reason there, you silly goose!
Yeah I don’t get this part. Preventing marital rape is a good thing.
But then why force people to stay married if they are unhappy with the sexual situation? Seems like this would have the opposite of the desired effect.
In a “fault” divorce, it could allow people to use the obligation of a spouse to perform sexual acts as a way to assign blame in the divorce. Basically allowing one partner to claim harm and therefore pursue financial damages or even leverage in custody disputes because they were owed sex. It trapped people in situations where they were forced to have sex or face potential civil penalties if their partner refused a no-fault divorce.
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I’m unfamiliar with french law. But I doubt you need a reason to divorce. If 2 ppl no longer have sex and they want to divorce over it, they probably can.
This is more probably about “we are divorcing because you refused to fuck me, so now you owe me something”
You don’t need any argument in no-fault divorce. IMHO that’s how it should work everywhere; it’s not like you need to prove your case in court to get married in the first place.
Overall, I think this is a good idea.
My thoughts on the part about removing refusal of intimacy as justification of divorce are more nuanced, however - and partially informed from anecdotal experience.
Fault divorce makes you prove that harm is being done thus a divorce is needed. This is removing no sex as a fault. I think there are usually financial ramifications from being the at fault spouse. Thus there would be financial repercussions for refusing to have sex with someone. Obviously a bad thing.
There is a thing called no-fault divorce that requires no proof of harm. I don’t know if France has this, but it is how you get around needing any reason besides that one spouse wants to.
Yeah it’s a whole different argument.
Being married does not entitle you to sex - great.
Wanting to divorce because not enough sex - fine.
It’s not so much that you felt the other person was obligated to provide the sex (though probably this is th real arhument) but more that it just turned out you are not that compatible or you just grew apart. Should a person not be allowed to divorce if they fell out of love with their partner, ergo they turned out to have less or no more sex?
Should a person not be allowed to divorce if they fell out of love with their partner, ergo they turned out to have less or no more sex?
They absolutely should, and they will still be able to, nothing’s changed there.
No, no, there’s a big change here.
Yes, divorces still go through as before, that doesn’t change. What does change is the context of fault in the divorce.
If sex is a marital obligation, the party refusing it can be considered at fault for the marriage failing. This usually carries consequences when it comes to splitting the assets, with the judges usually penalising the party “at fault”.
This makes it so that refusing to have sex cannot be grounds for being found at fault, and makes things more balanced.
Yes this is correct, we’re in complete agreement there. The comment I was responding to worded it vaguely though, which made it sound like you cannot get a divorce because you have a sexless marriage. It made it sound like people were being forcibly kept married, which is false. You can get divorced because it’s Tuesday, or because the moon is in retroflux. Holding your spouse responsible for those things is a different story, however.
I admit I worded my comment vaguely because I was rather tired and wasn’t sure how I should express the nuance I feel around that. But to fix that:
In my experience, going from a reasonable, mutually healthy level of intimacy to one party just completely lacking interest is essentially never the core issue in play, but it is an exacerbating issue. For instance, with my ex, who I was with for five years: for the first couple years, things were pretty great. Then she ended up slipping into perhaps the worst long-term episode of severe depression and video game addiction I have ever seen in my life. I’m talking 12-14h at least a day in a KRPG, completely withdrawing from IRL social interaction (including with me, for the most part) and supplanting it with constantly being on voice chat with the various clans she was a part of over time in the game. Mind you, I enjoy gaming myself, and have struggled with overdoing in the past as well, but never to this extent in terms of length and severity. And despite trying to find numerous ways to help/support her, encouraging her to find different and better therapists and psychiatrists, and figuring out how to rebalance her meds - including offering to just be on the phone with me for 30 seconds at the beginning of the call and just saying “I give permission for my partner to discuss this stuff with you and try to find a better solution because my mental state prohibits me from doing that right now”, being effectively unable to make any motion in a positive mental health direction. To the point that it got so bad that I became severely depressed and began aggressively self medicating, eventually to the point that I realized staying in the dynamic would probably kill me, in a very literal sense. She would barely come out of her room for dinner towards the end, and I was absolutely not about to get her to just let me “use” her for intimate gratification when the chemistry was completely gone and she was gonna just lie there like a fish - I’d have felt like I was assaulting her, and I refuse to do that.
So: no, it shouldn’t be the grounds for a divorce (or partner separation, I happen to not give a shit about marriage outside of the context of tax benefits, but I take a committed partnership very seriously), but it can and should be considered an exacerbating circumstance in a relationship that has extremely serious, long-lasting problems that essentially put everything into a death spiral.
Also: I’m sharing this for context and nuance as an explanation of my opinion. I’m not asking for or desiring feedback or constructive (or otherwise) criticism or judgement. Me explaining this is an infinitesimal fraction of the lived experience of it, like you saying your partner is “pretty cool”, when there are myriad shades of nuance to a partnership. It is a closed chapter of my life, and I am better for it.
Uh… Does this imply that in a sexless marriage one is allowed to have sex with a third party without incurring fault?
NO. It is, quite literally, the opposite. How do you misinterpreted it that badly?
A marriage is a legal contract, and it binds the parties to mutual support, fidelity, respect, and cohabitation.
This serves to clarify that sex is NOT included in that list of obligations, but do note that fidelity IS. You don’t get to get to justify cheating with “I wasn’t getting any…”.
That said, the parties are obviously free to come to an agreement on what works best for them - and if that includes extramarital sex, then that’s fine as long as both agree.
I think of it like housework. No one should be compelled by the law to do housework. But if one person in the house is doing no housework, the others have a real and justified complaint. It’s not legal grounds for eviction, but it should be a material point against them in any dispute mediation that takes place.
To translate that: if one party in a marriage is withholding sex, they don’t get to claim a full 50% right to all the assets in the marriage. I’m not saying zero, but…
Exactly why this law needs made clear:
No one is entitled to sex
‘Withholding sex’ isn’t a mark against someone in a divorce and in no way should it be a factor in whether someone is entitled to their fair share of the fruits of a shared life should it come to an end.
If sex is housework, sleeping with that person is a chore, and god if that’s not the world we live in anymore.
Don’t take an analogy literally. That’s bad faith.
And if you don’t think marriage is a stated intention to have a sexual relationship, then we simply disagree. But your opinion, much as I honor it, is your own innovation.
As long as “I don’t like her anymore” is an acceptable reason, it won’t have a practical effect. But if you have to file according to a narrow set of categories like infidelity and abuse, that’s a problem.
As a French, it’s about time
I was surprised to see it existed in France. I tried to search for other countries that have that particular kind of law, but only found general areas, not specific countries.
It was a quite debated matter amongside law specialists, if i remember my time learning it. Like there was an obligation of community in the text, translated as an obligation of sexuality in jurisprudence since more than a century, but some recent interpretation of it were far more tolerant. I remember one case where judges ruled that a lesbian woman married to an asexual man for the apparences, and both living their sexual lives separately was still proper marriage because they cared for each other. Still was kind of an exception though, i’m happy to see it change officially at last.
Only rational civil unions should exist and have whatever legal powers the people involved deem necessary so long as they aren’t against public policy
Marriage should not be a recognized institution and should be relegated to the halls of religious extremists
There are less hyperbolic ways to say marriage shouldn’t carry various legal benefits over civil unions just because it’s more or less become a tradition.
This reads like someone showing up for Christmas dinner with the family and tearing down the decorations because they don’t like how commercialized the holiday has become.
It took until 2026 for France to remove the sex requirement of marriage
Don’t pretend it’s some innocent institution
It should be scrapped entirely as a legal mechanism and replaced wherever possible
I didn’t pretend marriage is universally innocent. I said it’s a tradition just like hanging colourful lights on a tree within a home in December, and that it’s just as aggressive to state everyone be rid of their decorations as that the concept of marriage should be abolished.
I didn’t say I thought you were wrong - I said the initial comment read a bit hot off the stove.
It’s not just a tradition it’s a tradition that actively creates and informs legal rules anchored to that tradition
Your analogy between the enduring institution of marriage with Christmas lights is simply false
Your argument seems more against religion (and inferrably monogamy) than it does marriage itself. Especially if “civil union” is your alternative.
I don’t see what the benefit would be to just go through the family law and replace the term “marriage” with “civil union”.
Health Insurance is a big one.
Civil unions can be a mere superficial replacement of the name but it can also be a creative and new way to create legal relationships
Civil unions being basically just marriages is lazy and people should just enter into legal relationships with one another for various reasons (child custody, medical determinations, property distribution etc)
There are tax and government benefit reasons to get married it’s an artificially maintained institution to perpetuate notions of the family and continued existence of a people
It needs to be abolished and society needs to respect different and specific legal arrangements that people make instead
So you want to remove all of the various privileges and duties bundled together as legal marriage, save for the ones that people manually enter into. I think that’s a terrible idea.
People already have freedom to contract. With a competent lawyer you can already co-parent with one adult, give another your medical power of attorney, and specify the disbersment.of property after you pass in a relatively tax-efficient manner. Even if you’re married to someone and want those other adults to all be someone other than your spouse.
If we did what you suggest and remove the underlying default bundle of agreements we call marriage, we would dramatically increase the cost of divorce and the rate of economic spousal abuse. All someone would have to do to get out of a “marriage” absent its original terms would be to burn the copies of their agreement, and even the simplest separations would be subject to adversarial litigation.
I think there’s some wide latitude to modify that default bundle and remove some of its limitations and presumptions. (Especially when it comes to taxation and social welfare, where a UBI + ~40% flat tax is better in nearly every way). But humans do pair-bond, and it seems to make much more sense to argue for the actual changes you want rather than insisting that we wholly disregard the atomic unit of human civilization.
duty ≠ obligation
To need it explained and clarified into body of law is scary.
Are you thinking of the word “right”? Because duty do equal obligation, explicitly.
Obligatory literally is in the definition of duty…
I have the duty of cast my vote in any election, not an obligation.
A simple example.
Yes it is. Just like if you have jury duty.
In my country, jury duty can be refused and is deemed as a role, not an obligation. It is an honor, as it is very rare to have such added role in court; takes very complex and often serious crimes. People called for it often accept but I have heard of situations where people object from personal or moral values.
And, again, in my country, voting is not an obligation, nor legal, nor moral. It is a right and the duty to vote is considered a matter of respect towards the right that was acquired through a revolution and the individual right to be part of the political destiny of the nation, no matter how small.
Maybe I’m splitting hairs, here, but I don’t care.
A duty arises from a personal sense of necessity to do something. Call moral obligation if it is easier for you. Being moral relative… Obligation is determined, enforced and enforceable by law.
What exactly do you think the meaningful difference is between duty and obligation?
If the law says that teachers have a obligation to report the injuries of chicken to the nurse, and that hall monitors have a duty to report the injuries of chicken to the nurse, I would expect both to be dismissable and potentially subject to a litigious parent.
I’m so confused. Why should teachers report injuries of chickens to a nurse?
