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.
Fault based divorce is already a stupid concept (under the law).
Someone MAY be at fault, but you should never need to provide a reason beyond “I don’t want to anymore” to commence divorce proceedings.
Marriage is just legal protections for the partners in the event of a separation (i.e. rights to split assets and whatnot).
But it’s still entirely voluntary.
Well, in nice countries anyway.
Honeyyy it’s time for our state mandated sex!
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.
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.
For reference here’s the part of the comment I replied to:
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?
Emphasis mine.
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.
I was with you until the last have sentence. How does it make things more balanced?
Women are known to weaponize/withhold intimacy as a form of punishment. If anything, this tips the balance in favor of women even further, as is tradition with most legal frameworks.
In what universe do you live in? Because in this one, it’s not the men who are being beaten, abused and raped in their own home by their own partner, is it? Look up surveys and studies, if you find this in any way surprising.
I fail to see your problem with “withholding intimacy”. Nobody is forced to consent to anything, and if someone no longer wants to have sex with you, then that relationship has very serious problems.
Lack of sex is a symptom, not the cause, and if you think it’s being used to “punish you”, then you need to take a step back and have a very long think about what is going on from your partner’s perspective. If you’re unable to do that, then find help - a therapist, a psychologist, a councillor, someone that is unbiased and that can help provide insights.
Ultimately, you may come to the realisation that your partner and you have needs that the other is not willing or able to meet, and that it’s time to go separate ways. Or you may both come out of it with a better understanding of each other, and live happier lives because of it.
But let me tell you, the fact that you assume that you’re being punished because you’re not getting sex, that’s one massive red flag.
I never inserted myself, but nice projection/straw manning there.
Edit: If you find the patience, revisit this comment some time later on. I will update it.
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…
A huge victory for the assexual community.
Speaking as a man, I don’t anyone to fuck me out of obligation, I want to be fucked by a someone who is really into me and wants to fuck me because they are a really into me and are horny as fuck for me :3
what happens if your friends owes you like three fiddy?
I don’t fuck crustaceans from the cretaceous period.
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!
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.
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.
didn’t even know it was a law in france
I don’t agree with this at all. If you are a very sexual person and suddenly your partner isn’t thats not your fault and you have a right to be happy with someone else if you so choose
Nothing I love more than seeing gross takes on the Internet from my home state.
What’s gross? Dead bedrooms are a thing and become a thing sometimes even in healthy relationships. If you are a sexual person and suddenly your partner is not. It’s unfair and selfish to make the other partner stay committed. I’m not advocating for affairs but I do believe people have a right to be happy and being stuck in a marriage without sex seems like it would be miserable
This isn’t saying you can’t get a divorce. It’s saying a woman cannot be legally obligated to fuck her husband.
Then that woman is going to be single. I know truth hurts, but it’s reality
Oh no. Some sexist guy in the American Midwest won’t date the nebulous concept of a woman with bodily autonomy! What ever will the women do???
You stay lonely sweetheart. Happily married 23 years now and I tagged you as forever alone
“happily”
I’m sure she’s happy and not stuck. Whatever you need to tell yourself.
Is adultery illegal in France? Is it still cause for a fault-based divorce? While I very much agree with the change they are making, I think refusal to have sex should rule out adultery as a cause for fault based divorce. Just seems wrong to say you can’t have sex with anyone other thatn this one person who won’t have sex with you, so you are at fault if you have sex… horrible wording, but I think y’all get what I am saying.
What if one partner wants a divorce because the other partner was having sex with other people due to there being no sex within the marriage?
I can see not being able to divorce someone (at fault or whatever it’s called) just because they don’t want to have sex, but would they then be able to divorce you (at fault) if you seek it elsewhere and are open about it?
Just curious as it would be an interesting situation.
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”.
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.
Okay, you right, I wrong, Merry Christmas.
