Is It Okay to Masturbate in a Sexless Marriage?

Recently a reader named Average Joe submitted a Spiritual Conundrum to Spiritual Insights for Everyday Life. His question: Is it okay to continue to masturbate for sexual release considering that he is now married, but in the six years since the wedding there has been no sex at all? He also asked whether he is really married, since the ceremony was not done in a church, but in a courthouse officiated by a Justice of the Peace.

I’ll show his full question in a moment. First, here’s the short answer:

As covered in my earlier articles on the subject, masturbation, if practiced in moderation to release sexual tension, is not wrong or evil, but good and even healthful—though of course, nowhere near as good and healthful as sexual intercourse within a loving, faithful, monogamous marriage.

For the Bible-thumpers out there, the Bible does not say one word about masturbation. The traditional “Christian” prohibition on masturbation is completely unbiblical. See: “What does the Bible Say about Masturbation? Is Masturbation a Sin?”

Is a marriage performed by a Justice of the Peace a real marriage? You might be surprised to hear that throughout the Bible, and for the first 1,000 years of Christianity, marriage was a purely civil matter. The church wasn’t involved in it at all, except to forbid adultery. In Bible times there was not even a wedding ceremony, let alone a priest officiating at it. And in the Christian era it wasn’t until after the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century that it became mandatory for a priest or minister to officiate at weddings.

Is a marriage performed by a Justice of the Peace valid? From a biblical perspective, it’s just as valid as a marriage performed by a minister or priest. Neither one is required by the Bible.

The question

Here is the full Spiritual Conundrum that Average Joe sent in:

Hello Lee,

I’ve read a couple of your posts on sexual immorality and feel that your insights are eye opening and realistically portrayed. The spiritual views and conflicts one may ponder associated with pornography and masturbation are presented in a way that I haven’t seen before and that I believe are done according to Jesus’s statement to do all things in moderation. So I greatly appreciate your efforts and applaud your insights!

My issue: I have had a steady diet all my life of either fantasy related release of sexual energy ending with masturbation or visual pornographic release with the same result in order to curb sexual energy. I finally got married (once) by the justice of the peace (not in church) in hopes of having a God honoring relationship with a woman and with hopes of a loving and sexually fulfilling marriage. About 6 years have passed and I am in a sexless marriage, we have not consummated once since getting married. We have fooled around a few times, but with no intercourse (not once). We don’t hug, kiss, or have any sexual contact now and do not sleep in the same bed even for years.

My question: Is it ok for me to continue the somewhat harmless act of masturbation due to my situation or is this no longer God honoring as I do have a wife? Also, my father and others say I’m not really married to my wife since the marriage did not occur within a church. Do you agree? However, at the courthouse, my father and friends were all present when we exchanged vows with our hands on the Bible.

Thank you so much for your consideration on this!

Thanks for your good questions, Average Joe! Let’s take things one at a time, not necessarily in the order asked.

All things in moderation?

First, a correction:

It was not Jesus who said, “All things in moderation,” nor is that saying anywhere in the Bible. Rather, it’s based on ancient Greek and Roman philosophy. It is usually attributed to the Greek poet Hesiod (c. 700 BC) and the Roman playwright Plautus (c. 254 BC – 184 BC), and sometimes to the Greek philosopher Aristotle (384 BC – 322 BC).

Would Jesus have approved? Maybe. But Jesus wasn’t a very moderate guy. When it came to evil and sin, he was uncompromising about not doing it. Still, he was merciful to sinners, not condemning them unless they stubbornly refused to repent, but telling them to “go and sin no more” (John 8:11). Perhaps Jesus would approve if we made one little modification to that ancient aphorism:

“All good things in moderation.”

But wait! Some good things are not meant to be done in moderation, such as loving God, which Jesus says we are to do “with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength” (Matthew 22:37; Mark 12:30; Luke 10:27).

When it comes to ordinary activities, though, I think the ancient Greeks and Romans were onto something. It’s best not to overdo it. Anything, including masturbation, can become harmful and destructive if we get carried away and do too much of it.

As covered in one of my other articles on the subject (which are linked from the end of this one), my suggested rule for masturbation is: do it as often as needed to take care of the ol’ biological sex drive—which is different for different people. That’s assuming you don’t have a partner with whom you can engage in sexual intimacy and satisfy not only your sex drive, but also your human need for closeness to another person.

What about married people?

Many people are blessed to live in a happy, loving marriage or committed relationship in which not only their sex drive but their love for each other is satisfied and expressed in a happy and fulfilling sex life.

Many others are not. Some are married and do have a sex life, but one partner wants it much more often than the other. Some married couples do have sex, but very seldom. Therapists generally consider a marriage to be “sexless” if the couple has sex fewer than ten times a year. And some people have literally sexless marriages, in which there is no sex at all. They may have had a sex life at one time, but it has now ceased altogether, or like Average Joe, they may never have had sex.

Is it okay for people in these situations to masturbate?

Outside of the more conservative and reactionary parts of the Christian Church, the answer to this question is a solid “Yes.” Culturally and psychologically speaking, it is a way to satisfy our natural sex drive without having to resort to . . . less desirable means. From a religious point of view, it is a way to avoid the temptation to commit adultery—which is forbidden in the Bible—and remain faithful to your partner.

Is it a good situation?

No. Marriages that have no sexual intimacy tend not to last long-term. And even if they do, for most people who have normal sexual and romantic feelings, it feels more like having a housemate than a partner in marriage—and that’s not what they signed up for. A lack of sexual intimacy usually means either trouble in the marriage or a marriage that is a marriage in name only, without the inner oneness of minds and hearts that is the essence of real spiritual marriage.

If you are stuck in a sexless marriage, and you can’t work it out between the two of you, I would suggest seeking help from a marriage counselor, therapist, or trusted clergyperson to help you heal the rift in your relationship. If the problem proves to be insoluble, the reality is that sooner or later most people are going to start thinking about dissolving that marriage. Usually a sexless marriage means that even if it’s a legal marriage, it’s not a real marriage. There is no real inner connection.

Is it okay to masturbate in such a marriage? Yes. It is not against the Bible, and it is a way to remain faithful to your partner and satisfy your sexual needs while not engaging in acts that the Bible does prohibit, or that are emotionally, socially, or physically harmful. Take away the guilt that the Catholic Church, especially, has irrationally and unscientifically heaped onto masturbation, and it is simply a natural, healthful way to release sexual tension—assuming it is done in moderation, as needed to satisfy a person’s natural biological sex drive.

In marriages in which the partners do love each other, but have mismatched sex drives, masturbation can take up the slack for the partner who has the stronger sex drive. And if one or the other of the partners cannot have sex due to acute or chronic illness, masturbation is a way for the other partner remain faithful while satisfying his or her sexual needs.

What if we weren’t married in a church?

Historically speaking, church weddings are a recent phenomenon. They became the norm only in the past 500 to 1,000 years. Before that, although the priest might attend or observe a wedding, the priest did not perform weddings. The idea that a marriage is not valid if there wasn’t a wedding performed in a church by a priest or minister is not only unbiblical, but is a relatively recent development in Western society.

There are weddings in the Bible. But if you read through the entire Bible from beginning to end, you will not find a single mention of a wedding ceremony, nor will you find any mention of a priest being involved in the wedding. That’s just not how it was done.

Most commonly, marriages were arranged by the families involved. The family of the groom would pay a “bride price” to the family of the bride. At that point she would be considered married to him even if they hadn’t yet begun to live together and consummated the marriage. Sometimes the two would not have met each other before the wedding took place. The bride might even be a young girl, but the wedding wouldn’t take place until she reached young adulthood. Commonly there would be at least a year from the time the marriage contract was made to the time of the wedding.

As for the wedding itself, this usually involved the bride being brought to the groom’s home or family compound. He would then take her into the bridal chamber and sleep with her. This would begin a week of festivities, which is called a “wedding feast” in the Bible. Once the groom slept with his bride, the marriage was consummated, and it was considered completed and sealed. For some biblical examples illustrating these wedding customs, see Genesis 29:21–30; Judges 14; Matthew 22:1–14; John 2:1–11; Revelation 19:9.

As you can see from these passages, the church and the priests had nothing to do with it. There was no ceremony, no exchanging of vows, and no clergyperson saying, “I now pronounce that you are husband and wife.” The two key events were the making of the wedding contract at the time that the groom’s family paid the bride price to the bride’s family, and the consummation of the marriage, which took place at the beginning of the wedding feast.

Just to be clear, the bride price did not mean that the bride was being sold to the groom, nor did it mean that she was his “property.” Rather, the bride price was seen as compensation to the bride’s family for raising her and protecting her up to the time when she could be given to the groom in marriage. Despite the pronouncements of certain modern-day ideologies, women in those days were not property unless they actually were property—meaning slaves. And both men and women could be slaves. But wives were not slaves.

Biblically speaking, it doesn’t matter whether the wedding was performed by a clergyperson or by a Justice of the Peace. Here are the two things that do matter, if we carry biblical practices into the present day:

1. An agreement to marry, which in biblical times was contracted between families, but in today’s Western society is mutually agreed to by the couple themselves.
2. The consummation of the marriage at the time of the wedding.

Average Joe’s marriage has one of these, in the form of a consensual civil marriage, but not the other.

What if the marriage is never consummated?

Ironically, biblically speaking, the problem with Average Joe’s marriage is not that it was performed by a Justice of the Peace, but that it was never consummated. If a man never slept with his wife, or if she refused to sleep with him, the marriage would not be considered complete, and there would be serious repercussions.

If the man refused to sleep with his wife, he would be seen as robbing her of the honor of bearing children. Her family would view this as a breach of the marriage contract. They might demand that he sleep with her, or that he return her to her family as a virgin so that she could be married to a man who would do his duty to her and give her children.

If the woman refused to sleep with her husband, most likely he would simply divorce her, and she would be disgraced. It is unlikely that another man would be willing to marry her.

Either way, it would be considered a great scandal.

In reality, this would rarely happen, except perhaps in cases in which a wealthy man heavily favored one of his wives over the others. Unlike in Western and Western-influenced cultures today, in which marriage is commonly seen as a relationship based on love, in those days marriage was seen primarily as a means of producing children, especially sons who could become heirs, and of creating alliances between families and clans. If there was no intention of having sex and bearing children, the people of those cultures would have seen little reason to contract the marriage in the first place. Even marriages intended to link families and clans were expected to produce children as the fruit that binds the alliance together.

In particular, a woman would be highly unlikely to refuse sex and thus avoid bearing children. In those days, women could not find fulfillment by going out and starting a career independent of her father or husband as women commonly can today. Bearing and raising children was a woman’s primary path to fulfillment, honor, and respect in society. A childless woman was an object of pity, or of scorn. This, and the eagerness of women to bear children, is illustrated in several Bible stories, such as the story of Abraham’s wife Sarah and her slave Hagar in Genesis 16 and 21 and the story of Jacob’s two wives Leah and Rachel in Genesis 29 and 30.

Even today, many people would question whether there is really a marriage if there is no sexual intimacy at all. Sex within marriage is seen as an expression of the mutual love and inner oneness that is the basis of present-day marriage. To use the biblical term, do two people really have the oneness of marriage if they are not “one flesh”?

Masturbation in a sexless marriage

Life is complicated. If you are in a sexless marriage, only you can decide how you will handle it. And really, masturbation is the least of your problems. If you can’t make love with the one you’re married to for whatever reason, masturbation is the healthiest and least problematic way to take care of your sexual needs.

What masturbation doesn’t do is take care of your emotional need for closeness to and intimacy with another human being. That’s why even if you do ignore the traditional Christian church’s unbiblical, unscientific, and irrational prohibition of masturbation, you have only patched over the real issues in the marriage.

Masturbation can take care of your biological sexual needs, but it can’t take care of your emotional, spiritual, and human need for closeness and intimacy with a partner in marriage. This was the relationship God gave us from the beginning. It is not merely a physical relationship. In a real marriage, the physical relationship is an expression of the inner spiritual relationship.

If that physical expression is missing from your marriage, then you have some hard choices to make, and some hard work to do.

If you and your partner in marriage do feel an inner connection of love and friendship, then the hard work means taking whatever steps are required to bridge the gap between the two of you, build up your sense of connection and closeness, and heal your own individual issues and your relationship with each other to the point that your love for one another can be expressed physically in a loving and happy sexual relationship. This is not something that’s going to happen overnight. And it may require professional or ministerial help to accomplish. But if there is any possibility of rekindling the marriage, or kindling it in the first place, it is very much worth it.

However, if you’re legally married, but not really married, and it becomes clear that this is not going to change, then you have a hard choice to make. Do you remain in a dead marriage, or do you dissolve it and move on? That is a choice only you can make, because you are the only one in your shoes. And of course, the laws and culture of your country and community are a major consideration in making that choice.

Back to the positive side of things, any effort you can put into healing the relationship will be well worth it. Even if you aren’t able to heal this relationship, the experience of seeking understanding, and making the effort to build a good and loving relationship with your partner in marriage, will bring about emotional and spiritual growth that you can carry with you into whatever relationship might come next if the one you’re in now is irreparably broken.

If nothing else, I’m here to tell you that there is marriage in heaven. If it turns out that the one you’re married to now is not a true spiritual partner for you, in heaven God will give you someone to love, who will love you in return, to eternity.

This article is a response to a spiritual conundrum submitted by a reader.

For further reading:

• Real Marriage vs. Legal Marriage
• Can you Fall in Love in Heaven if you Haven’t Found Someone on Earth?
• What does the Bible Say about Masturbation? Is Masturbation a Sin?
• Can You Masturbate Without Lusting? What about Matthew 5:27-30?
• Is Masturbation Always Sinful? Does it Always Come from Lust?
• What does the Bible Say about Pornography? Is Pornography Sinful?
• How does Marriage Fit In with a Spiritual Life? Is There Marriage in Heaven?