I am not a lawyer let alone a specialist in family law but I have inadvertantly dabbled my toes if not waded in a good ways into this swamp.
--The state of WA does not care whether parties to a marriage ever have sex or not. That is, not having sex is not automatic grounds for an annulment. This is useful in obscure ways, but I am not versed in WA divorce law to know how refusal to have sex is actually customarily interpreted.
--Actually I think marital rape statutes were created BECAUSE of husbands' presumptions that they were entitled to sex from their wives whereever and whenever they wanted. I do not think men were exactly suing to enforce this right. Before marital rape statutes. the legal system and courts just would never recognize women's right to refuse.
And speaking for myself, if you are looking for amusing verbiage to woo me with, don't start with marriage law. Almost anything else, the categorical imperative, the stock market report, the livestock report, the phone book a likely to be a lot less depressing and hopefully more amusing.
DC
In a message dated 8/7/2003 11:46:44 PM GMT Daylight Time, andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com writes:
> Well refusal _ever_ to have sexual intercourse is
> probably grounds for divorce in every state. But I
> don't think any jurisdiction or the common law ever
> created a legal duty to give in to the husband's
> demands whenever. Such a duty would of course be
> unenforceable. What would you do, sue? But perhaps you
> mean the obverse, that the wife had no legal rights
> against nonconsensual sex with her husband, i.e., that
> legally he couldn't rape her. And in many if not all
> jurisdictions that was true until recentlt.
>
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