Are Sexual Fantasies Permissible in Marriage?

Overview:

Are sexual fantasies permissible in Catholic marriage? Discover the nuanced moral guidance on whether spouses can enjoy sexual fantasies within the bounds of Catholic teaching.

Is it okay for Catholic spouses to harbor or even enjoy sexual fantasies? We recently were asked this question and I thought it would be a wonderful opportunity to bring to all of our readers. So let’s dive in. 

First things first, what is a sexual fantasy? A sexual fantasy would be any sexual scenario or sexual act that either is or could be conjured up in the imagination and enjoyed with some degree of carnal pleasure. 

So, can Catholic spouses enjoy sexual fantasies within marriage? Yes, and no. Allow me to explain with a series of moral principles to keep in mind when discerning this question. First and foremost, it would be pastorally absurd to suggest that spouses can only think about each other in sexual ways during the marital act or even during mutual conjugal relations outside the marital act itself. What this would mean in practice is that the moment a memory of a past sexual encounter with your spouse appears in your imagination, you’d have to treat it with the same degree of restraint that you would about a person who isn’t even your spouse, as if you are not even married at all. Virtually all moralists recognize this level of rigorism as absurd and actually dangerous to morals. For when the bar for Christian virtue is set too high, this can easily lead people to give up the pursuit of virtue altogether and fall into despair and even final impenitence. Therefore, it must be admitted that to harbor sexual thoughts or desires about your spouse outside the marital act is not in and of itself a sin. As St. Thomas Aquinas teaches, “pleasure in what is good is good, whereas pleasure in what is evil is evil” [1]

That being said, this is not without a number of qualifications and caveats. If, for example, a sexual thought, desire, or fantasy involves anyone other than your spouse, then any enjoyment derived from such a thought becomes gravely sinful, for this would be nothing short of adulterous pleasure. Moreover, such sexual thoughts should only be about your spouse as he or she really is. That is, you should never think of your spouse as though he or she were someone else, say some other celebrity or fictional character, or that he or she had a fundamentally different appearance than what they have by nature. When we get married, the Sacrament ordains us and binds us to this person with this body, not someone else’s body. Sexual pleasure is meant to draw you closer to the person to whom the Sacrament bound you, and so any sexual fantasy or desire or thought that drives you away from a desire for real and concrete intimacy with your spouse cannot escape the mark of sin. On the flip side, if sexual thoughts or fantasies are truly grounded in your actual and concrete relationship with your spouse and there is a mutual openness with which these desires are explored together, this can help grow the bond of emotional intimacy which in turn will lead to a much more satisfying sexual relationship within marriage. I will close with some moral teaching on this issue from the esteemed moralist and Servant of God Fr. Felix Cappello, who writes in his Tractatus canonico moralis de Sacramentis: De matrimonio: 

“Thoughts, pleasures and desires - Internal pleasures, concerning those sexual acts which are permissible for spouses, are not sins; insofar as a spouse delights in what is venially sinful, such internal pleasures are venially sinful, insofar as a spouse delights in what is gravely sinful, those pleasures are gravely sinful, because pleasure receives its morality from the object of that pleasure. 

Carnal pleasure, which arises from a sexual thought about something per se permissible in marriage and which is voluntarily enjoyed outside of intercourse, excluding the danger of masturbation, is not a sin in itself, because the marital state makes such sexual thoughts permissible.” [2]

References:

1.Summa Theologiae, Supplement, q. 49, art 6, co.

2.Fr. Felix Cappello, SJ, Tractatus canonico moralis de Sacramentis: De matrimonio