relationships and sex

The following questions came up during a conversation (are lj-posts considered conversation?) with theazureman. In case anyone else would like to express their opinions on any of them, I'm posting them here.

1. Does a marriage/close partnership-type relationship need some form of regular intimate physical contact, whether sexual or otherwise, to survive?

2. If your significant other rarely, or never, wanted to have sex with you, would this make you to feel that they didn't really care about you anymore?

3. Is there such a thing as love without sex? (Excluding parent-child type love, I suppose... but that gets into the whole issue of what love really is.) Perhaps I should rephrase that. Is there such a thing as romantic love without sex? (which probably depends on what "romantic" really means...)

4. Is a relationship without sex really just a friendship, and not love?

5a. Is it possible to have an enjoyable marriage/relationship where one person wants sex but the other doesn't? (between a given 2 people, either in a monogamous or poly situation)

5b. If both people were to agree that the person who wanted sex could have sexual relations with other people, could the non-sexual relationship between the initial 2 people still survive without diminishing in quality?

5c. Would such sexual relationships with other people feel more satisfying and/or important to the person having them, than their non-sexual relationship with the initial person?

6. All other aspects being equal, is a relationship with sex always better than one without it?


Bah. I feel so stupid sometimes. Some of the answers to these questions seem obvious. But it all depends on... a lot of factors, I suppose.