 On the conjugal view, marriage is a permanent commitment, “ordered to procreation and family life” (7) and constituting a “comprehensive union” of a man and a woman. The union joins spouses “in body as well as in mind” and is “sealed by sexual intercourse” (3). Such a union is “a basic human good, a distinctive way of thriving” (35). And “there is something special” about a marital couple’s sexual intercourse, because it constitutes the “highest kind of bodily unity” (26), a unity not available in any other relationship. In having intercourse, the marital partners “do not merely touch or interlock” but unite in a way that “has generative significance” and “physically embodies their specific, marital commitment” (36). By contrast, the revisionist view regards marriage as essentially a matter of “emotional union and cohabitation” (8). Sex can enhance the emotional connections but is not essential to the marital union, and when the emotions cool, the partners might reasonably seek to end the union.