Perhaps all this thinking about marriage begins from the wrong starting point

Sarah Coakley is Norris-Hulse Professor of Divinity at Cambridge. When she was the Mallinckrodt Professor of Divinity at Harvard Divinity School, "Ecclesiastical Sex Scandals: The Lack of a Contemporary Theology of Desire," was presented as the Reynolds Lecture at Princeton University on April 28, 2005.

Sarah Coakley considers Gregory of Nyssa's 'de virginitate' and how 'Gregory presents to us in this unique text ...a vision of desire, and its right ordering in relation to God...the choice is about what the final telos of one's desire is.'

She cuts across the 'disjunctive theological opinions (conservative vs. liberal)... "Conservatives" here, of course, tend to have recourse either to biblical injunctions that they take to be unambiguous, or to magisterial authority... "Liberals," in contrast, tend to suggest, overbearingly, that they know better, in the light of modern psychological theory, than anything that Bible or tradition or authority could disclose to them.

She has us consider our obsession with discussing homosexuality to the detriment of attention to increasing divorce rates and the increasing numbers of singe-parent families:

'homoeroticism has become sufficiently open to discussion to be dissected publicly, and emotively, in the news media (and then either condoned or condemned); yet it is insufficiently integrated into a general discussion of "desire" to make comparisons with heterosexual patterns of behavior a worthy topic of sustained theological reflection.'

What Coakley does is cause us to consider less, as Goddard would put it, that sexual expression is for mutual comfort too, and not always pocreative: 'a good tied by God to his good gift of marriage' (Goddard, Homosexuality and The Church of England, p. 10) but that moreover, desire finds its fullest satisfaction in God or as Coakley puts it 'rightly ordered desire. In other words—and this is surely a point of great spiritual significance for today—right-channeled Eros ... is impossible without deep prayer ...'

She suggests that is how we might assess both heterosexual and homosexual desire: 'by the... exacting standards of progressive non-attachment and ascetical transformation. Then, I submit, homoerotic desire could potentially be released from its cultural, and biblical, associations with libertarianism, promiscuity, and disorder.'

She believes it is challenging to do this kind of 'rethinking...in an age of instantly commodified desire and massive infidelity...'

She suggests this is 'another mode of discussion that could cut creatively across the established ecclesial battle lines...'

...so another take on the whole shaboodle to explore.

I am being encouraged to read Tobias Haller, 'Reasonable and Holy'.There are a series of essays on his website 
01. Where the Division Lies
02. Pro-Creation
03. True Union (1)
04. True Union (2)
05. True Union (3)
06. Clash of Symbols
07. Remedial Reading
08. Scripture (1)
09. Scripture (2)

There is also perhaps a challenge in this for someone with more time than I currently have. According to the recommendee 'not a single person has succeeded to demolish a single one of his [Haller's] arguments...'