Object of the Consent in Marriage

The consent that makes a marriage is, implicitly, the consent to the use of marital rights.

The essential end of marriage is the begetting andrea ring of children, and the control of fleshly tendencies. The parties may have many other accidental or nonessential ends in view, good or bad. Thus a person may marry for wealth, or for social position, or to prevent another from getting the personespoused, or to reform the person married, or for a variety of other reasons. But the essential end of marriage is in marriage itself, and those who assume the marital state assume what that state is, no matter what their individual purposes and intentions may be. The accidental ends (the personal or individual purposes and intentions of the spouses) cannot prevent their marriage from being a true one. Thus a woman who marries for social position is a married woman, despite her unworthy purpose in marrying. A man who marries for wealth is a married man,notwithstanding his personal objective in taking a wife.