Marriage has the potential to see two people bonded to each other in rationality, sincerity, and joy across different categories as much as they allow themselves to be. Since people can lovingly give themselves in total openness about themselves to one another, the intimacy can be extreme in its depths and in the comfort this brings to both people. Though the epistemological limitations of human nature cannot be shed so that a person sees right into the mind of their marriage partner, marriage can come as close to this as is logically possible. The intimacy that is possible goes far beyond mere sexual bonding. There is far more to individuals than there sexuality, so there is inevitably more to married couples than their sexual relationship with each other.
This is why sexual intimacy--and interpersonal acts of sexual contact always involve a degree of physical intimacy even if there is relational detachment--does not have the power to cure a marriage of woes that are beyond the scope of the sexual aspects of the relationship [1]. If a couple is intentionally intimate only on a sexual level, however regularly, especially if there is no independent or transcendent relational connection, affection, or commitment, the marriage is practically as good as dead already. Sexual intimacy in a relationship is certainly a vital thing for people who are not asexual; indeed, the sexual component (which is not necessarily just about having sex) is all that separates the likes of dating or marriage relationship from a platonic friendship. There are far more important qualities for a couple to share together.
Without alignment on an intellectual level, that of sharing a worldview that also must both true and verifiable for the relationship to not be based on the false and destructive errors of assumptions, philosophical apathy, or subjectivism [2], a relationship is always both invalid and handicapped. A couple united in their allegiance to falsehood or lack of concern for foundational truths has betrayed reality, which means that the only basis for their relationship is error and emotionalism. Aside from their worldviews being false or assumed by necessity, this means that the relationship is actually superficial and hindered in the scope of its flourishing as well. There is no deeper sort of intimacy than that of friends or romantic couples who are both devoted to the rationalistic truths which transcend all other things, including sociality and psychological connection.
Of course, philosophical/intellectual alignment in the truth (anything else is wrong and therefore utterly baseless) and mutual celebration of this is not all that it takes to establish the widest, deepest composite of intimacies. Without genuine relational attachment and love, the union is empty in a different sense, a hollow social arrangement that one or both parties are only passively drifting along life in. It should not be difficult for someone to see how this cheats both halves of a marriage out of a relationship that reaches greater peaks, bringing with it more penetrating levels of personal connection that elevate the marriage as a whole. For a relationship to reach its full potential, there must be first recognition of and commitment to the objective philosophical truths of reason, then personal connection (the next most vital general category), and then sexual intimacy within this context.
The absence of any of these qualities necessitates an obstacle, whether it is acknowledged or not, to the holistic, true intimacy that a maximally thriving marriage--one thriving in its submission to rationality, mutuality, affection, and openness--allows for. Take away any of these characteristics of the relationship, and the marriage is either based on something philosophically invalid (untrue or epistemologically unprovable and thus unjustifiable as a belief) or at the least has not reached life-giving unity to the largest extents possible. Even if only for the idiotic sake of blind emotionalistic fulfillment, it would still always ironically be in a person's best interests to seek out and cultivate such marriage relationships if they do desire to marry, for, though they could never achieve this status while holding to emotionalism, only this kind of marriage is of the greatest potency. What sort of self-obstructing person would intentionally scheme to go into marriage strictly to waste their own time?
[2]. See here:
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