Ricerc@Sapienza

Objective: Sexuality has different meanings and follow different
scripts depending on the country or geographic location and the
dominant culture. The growing globalization and migrations
leaded to marriages between people belonging to different cultures.
Moreover, in modern societies there are many migrant
communities that, although integrated, follow faithfully the rules
and values of their culture of origin. For this reason, health care
professionals are progressively exposed to the task of understanding
and dealing with sexual difficulties that have a lot to do
with the cultural aspects of patients. Very often professionals are
not prepared to face diversity and complexity in relationship, or
describe the problems with imprecise terms. The aim of the
present work is to collect and review data on Unconsummated
Marriage (UCM) all around the world, to identify difference and
similarities, and to suggest a globally shared taxonomy of the
different conditions that go nowadays under the UCM umbrella.
Materials and Methods: A review of published literature on
UCM from different areas of the world was conducted.
Results: Substantial difference emerged among Middle Eastern
(MES) Western (WS) and Eastern society (ES). In MES, sexuality
is allowed only in marriage, in WS sexuality and relationship
are not strongly linked, while in ES it is possible to find both
conditions depending on the country and whether the area is
metropolitan or rural. This could suggest that the term unconsummated
“marriage” is unable to cover the phenomenon in
such different countries. Moreover, the mean time before the
consultation, causal attribution and prevalence are very different
in such societies.
Conclusions: We found that the term “First attempt intercourse
dysfunction (FAID)” could be better to describe male and female
difficulties related either to ignorance about sexuality or state/
performance anxiety and mainly characterized by short time prior
consultation. On the other hand, where individual difficulties are
involved creating a couple sexual dysfunction, mainly characterized
by long time to consultation, we suggest a new term as
“Unconsummated relationship” (UCR)”.
Disclosure: Work supported by industry: no.