Q. My husband and I recently got married in the church. We are an older couple with grown children. We love each other very much. I get confused on exactly what we are permitted to experience as a married couple who can no longer have children. What I have read about this subject is very broad. Can you give me your insight on this subject? 

As for you and your husband who are beyond childbearing years, the only question is that of expressing sexual love in accord with the virtue of chastity.  The simple and straightforward answer to this question is that sexual love, even within marriage, and even when beyond childbearing years, must be chaste and pure.  In other words, it is possible, even within marriage, for sexual love to be lustful and impure.  For marital sexual love to be holy and pure, it must be lived and expressed in a holy and self-giving way by which the couple intends to renew their marital covenant which makes them one.

Of course your question seems to be looking for specifics as to what is permitted and what is not.  This is hard to do and the Church does not have a list of “acceptable practices” so to speak.  Hopefully a few general principles will help to guide you in this as well as your prayerful discernment.  Chaste and pure sexual love in marriage will include the following:

• It will always be self-giving, not selfish.
• The other will never be seen or treated as an object.
• It will always be an expression of your marital covenant of unconditional love.
• It will have the effect of deepening your spiritual union.
• It will be experienced as being blessed and willed by God.
• It will be focused upon the person, not only upon the physical pleasure.
• It will culminate in the natural sexual act rather than in unnatural sexual activity.
• Love will control the passions rather than passions controlling the love.

Hopefully these general principles will help you in allowing the Holy Spirit to unite you and your spouse in the holy love God has blessed you with.