While your history and scripture is extremely helpful, and your defense of their important quite agreeable. also agreeable is the important of anousement for the oath enforcement portion of marriage among many other perspectives you wisely brought to the table here.
I’m afraid however that your position and the position of the non-catholic faith is a bit unclear.
While it seems inferred that the catholic faith starts marriage at the first act of sex. As you illustrated that is not so clear in the bible as far as other christian faiths are concerned.
Because there are many possible answers in the ambquity I feel obliged to only ask you where you & your faith stand on this particular question, as I have asked of everyone else.
Fair questions:
I mention the Catholicism reference only because of the commonly-held cultural belief that consummation is required to ‘complete’ a marriage. Roman Catholics are also the only mainstream faith (I think that’s true) that permits the annulment of an un-consummated marriage. [I’m not sure of the Anglican/Episcopalian church... particularly since it was formed from a disagreement between Rome and the King of England over this point... and I’ll ignore the historical details on that story!].
As a Protestant (conservative/reformed Presbyterian, specifically) I do not personally hold to the Catholic view, as I don’t believe it is scriptural (discussed earlier). Frankly, though, it hardly ever comes up: we’re all pretty much married when the ‘you may kiss your bride’ line is uttered!
But if you want to know the distinctions, it’s pretty much this:
Catholicism: oaths and consummation (Marriage is also elevated as one of their 7 sacraments)
Protestants: oaths alone (Protestants believe there are only 2 sacraments: baptism and holy communion (the eucharist))