Noyes built complex marriage on a specific reading of scripture: that the promised Second Coming of Christ had already taken place in 70 CE, at the fall of Jerusalem, and that believers who accepted this could therefore live in the resurrected state Paul described, free of sin, here and now. Ordinary marriage, on this reading, was one more form of selfish exclusivity that perfected people no longer needed. Every member of the community was understood to be married to every other, and pairing off into an exclusive couple was treated as a moral failure called special love, subject to correction in the community's system of mutual criticism, where members submitted their conduct to the group's scrutiny in turn.
Sexual union was governed by male continence, Noyes's term for intercourse without male orgasm, which he presented as a discipline that let intimacy continue without the burden of unplanned childbearing that fell on nineteenth-century women. Initiation of new members into the practice, and pairing of younger members with older, more spiritually established ones, was organised through what the community called ascending fellowship, on the theory that spiritual maturity could be transmitted this way. In its final decade the community extended the logic into stirpiculture, a committee-run breeding programme that selected which members should have children together on grounds of spiritual and physical fitness, framed by Noyes as the scientific improvement of the next generation.
None of this was practised in secret. Noyes published the theology and the practice under his own name, and complex marriage was the community's public identity for three decades, which is precisely why it drew sustained outside hostility and why it could not simply continue once that hostility reached the point of prosecution.