A beautiful young woman from Long Island was blessed to have been raised in a solidly Catholic family and to have attended a truly Catholic high school. She made up her mind before entering college that she wanted no part of premarital sex. After graduating from a Catholic college, she took a job in Philadelphia. She prayed the rosary daily and often attended Mass during the week in addition to Sundays.
At one point, she met a man who seemed like a perfect match. He was polite, treated her well, and was Catholic. In fact, he attended daily Mass. She figured, “At last, I found a man with whom I will not have to fight all the time about chastity.”
After eight months of dating, he said it was time for them to have sex.
She needed no time to think about it, ending the relationship immediately. It hurt her a lot because she really liked him, but she loved the Lord more.
Eight months later, he called and asked to see her. When they got together, he apologized for his worldly attitude and for being a hypocrite about his faith. “You were right. I was wrong. Our faith is empty if we don’t pursue chastity. If I promise to embrace biblical values, will you consider dating me again?”
After giving it some thought, she agreed. They courted for a couple of years and then got married. Now, after six years of marriage, they have four lovely children, and they go to daily Mass together!
It’s not just with non-complying males that the chastity issue comes up. A young friend, a daily communicant, dated a woman who was raised in a faithful Catholic community. When she wanted to cut corners on chastity, his spiritual director warned him that not only was that sinful, but more trouble lay ahead. His director was right. They got engaged, and a couple of months before the wedding, she told him it was time to have sex. Being a daily communicant, he told her he had no intention of doing that. A big blow-up followed, but he prevailed.
Unfortunately, he never told his spiritual director about that episode. Had he done so, his director told him later, he would have had urged him to run from this woman. But they married, and within three months, she was asking to do some strange things. The marriage went spiraling downward from that point on, and they divorced.
Contrary to the messaging of our modern “sex-positive” culture, women have quite a lot to lose in this battle over chastity. British journalist Hephzibah Anderson decided to live one year without having sex, after some years having a great deal of sex. She wrote this in her 2010 book, Chastened:
As soon as I went to bed with a man, I’d lose any clear sense of perspective. I had constantly mistaken casual hookups for rose-tinted beginnings.
However uninvolved I started out—however uninvolved it seemed I was supposed to be—I could not remain cool-headed (or cool-hearted) as the temperature shot up.
To admit as much felt like letting down the sisterhood. I knew that as a woman my right to sexual expression was hard won, yet that ideal seems to have been watered down to become intimacy without intimacy. While it is billed as empowering to be able to love and leave a man like a man, to me it felt like I was denying a whole set of instinctive feminine responses, forcing myself to conform to decidedly masculine relationship ideals. And what a waste of energy all this weeping seemed!
Men have a great deal to lose with pre-marital sex as well. They come to trivialize sex; they live by their urges and not by reason; and they fail to cultivate the richer loves such as friendship, affection, and agape (self-giving love) so necessary for a healthy marriage. Sex can also blind a man to personality problems.
As has been often said, love is always ready to give; lust is always ready to take. This is likely why men are 63% more likely to divorce if they have had pre-marital sex (and women 76% more likely to divorce) according to a 1994 University of Chicago survey. The numbers can only have gotten worse since then.
Both men and women sometimes tell me that it is impossible to find a potential spouse who will live biblical chastity. But that isn’t true. I have officiated at a good number of weddings where the couples did not have sex the whole time leading up to the ceremony.
To live in the state of grace and have a solid friendship with the Lord, single Catholics are directed to live chastely. Some don’t think this is possible, but as G.K. Chesterton famously said, “the Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.”
In his encyclical on moral theology, Veritatis Splendor, St. John Paul II included a section on martyrdom (90-92). Why? Because if we are not willing to die rather than sin, we all have our price for betraying God. Breaking up might seem like a martyrdom, but remember: no martyr ever regretted dying for God. Nor do I know of one person who regretted leaving a charming but unchaste sweetheart.
Jesus makes clear the evil of fornication: “For from within, out of the heart of man, come evil thoughts, fornication, theft, murder, adultery” (Mark 7:21). The Catechism of the Catholic Church is also clear: “sexual pleasure is morally disordered when sought for itself, isolated from its procreative and unitive purposes” (2351). The unitive purpose implies the celebration of the existing marital love covenant, so sexual pleasure may be sought only in marriage.
The women and men I know who have not compromised on sexual activity have all come out ahead. They didn’t settle, and it paid off in solid marriages.
Where do you find a Catholic who wants to date chastely? Pro-life groups, Bible studies, and groups that study Catholic spiritual works and Church documents are a good place to start. I’ve found that Catholic dating websites have also produced some wonderful marriages. With all of these, you must be patient and strong, and you must refuse to settle.
This is not to say chastity is everything. It isn’t. It’s not even the most important thing. The most important thing is having a strong prayer life, a sacramental life, a life of worship, a life of virtue—in short, a loving relationship with God that is so strong and so intimate that it will make living chastely easy.
Having a good relationship with a member of the opposite sex who might be a marriage partner one day is big. But having a good relationship with Jesus Christ and living in the state of grace is far, far bigger. “Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me; and whoever does not take up the cross and follow me is not worthy of me. Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it” (Matt. 10:37-39).
To young Catholic single men and women, I ask: Are you willing to lose your life for Jesus’ sake? That is when you’ll be ready to find the holy marriage to which God is calling you.
Incidental details of the stories herein were changed to protect the privacy of those involved.