Category Archives: Commitment

Growing Together in Virtue

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Several readers have asked us questions about how we find benefit from being together in a partnership rather than living as celibate singles. We’re not ones to sound our own trumpets, and we know that we’re very much works in progress. Over the time we’ve been together, we’ve learned a lot about ourselves as individuals, each other, and us as a couple. We think being able to make a commitment to be there 100% whatever life throws our way does help us grow together and individually. By attempting to cultivate virtues in our vocation together, we’re able to be more present, open, and respectful. We hope that in time we continue to grow towards holiness. Today, because we’ve been asked specifically about growing together in virtue, we want to present some ways we’ve seen virtues manifesting in our lives together thus far in our partnership.

We give each other space to process difficult questions and life issues, but we’re also learning how to support each other effectively during these times. As we grow in our capacity to love one another and God, we experience moments of compassion that were not as present earlier in our relationship. We notice each other being able to extend empathy in new ways when one of us is faced with a challenging situation. When Lindsey suddenly lost a job in December 2013, we began managing a great deal of additional stress and uncertainty. Job loss is hard for any number of reasons: there’s a blow to a person’s confidence, financial stresses go without saying, a job seeker needs to put significant energy into the search even before getting the first email reply back, a family has new questions about what kinds of job searches are honestly in bounds, people ask for lots of support from extended family and friends, etc. It would be all too easy for Lindsey’s frustration to bubble up into anger and for Sarah’s full schedule to produce exasperation. However, being together has helped us stay the course. Sarah can help Lindsey decide when it’s best to put more letters out there and when it’s best to wait and see if a solid lead is going to produce a favorable outcome. Lindsey can help Sarah manage affairs of the house even amid completing job applications. We can remind one another that God is at work even when we seem lost. Sarah gives Lindsey a listening ear to process what is happening. Lindsey can always remember to greet Sarah with a hug. Together, we can offer one another a kind of emotional stability that makes trusting God easier. Sarah can read Lindsey and discern when advice would be welcome or when it’s best to practice compassion.

We have made a commitment to cultivate charitable speech toward one another, even when it doesn’t come naturally. That includes when one of us is having a bad day, when we’re arguing, and when we’re feeling impatient with each other. In all our friendships and other relationships, there are times when it seems easier and even more cathartic to express thoughts and feelings forcefully and indignantly. We think most people probably experience moments when it feels better to sound off like a bullhorn than to communicate difficult emotions with kindness, and we know this is true at times in our interactions with each other. Sarah often becomes irritated at Lindsey’s tendency to leave empty soda cans and bottles lying around the apartment, and it doesn’t help that Sarah considers Lindsey’s soda habit annoying in and of itself. Therefore, it takes little effort for Sarah to announce snarkily, “I’d like to see one evening when I can come home and not have to pick up a soda bottle in the living room!” In the same way, Lindsey finds it frustrating how frequently Sarah forgets that it’s her job to clean the cats’ litter box. It can be tempting for Lindsey to remark, “You can’t ever seem to be responsible with this.” It’s much more of a struggle for both of us to challenge ourselves toward kind, loving communication that addresses problems while also extending grace and empathy, but we make a daily commitment to doing so anyway. We don’t always get it right, but the more we practice saying, “I know you’ve had a busy day, but could you please take a few minutes to clean the litter box/tidy the living room?” the more natural it becomes for us to use charitable language in our relationship and also in our interactions with other human beings.

We encourage one another to say “yes” and “no” in healthy ways. Like many other people, we both oscillate between thinking that we can conquer the world and wanting never to get out of bed ever again. Learning how to say “yes” and “no” in healthy ways involves cultivating humility. When Lindsey lost a job, it was easy for Sarah to spring into action and look for extra work everywhere possible. Lindsey nudged Sarah to consider that the only real solution was both of us earning an income. We consistently urge each other to attend to our mental health, acknowledging whatever limits we may encounter. Like many couples, we have times where one of us is very excited about doing something when the other has serious misgivings. We have learned to balance when it’s time to compromise and when it’s time to advocate for our own needs. Frequently, extroverted Sarah wants to stay out far longer than introverted Lindsey can handle. We’ve learned to communicate about our different needs. Sometimes Sarah will take a moment to people-watch, sitting on a quiet bench to give Lindsey a few minutes to recharge. Other times, Lindsey will see that Sarah has a significant energy need that can only be met by getting around a lot of people. We have learned a lot about each other’s complexities that affect our preferences for social activities and activities together. Just as Lindsey needs to sit on a quiet bench to re-energize, Sarah also needs to sit calmly for a bit with her inhaler before venturing outside in cold weather to ward off any asthma attacks. In both circumstances, we need to be able to say and hear “yes” and “no,” and talk about disagreements that may arise. Learning to say “yes” and “no” in healthy ways has shown us quite a bit about cultivating patience.

We are learning to offer correction to each other lovingly. Caring about another person means helping him or her grow. Open and honest communication means acknowledging when you’ve said something hurtful. We’re quick to apologize when we have offended one another and try to observe a general rule of not going to bed when we are still in conflict. We choose to continue communicating in love even when we’re exhausted, frustrated, and overwhelmed. When Sarah gets overwhelmed, Sarah can be very terse and critical. Lindsey has learned how to highlight these communication patterns in a respectful way that enables Sarah to make appropriate changes. Since Lindsey is an engineer, Sarah knows to watch out for when Lindsey slips into “engineer mode,” trying to fix all the problems. Sarah is able to nudge Lindsey from a space of “fix-it” to a space of listening. We’ve learned when it’s best to encourage the other to sit down, stay still, and talk more openly about what is going on with us. Regularly practicing empathy for one another helps us grow in charity, a growth that affects the wide array of our relationships with others.

We encourage each other to enjoy life. Faith, hope, and charity are three often-named theological virtues. We’re both predisposed to taking life rather seriously. We have a lot of responsibilities on our plate. Lindsey knows Sarah is an extrovert and benefits from having fun around a lot of different people. Therefore, Lindsey is constantly on the lookout for different social activities to share with Sarah. Similarly, Sarah knows that Lindsey finds a great deal of enjoyment during special times at home. Lindsey enjoys the occasional excursion to one of our favorite nearby markets where we can find an interesting culinary experiment in the making. We’ve learned that enjoying life together produces hope, even when things look very dark.

In closing, we are not trying to present ourselves as models of sanctity and faithful living. We wanted to share some of the positive fruits we’ve seen in our relationship thus far, noting how these fruits help us live more fully into our first calling of putting on Christ and imaging Him to the rest of the world through our lives. We pray that God continues to help us grow closer to Him through the relationship we have with each other.

Comment Policy: Please remember that we, and all others commenting on this blog, are people. Practice kindness. Practice generosity. Practice asking questions. Practice showing love. Practice being human. If your comment is rude, it will be deleted. If you are constantly negative, argumentative, or bullish, you will not be able to comment anymore. We are the sole moderators of the combox.

A temporary vocation?

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While Sarah was working on an academic research project last week, we were shuffling through some photocopied archival materials that included surveys of young people from the 1930s-1940s who had decided to leave a particular lay Christian social action movement after having been involved for varying lengths of time. One of the survey questions asked, “Why did you decide to leave?” Though almost every former member had expressed continuing dedication to the movement’s purpose and goals, Sarah noticed that the vast majority cited “temporary vocation” as the primary reason for separating from the movement. It seems that most who left had joined anticipating that someday, they would be moving on to more “permanent” vocations or perhaps other “temporary” ones.

The phrase, “temporary vocation” has never sat well with either of us. Our own understanding of the term “vocation” is a lifelong commitment to a particular way of serving God and others. Because of this, we find it curious that people frequently suggest, “Maybe celibacy is a temporary vocation for you two.” We can understand why the idea of being called to lifelong celibacy, especially within the context of a relationship like ours, might seem perplexing from an outsider’s perspective. We are also aware that this suggestion usually comes from people with the best of intentions. However, today, we would like to offer some thoughts on the problem that arises when one refers to vocations as “temporary.”

When someone suggests that our vocation to celibacy might not be permanent, the question, “What if your Christian tradition’s teaching on sexual morality changes?” sometimes follows. Most people in our lives know we are part of a church that holds to a traditional sexual ethic, so it’s reasonable to infer that our own sense of call is in some way related to our tradition’s teachings. It is true that we have drawn upon the resources present within our Christian tradition to discern our vocations, both individually and together. At the same time, our decision to embark on the journey of a celibate partnership is voluntary. We did not make the choice to live celibacy as a result of feeling backed into a corner by the Church. We have committed freely to living life together in this way. Therefore, if the teachings of our Christian tradition on sexual morality ever were to change (and we do not believe this will happen), it would have no impact upon our chosen vocation. We are not attempting to cultivate a celibate vocation because of fear that we have to or else face divinely imposed consequences. We are doing so because we want to—because we believe celibacy is an important part of God’s plan for us.

Speaking of “temporary vocation” implies that vocations in general do not require dedication, commitment, and willingness to live into God’s call during the hard times. Last week, we wrote for the first time on the vocation of marriage and prepared for that topic by asking married people to educate us on their ways of life. Writing that post got us thinking about two different messages we’ve heard about marriage: 1) it’s a forever commitment, and 2) approximately half the time, it ends in divorce. On the one hand, it’s likely that few people enter a marriage thinking, “Maybe this is a temporary vocation.” Neither of us has ever known of a person advising a newlywed couple that they should consider the possibility of marriage being temporary. Maybe we’re letting optimism get in the way here, but most people we know who are married or anticipate getting married someday accept that the vocation to marriage is intended as a lifelong commitment. On the other hand, even if most individuals don’t view marriage as a “temporary vocation,” it’s clear that our society does. Both of us have family members and friends who have experienced divorce and remarriage, so we are not suggesting that divorce is always a morally unjustifiable occurrence. But it’s true that now more than in decades past, it has become acceptable to end a marriage—a lifelong commitment—for virtually any reason: personality conflicts, financial hardship, impotency, one spouse’s irritation with the other’s pet python. In a sense, marriage is becoming even more of a temporary than permanent vocation in the eyes of American and some other western societies.

It makes sense that if many people are coming to see marriage as a way of life that does not require an everlasting commitment, some might also have trouble seeing how celibate vocations demand just as much dedication. We have seen firsthand that the general population does not view consecrated religious life as a permanent vocation. A friend of Sarah’s, whom we will call Molly, spent over two years of her time in law school discerning a vocation to a particular Roman Catholic religious order. Upon graduation, Molly became a postulant and started her journey toward taking vows. During this time, Molly’s mother insisted that in a year, Molly would come to realize that she wasn’t actually called to be a nun. However, Molly came alive inside the monastery. She loved the community’s spiritual life and looked forward to one day working in the Catholic schools operated by the order. A year later, Molly entered the novitiate and took the name Sister Maria. Her mother maintained that she would be better off married and would eventually come to see this before taking vows. Not long ago, Sister Maria made first vows, and her mother is still waiting for her to leave this vocation and return home. Decades ago, this would not have been a typical reaction from a parent whose child entered a Roman Catholic religious order.

Proposing that the vocation to celibate partnership (or at least the celibate aspect of it) is temporary is much the same as stating that other types of celibate vocations are also temporary states of life. We do believe that in certain circumstances, people can commit to celibacy for a defined period of time. This was, in fact, the situation for most young people who were part of the Christian social action movement that Sarah was researching last week. But we think it is far too easy to assume that celibacy is a lifestyle one can choose to end at the drop of a hat (or the drop of one’s pants). One doesn’t need divorce papers or an annulment in order to stop living celibacy. Leaving a religious order is quite an involved process, but doesn’t exactly require the division of assets, attorney fees, custody battles, etc. that often come along with legally ending a marriage. And in the eyes of many, choosing not to continue in a celibate vocation that doesn’t entail religious vows is as simple as saying, “I don’t want to do this anymore.” But this isn’t the case for people who understand celibacy as a vocation and not just sexual abstinence.

The two of us exist in an almost completely uncharted territory somewhere between monasticism and marriage. Celibate monastics take vows to God and to their communities, making their commitments to this vocation visible. Married people in some traditions take vows to each other before God and their faith communities in a formal ceremony, making their vocation known to the world. As there is no exact analog to either for celibate couples like us, it is challenging to put the commitment we have made to each other into words. Because of this, people tend to classify us incorrectly as a couple living a unique sort of marriage. And perhaps that is why we’re often assumed to be living in a “temporary” celibate vocation.

To suggest that celibate vocations like ours will not stand the test of time is to question the robustness of other kinds of vocations as well. We believe that all vocations require steadfastness and acceptance that life will not always be easy, pleasant, or ideal. All vocations have the ability to grow if nurtured and the ability to wither if left improperly attended. The phrase “temporary vocation” may seem innocuous, but we see it as little more than shorthand for, “a way of life I can leave when its demands become too great.”

Comment Policy: Please remember that we, and all others commenting on this blog, are people. Practice kindness. Practice generosity. Practice asking questions. Practice showing love. Practice being human. If your comment is rude, it will be deleted. If you are constantly negative, argumentative, or bullish, you will not be able to comment anymore. We are the sole moderators of the combox.

Learning from other couples

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Today we will be addressing a question that we have gotten from several readers: “How do you feel about other LGBT couples who say they are not called to celibacy?” We think this question is important because we live at a time where many Christian traditions have gone “on the record” about the need for LGBT people to live celibate lives.

Many people who have asked us this question indicate that they have met celibate, LGBT Christians who are very triumphant in their celibacy and avoid interacting with any other LGBT people who are not living celibate lives, or who anticipate becoming sexually active at some point in life. We would like to be clear: we reject the idea that celibate LGBT Christians should be triumphant in their celibacy. Celibate, LGBT Christians would do well to remember that all vocations are fragile and that radical hospitality lies at the heart of a celibate vocation. Lindsey has experienced the negative aftermath of triumphantly asserting one’s ability to draw “right” boundaries to establish “proper” conduct. From our observations, many of the most triumphant celibate, LGBT Christians seem to glorify their ability to stay on the right side of “the line” used to define sexual acts. We believe that such people confuse sexual abstinence with the idea of celibacy as a vocation.

People enter celibate vocations by making choices. Vocational choices are influenced by a number of important factors that include, but are not limited to, one’s Christian tradition, one’s sense of an appropriate career pathway, one’s network of relational possibilities, and one’s economic circumstances. We believe it is manifestly inappropriate to assert that these factors are identical for all LGBT Christians. The purpose of one’s vocation is to provide a pathway to holiness where one can learn to love and grow in Christ-likeness.

We have been blessed to know many LGBT Christian couples. The majority of these couples would assert that they do not feel called to celibacy. Furthermore, a significant faction of these couples come from Christian traditions that have some sort of provision for the blessing of committed, monogamous same-sex relationships. We have observed that triumphalism gets in the way of building relationships with people whose approaches to sexual ethics differ from one’s own approach. We refuse to take the path of triumphalism and demand that these couples devote themselves to learning from us. We don’t see ourselves as having all (or perhaps any) of the right answers to complex ethical questions.

When we think about faith-filled same-sex couples who do not feel they are called to celibacy, a few of our friends come to mind. We have sincerely appreciated the opportunity to get to know them more and feel privileged that they have shared their life together as a couple with us. As an LGBT Christian couple ourselves, we relate easily to many of their life experiences. As friends, we rarely discuss sexual matters. Honestly, we do not give two figs to know the intimate details of our friends’ relationships. Such details are rarely relevant and can only be shared in friendships characterized by mutual respect and regard. Even in the closest of friendships, many people just aren’t that interested in talking about their sex lives. We’ve been so encouraged by meeting other LGBT Christian couples at different life stages, and we are profoundly grateful for the ability to call these people friends. We thank God for connecting us with these couples, and we’re grateful for all of the things they have taught us over the years. We’d like to share with you, our readers, some of the things we’ve learned from some of our LGBT friends who do not feel called to celibacy.

A commitment to staying present when things are incredibly challenging

Charlie is Lindsey’s brother from another mother. Charlie is an exceptionally gifted listener, always willing to pray through some of the most difficult parts of life’s journey. Whenever Lindsey or Charlie needs support, the two of them have an almost instant response to reach out to one another. You could say that this inspired Charlie to discuss with Lindsey various aspects of his relationship with Isaac when things were really difficult.

At first, both Charlie’s family and Isaac’s family had a hard time accepting their relationship. That’s saying things a bit too kindly… Isaac wound up moving into Charlie’s apartment much earlier than expected because Isaac was kicked out of the house when his family found out he was gay. Charlie worried about the potential consequences of his boyfriend living with him, but came to the conclusion that his couch was a better home than Isaac’s car. As their relationship moved towards greater commitment, Charlie’s family had a hard time navigating questions around whether they would support Charlie’s wedding. Charlie and Lindsey spent hours on the phone. Lindsey had a huge lightbulb moment upon realizing that, beyond a shadow of a doubt, Charlie’s Christian parents had certainly grown in their understanding of sexual morality over the course of their relationship. All of a sudden, sexual morality became a dynamic reality rather than well-packaged gift that must always be preserved at all costs.

For us, Charlie and Isaac have always been an example of a couple overwhelmingly committed to Christ. They constantly discern whether anything in their relationship needs to shift in order to show the love of Christ more fully to the other, and inspire us to do the same.

A generous hospitality that welcomes everyone to a safe place

When we’re getting ready to hang out with James and Bryan, we know that we should remember to bring the board games. All sorts of conversation can flow over Ticket to Ride or Catchphrase. James and Bryan are incredibly friendly people who have a knack at making other people feel welcome.

James and Bryan are intellectually honest, gracious, and committed to hospitality. As a couple, they’ve weathered the challenges of living in a long-distance relationship yet have appeared to have come out on the other side looking as fabulous as ever. The time we spent a few states apart at the beginning of our own relationship was just a few months, so we can only imagine the difficulties of maintaining a long-distance relationship for several years. We’re always drawn to couples who have made such relationships work. With James’ and Bryan’s obvious commitment to generous conversation, we’re not terribly surprised that their relationship grew and thrived. We admire how James and Bryan have searched their respective Christian traditions to discern their life together.

We have been impressed time and time again with James’ and Bryan’s generosity. Bryan once shared a syllabus with Sarah when they realized they taught courses with overlapping topics. They care a lot about creating safe places for LGBT Christians to discuss issues around faith, sexuality, and gender identity. Getting to know James and Bryan helps us to see a concrete example of radical hospitality lived out before us.

A patient endurance when asking difficult theological questions

Lindsey has known David for several years. David has offered one model as to how LGBT Christians could reconcile faith, sexuality, and gender identity within our Christian tradition. A high school teacher by day, David is surprisingly willing to dialog with any number of people asking hard questions about faith, sexuality, and gender identity in his free time. David and Glenn have been together for decades, providing a living witness that long-term LGBT relationships are possible.

Because David is a member of our own Christian tradition, he’s been able to encourage us as we find our way. He reminds us of how to have discussions on LGBT topics within our tradition. His patience, particularly with Lindsey, has helped us develop a gracious approach even when official statements seem to do little more than frame the celibacy mandate in a very polemical manner. David and Glenn recently hosted Lindsey when Lindsey visited their city. Although we occasionally have come to differing conclusions about how to navigate aspects of our shared Christian tradition, we have been able to develop a deep respect for the faithfulness of all involved. Learning from David and Glenn often means being challenged to think outside our own sets of assumptions, and we are always glad to engage with their perspectives.

To sum up, we make a conscious choice to reject celibate triumphalism. We find the suggestion that we have nothing to learn from people in other kinds of partnerships absolutely absurd. We’re so grateful that God has given us an incredible network of friends who want to share their lives with us. And we look forward to the opportunity to walk alongside even more people as we continue our journey.

Comment Policy: Please remember that we, and all others commenting on this blog, are people. Practice kindness. Practice generosity. Practice asking questions. Practice showing love. Practice being human. If your comment is rude, it will be deleted. If you are constantly negative, argumentative, or bullish, you will not be able to comment anymore. We are the sole moderators of the combox.

How We Met

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Of all the questions we receive via email and Twitter, “How did you two meet?” and “How did you become a couple?” are probably the most common. Because so many of our readers have asked, today we would like to tell you that story.

Our relationship began as a friendship that arose organically. We met unexpectedly via our participation in the Gay Christian Network’s online community. When Sarah first joined GCN, Sarah was experiencing a great deal of loneliness and was seeking new friendships. Sarah was in a relationship that would unravel over the next few months and was having trouble coping with that reality. Lindsey had been a member of GCN for several years by the time Sarah joined, and happened to say hello after Sarah had made an introduction to the community. We had a few brief interactions, and Lindsey introduced Sarah to one of Lindsey’s gay male friends who was local in Sarah’s city.

Eventually, an incident on the message boards involving another member in need of help brought Sarah and Lindsey into more intentional conversation with one another. We realized that we had many common interests and enjoyed discussing a variety of topics together. We talked about our doctoral dissertations, our students, the interest we shared in using our very different types of academic training to address issues of poverty and social justice, our spiritualities, and our shared woes associated with being graduate students. We were astonished at how naturally and easily we were able to support each other during difficult times. Sarah offered to wake up extra early and listen to a trial run the morning of Lindsey’s dissertation proposal defense, and Lindsey offered a listening ear and a great deal of helpful advice when Sarah was scrambling to save the aforementioned long-term relationship. When Sarah’s relationship did come to an end, Lindsey was there to listen when Sarah needed to cry, vent, or just have someone on the other end of the phone line while indulging in some Ben and Jerry’s.

Sarah was not anticipating entering a committed relationship again so soon, but within a few weeks after the breakup, it became clear that Sarah’s and Lindsey’s friendship was deepening. Lindsey came to Sarah’s city for a weekend to visit another friend, and the two of us were able to spend some time together in person.  While acknowledging that Sarah would still need more time, we decided that when it felt right to move forward, we wanted to explore the possibility of doing life together more purposefully. We had no idea what this was going to look like, but we thought it sounded like an adventure.

Because we had such a positive experience with a long-distance friendship, we continued discerning how living four states apart would affect our relationship as it developed, and we met each other’s families and friends. In the weeks and months that followed, we came into regular patterns of being there for one another, experiencing an ever-growing sense of emotional intimacy. We started to recall our previous explorations of celibacy as individuals, and soon saw that we felt mutually drawn to cultivating a celibate vocation within the context of a shared life. In late spring, Lindsey received a job offer in Sarah’s city totally out of the blue. We discussed the idea of living together and whether we were ready for that. After a great deal of prayer, planning, and searching for living quarters that would be sufficient for two humans and two mischievous felines, we moved into our first apartment. Since then, God has continued to reveal to us new and meaningful ways of helping each other as we work out our salvation with fear and trembling. We find ourselves absolutely loving sharing life together, and we look forward to many more years.

Comment Policy: Please remember that we, and all others commenting on this blog, are people. Practice kindness. Practice generosity. Practice asking questions. Practice showing love. Practice being human. If your comment is rude, it will be deleted. If you are constantly negative, argumentative, or bullish, you will not be able to comment anymore. We are the sole moderators of the combox.

My Failed Celibate Relationship

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A reflection by Lindsey

I’ve had a lot of different opportunities to learn about my vocation to celibacy. My partnership with Sarah provides a fantastic place to discern how God is calling me to live a celibate life. Additionally, I spent time cultivating celibacy as a single person. But the first place I explored living a celibate life was in a romantic relationship.

When I was first beginning my journey of reconciling my faith and sexuality, I found myself inexplicably drawn to a person I shall call Carey. Carey was several years older than me but lived a life richly connected to Christ in a local faith community. Carey’s pastor was supportive and accepting, encouraging Carey to pursue life in Christ. Despite our age gap, we seemed to be in similar life stages and exploring closely related callings. We could talk easily, and we grew closer and closer. It wasn’t long before I found myself desiring a relationship with Carey.

But there was a problem… or so I thought. Carey was earnestly and stridently convicted that gay sex is a sin and could not be approved under any circumstances. How in the world could a relationship work out? My own views on how to reconcile one’s faith with one’s LGBT status were in flux, and I didn’t want to be trespassing on Carey’s ethical conscience. We had several conversations about the perceived tension and came to the conclusion that it was possible to pursue a relationship that didn’t involve sex. Through a series of unlikely events, I ended up flying to visit Carey a few weeks later. We hit it off with a good deal of instant chemistry.

Carey and I started a strong relationship forged on mutual respect and shared commitment to Christ. We explored different ways to share a prayer life that worked even when we were separated by many states. Our common faith tradition anchored our time spent together. Carey had a bit more experience within our tradition and taught me quite a lot about how to live a way of life aligned with particular aspects of our tradition. We tried to pray early and often, ever growing towards a more complete prayer life in our tradition.

Our discussions about celibacy involved a lot of boundary work. We thought about the counsel given to unmarried heterosexual couples and tried to implement that in our lives. We also talked a lot about what dating heterosexual couples did with each other that did not count as sex. I found myself constantly right up against the boundaries. But I wasn’t driven to the boundaries because I wanted more; I was driven to the boundaries because they defined our limits about what we were willing to share together.

However, from my perspective, our boundary work related to defining sex seemed to bubble over into boundary work in other areas. Every bit of additional boundary work seemed to pull us apart rather than bring us closer together. Night prayer became attached to going to bed, specifically to Carey’s bedtime, a boundary that didn’t work very well with us living on different schedules in different time zones. We started praying separately. Our own tradition became an exclusive marker of faithfully living a Christian life. It became very easy to devote large chunks of conversation to being critical of people in other Christian traditions. We experienced even more conflicts when we talked about politics, especially as we started reading authors referenced by politicians from the other side of the aisle. Fighting politically is never fun. Towards the very end of our relationship together, our boundary work also expanded to only being friends with other LGBT couples in which both parties earnestly believed gay sex is a sin. For my part, I struggled mightily with this idea because I couldn’t see how boundaries in our relationship manifested any differently from those of dating LGBT couples who earnestly believed in trying to save sex until marriage.

I’m not sharing the unraveling of my relationship to point fingers at Carey, or to point fingers at me. I think both Carey and I found ourselves in over our heads because we had never stopped to think about what it might look like to cultivate a celibate vocation together. We had a pretty good handle on what abstinence entailed. Yet, over a year after we broke off our relationship, I had experienced a great deal of conviction that my relationship with Carey did not serve me in cultivating a celibate vocation. We never broke our rules about physical boundaries set to make sure we remained abstinent, but I felt slightly betrayed by my body and its capacity for surprising sexual connection.

I also felt misled by my Christian tradition. Early on in our relationship, Carey found a small book that detailed some of the authoritative teaching discussing LGBT people and their relationships. The practical counsel of the book boiled down to a belief that as LGBT people grew in their capacity to love one another, they would then make the God-honoring choice to refrain from homogenital acts. In the aftermath of my failed relationship, I found myself rather angry. How could the wisdom of my Christian tradition give me but two commands? There was the lofty call to “grow in love” and then the very specific directive to “avoid homogential acts.” I felt that in my relationship with Carey, eventually we tipped the balance towards the latter rather than the former.

Since failing in my first celibate relationship, I’ve become ever more convinced of the need to define celibacy in the positive. I have tried to live my life by the axiom, “Human beings have meaningful relationships with other human beings,” trusting God to show me places of rich connection. I began visiting different vowed celibate people to learn a bit more about how they lived their lives. I learned how to take myself out on dates, exploring different ways to appreciate myself as a beloved child of God as opposed to thinking that every significant friendship would eventually blossom romantically. I’ve become a big advocate of the idea that it’s worth spending time discerning what the vocation of celibacy might look like in a particular individual’s life before encouraging that person to jump into a celibate relationship. I’ve known other people who have experienced failed celibate relationships, and it’s almost uncanny how my friends’ relationships have mirrored the relationship I shared with Carey. I do not wish a failed celibate relationship on anyone, so I speak out about the need to be mindful when cultivating a celibate vocation.

Comment Policy: Please remember that we, and all others commenting on this blog, are people. Practice kindness. Practice generosity. Practice asking questions. Practice showing love. Practice being human. If your comment is rude, it will be deleted. If you are constantly negative, argumentative, or bullish, you will not be able to comment anymore. We are the sole moderators of the combox.