Category Archives: Hospitality

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.

The “Gift” of Celibacy

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The gift of celibacy is mysterious, alluring, and evasive. Sometimes it seems very easy to speak of the “gift of celibacy” while at other times, we find ourselves struggling for words to describe what we’re experiencing. We’ve never had a great reveal in which God has shown us everything that celibacy is, could be, or will be for us. We certainly have never experienced a sense that we were called to live a celibate life from the instant we were born. In the best moments, we catch glimpses of the Kingdom of God within our celibate vocation. In the worst moments, celibacy can seem like a bit of a fool’s errand. Vocations are like that, with moments of up, down, and everything in between. We’ve caught glimpses here and there, which reassure us that God cares about guiding and directing our way as the Good Shepherd.

The gift of celibacy is a divine mystery. The gift of marriage is equally a divine mystery. We’ve both benefited from seeing celibacy lived out in a range of contexts, yet no context can be exactly the same as our context. As much as we can learn from our favorite monastic communities, we still need to find our way in our lives. At times, Lindsey has been lead to specific Scriptures like Luke’s account of the sending of the seventy to find a vision for a celibate way of life. We’ve reflected deeply on core values that we think reflect the essence of living celibate lives. But we are also deeply aware, sometimes painfully aware, that while many Christian traditions have resources to help people navigate practical concerns associated with the gift of marriage, there’s not much out there for people trying to cultivate the gift of celibacy.

We have shared before that we feel God has called us to a celibate vocation together. We’ve often felt resourced by God as we’ve pursued this path. We might even say that we feel like God has given us the gift of celibacy. However, being given the gift of celibacy doesn’t mean that it’s easy to pursue this pathway in life. Both of us have had to discern how exactly God is calling us to live. On one level, we know that “celibacy” is a part of how we’re supposed to live. On another level, that direction creates more questions than it can possibly answer. Why do we feel so strongly that we’re partners, that we’re a team, and that we’re family? Why does language that communicates our life together seem impossible to find? What do we do when we realize that we know people, close friends even, who are waiting in the wings to hear us pronounce that our journey into celibacy proved unworkable for us? How do we create space to say, loudly and clearly, that living a celibate vocation is not about avoiding sex? And all this says nothing about the day-to-day stressors associated with taking air as human beings.

Together, we have been exploring the gift of celibacy together for over a year. We have a sense that there are certain key virtues that lay at the heart of a celibate vocation. We have tried different experiments to cultivate virtues like hospitality, spiritual maturity, and humility together. Some experiments have proved more fruitful than others. One great way to cultivate humility is to learn when to call an experiment a failure or even counter-productive! We’re not perfect, and we do not pretend to be for an instant. Our friend Stacey recently shared that her pastor signed off on his emails with “Stumbling toward Christ with you,” and collective bumbling about seems to definitely describe our assorted experiments. We can’t tell you why eating dinner together every night has stuck while trying to pray particular daily office prayers together has continually bounced. We don’t know why we’ve found it easy to converse non-stop while driving in the car together but find it next to impossible to select a movie we both enjoy. We’re amused that we’ve managed to host overnight guests more easily than having tea with local friends. Life is funny sometimes.

In our time together, we have connected deeply with Christ. We have shared here that we experience an unmistakable presence of joy. There is something about how God has placed the two of us together that just seems to work in our lives. But, our life together would fail to reflect the fullness of Christ’s life if we did not find ourselves joining in with Christ’s pain. We have been profoundly impacted by the reality of the broken world around us. We have hit our limits in being able to bind up the wounds of the other, learning that frequently the only option we have is to listen to each other share our individual pain, cry together, and present that pain to Christ. We have watched close friends spiral into depression and isolation. We have tried to discern how best to pray, how best to be present, and how best to give counsel. We have experienced a sobering reality that people can sometimes take our words as the “answer” and wind up pursuing incredibly self-destructive paths. We’ve also experienced the pain of being misunderstood and misrepresented. We have had our story dismissed as meaningless, deceptive, destructive, and even dangerous. For every ounce of human encouragement that we’ve had to pursue this way of life together, we’ve had to navigate a pound of biting criticism. That can be incredibly difficult, especially when the criticism can rock us to our core. Yet, time and time again, as we enter that core, we find Christ willing to meet us again… and again… and again…

And perhaps that’s what the gift of celibacy is all about in the first place. The gift is given in such a way where Christ promises to be there in the absolute darkest moments, shining His divine light.

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.

Choosing Celibacy: Why I’m Glad I Waited

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A reflection by Sarah

There’s a story that celibate gay people are supposed to tell with regard to how and why we became celibate. It’s little more than a variation on the ex-gay narrative that dominated the discussion about LGBT people in the Church until recent years. It goes something like: “I lived the gay lifestyle, was a slave to promiscuity, did a lot of drinking and drugging, and then years later, realized something was missing from my life: Jesus. I repented, began seeing a Christian counselor, and ultimately God helped me to stop having sex.” That’s not the story you’re about to read. That story, excepting the substance abuse bit (a topic I might address in the future), is not mine.

Lately, I’ve been seeing a certain type of popular article emerging on the Internet: different riffs on the theme, “Reasons I’m Glad I Married Young.” I have a number of friends who married immediately after high school graduation (some during high school) and many more who tied the knot during college or within a year of graduating. My younger sister met her future husband in college and married last June, just three weeks shy of her 23rd birthday. My parents were high school sweethearts and married two months after my father’s college graduation. I have no opposition to people embracing the vocation of marriage at early ages if they feel so inclined. I’m happy for my friends who have felt called to this pathway, and I wish them many joyous years of life with their spouses and children. But reading articles like this one and this one tends to evoke a consistent reaction in me: “I’m glad I waited until my late twenties to choose celibacy, and to begin a celibate partnership of the forever kind. I’m glad that I did not commit to this vocation at an earlier age.”

At this point, you might be perplexed. To many, celibacy seems like a default condition in life. It’s the temporary state that traditional Christianity teaches a person is supposed to maintain until marriage. It only becomes permanent once a person reaches his/her marriageable expiration date and becomes a bachelor or old maid, or less often, once a person embraces a call to religious life. Many view it as the state of life for those who are too young to have sex, those of age who are simply waiting for Mr. or Ms. Right, and those who don’t have a prayer of ever experiencing sexual activity in their lifetimes. And if you’re young, society tells you that you’re supposed to avoid the last category at all costs. If you’ve been reading any of our other posts, you’re probably well aware that Lindsey and I don’t see celibacy this way. We believe that celibacy is as much a commitment to a way of life as is marriage, and that in order to make such a commitment, either as a single or with a partner, one needs to be prepared.

I wasn’t born prepared for celibacy any more than my sister was born prepared for marriage. In fact, if someone had told me as a teenager that I would eventually end up living a celibate lifestyle, I would have thought that person was a few apples short of a bushel. Even by age 19 when I had begun to consider the possibility of a monastic vocation, celibacy was still more of a faraway possibility than a realistic pathway for working out my salvation. During my time as an undergraduate and, to a lesser extent, as a master’s degree student, I visited several monasteries and attended a number of retreats aimed at vocational discernment. There was something about the way nuns loved and gave selflessly to the world that captivated me. The witness of several sisters I had known personally spoke to my heart in a way nothing ever had before. But I never could conceive of myself actually becoming a nun.

In many ways, I desired what the sisters had, but every time I visited a community and started to head home afterward I thought, “This way of life isn’t for me. There’s something about it that just doesn’t fit.” I attempted to discuss this with friends, spiritual directors, and other people I trusted. Everyone seemed to have the same set of questions: “Is it the celibacy thing? The fact that nuns can’t have sex? You can’t see yourself living a life without sex, can you?” Though I knew all along that it wasn’t the “not having sex” part that was bothering me, I couldn’t quite put my finger on what the problem was. The way the sisters cared for each other and the people they served, the spiritual life they shared in community, the generosity that was so apparent in every moment of every day at the monasteries…though I’d had a couple of less-than-pleasant monastery visits, in general I could think only of the positives. Still, it was all too easy to reach the premature conclusion that if I didn’t feel called to join a religious community, God wasn’t calling me to a celibate vocation after all.

In the midst of all my monastery adventures, I was also engaged in another type of exploration. Though I can now remember being attracted to other females from as early as age 8 or 9, the idea that I might be “one of those girls who likes other girls” hit me hard for the first time around age 17 when I was a senior in high school and was dating a boy. It took me a few years more to realize that “lesbian” was the most fitting term for describing my sexual orientation, and slowly I began dating other women. My first sexual experience with another woman came during my senior year of college. The relationship I had with this person was significant on many levels, and I’ll always value the ways in which our emotional intimacy helped me to learn about loving and being loved. Throughout most of my twenties, I pursued a number of romantic relationships, many of them having a sexual element. Some were more serious than others, and some included aspects that I am not proud of, but I can say with confidence that each of these women had something to teach me with regard to becoming more fully human and coming to understand Christ’s love with greater intensity. I struggled a great deal with the conflict between my positive experiences of love shared with other women and my perception of the celibacy mandate I heard constantly from clergy and lay members of the Church. While I am now grateful for the celibate vocation I eventually committed to cultivating in partnership with Lindsey, I am also thankful for many aspects of the intimate relationships I experienced before making this commitment. Those two feelings are not mutually exclusive.

All things considered, why am I glad that I waited to choose celibacy? The answer is simple: because when I did choose this way of life, I was ready to embrace it fully—its beauty, its mystery, and its challenges. Taking the time I needed to mature and prepare for this vocation was absolutely necessary–even though during the process, I wasn’t always aware of that for which I was preparing.

When Lindsey and I first decided to become partners, all the missing pieces from my active vocational discernment period began falling into place. The notion that celibacy might be the way God was calling me to live reemerged, and this time it made sense in a way it never had before. It no longer felt like a distant possibility or an order handed down from a tyrant. The very first hour we began to envision what life together might look like, I remembered wise words I had heard from a nun during a monastery visit eight years prior. I had asked Sister Elizabeth, “When did you know for sure that God was calling you to this vocation, and in this specific monastic community?” I’ve never forgotten her reply: “I knew when I visited the monastery and felt an unmistakable sense of joy.” From day one of my partnership with Lindsey, there has been no expression more fitting than “joy” for what we experience together—whether we are taking an exciting road trip, praying Compline, visiting our favorite cupcakery, wringing out laundry due to the washing machine’s malfunctioning mid-cycle, or arguing because of a misunderstanding. But even as powerfully as I feel that joy now, I am equally convinced that if I had attempted forcing myself into celibacy within the wrong context for me or at a time when I was not prepared, profound depression and emptiness would have been the most likely result.

I am glad I waited to choose celibacy because I believe it is a gift—or at least it can be. Waiting allowed me the opportunity to listen as God gradually, in His own time, invited me to discover it and begin unwrapping the layers. Waiting also gave me several years to reflect and reach the conclusion that celibacy is not simply the default state for the unmarried—that it is a way of life one must actively choose, and defining it as “the absence of sex” limits the meaning of all celibate vocations. All too often, Christians encourage celibate LGBT people to forget the experiences of their non-celibate pasts, viewing these as times of sin to be regretted and pushed aside. I believe this approach is unhealthy and detrimental to the development of a mature spirituality. Because I waited to choose celibacy, I am able to look fondly upon all previous stages of my emotional, spiritual, and sexual development and know that each period of my life thus far has brought with it new wisdom, insight, and lessons taught by others far wiser than me.

The decision to embrace any vocation is just that—a decision, and one that requires careful thought and formation within the context of a supportive community. Sometimes, I wonder what might happen if the Church were to take as much responsibility for guiding and directing those God calls to celibacy as it does for those God calls to marriage. But perhaps that’s a question for another time.

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.

Dealing with Loneliness

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Since we have started this blog, we’ve noted different people on the Internet and in real life creating questions to help them make sense of the choices we have made. Some of the questions have included: Are these two terribly oppressed by religion?, Do they have non-existent sex drives?, How long could they possibly last as a ‘celibate’ couple?, and What kind of boundaries do they have?. Recently, Mark Yarhouse authored a blog post where he encouraged people to avoid rushing to judgment about how we have chosen to live our lives as LGBT Christians. In this post, he writes, “I suspect that for them it feels like the ‘risks’ (if you will) associated with a partnership of this kind outweigh the potential for loneliness or isolation many people report in remaining single.” Here, Yarhouse seems to be suggesting that we embarked on our partnership together with an expressed intention of avoiding loneliness. Indeed, loneliness is often perceived as the issue for LGBT people adopting a celibate way of life. Wesley Hill’s book Washed and Waiting devotes nearly 30 pages in an attempt to give celibate LGBT people hope that loneliness can end. However, we think it is all too easy to view loneliness as a celibate person’s most significant struggle, and also to assume that two people have decided to live in a celibate partnership because it is the best alternative to lifelong loneliness.

First a disclaimer: We have both benefited from being embedded in many different kinds of communities before we ever met each other. Being in academia (as we both are) connects an individual to communities where people regularly share ideas, have reasonably flexible schedules, and organize periodic social events. We’ve lived with roommates, housemates, and alone. We currently live together, and we suspect that celibate people who live their lives in community with others experience loneliness differently than people who live alone.

Now for a more direct answer to the implicit question raised.

To be completely honest, loneliness was the farthest thing from our minds when we began our relationship. We had spent several months getting to know each other as friends. Sharing life together came naturally for us. We have common interests, life goals, and spiritual commitments. Our lives intersected in an organic way, and we fell into a rhythm of doing life together.

We’ve seen plenty of people from across the entire sexual orientation spectrum enter into romantic relationships with the intention of overcoming loneliness. From where we sit, these relationships are ripe for partners to manipulate each other. In this sort of relationship, a person becomes a means to an end rather than being seen and appreciated as an individual. We’d also contend that people in relationships driven primarily by a desire to overcome loneliness will likely struggle to live out a celibate vocation together. The pull of overcoming loneliness can cause the pair involved to look inwardly towards each other rather than outwardly towards a radical hospitality.

While it seems like we are speaking from a privileged position of being in a relationship, we would like to point out that in certain circumstances, being in a relationship can actually cause people to experience profound loneliness. Sarah has had previous experiences in committed relationships, some involving sexual intimacy, that lacked the emotional and spiritual depth required to be vulnerable, to feel safe, to be heard, and to feel validated. When committed relationships of any kind carry with them a vacuum of love and support, a person can experience the most profound sense of loneliness associated with being rejected by the person with whom he or she is trying to share life. There’s at least some truth in the adage that you must first learn to enjoy being in a relationship with yourself before you have much to offer another in a committed partnership, celibate or otherwise.

It also strikes us as sort of bonkers that two people would forge a lasting partnership from the ordering of “I’m lonely, you’re lonely, let’s be lonely together!” Lonely is an individual emotion in which every person has to sort his or her preferred strategies for coping. When Lindsey feels lonely, Lindsey distinctly prefers to take a walk in solitude somewhere reasonably connected with nature or to enjoy a special treat like a cupcake. When Sarah feels lonely, Sarah seeks a change of venue and looks for opportunities to be around a lot of people in the city, having random conversations with people hanging out in different places. We’d contend that loneliness is an emotion that can clue us in that something’s not quite right. It’s a valid emotion to look out for. When loneliness is not addressed, it can lead to unhealthy forms of isolation; but the two states do not need to go hand-in-hand.

We do not mean to trivialize how other people experience loneliness. In some ways, we think it makes sense to speak of the experience of a celibate, LGBT person as alienating. A celibate, LGBT person can experience a double-whammy of social exclusion in a world that normalizes the experience of married, cisgender, heterosexual people. It can be difficult for any unmarried individual to feel especially at home among peers who are establishing families. It is much harder when unmarried people feels as though they need to be vigilant less they let their LGBT statuses “slip” in unsafe contexts. We are grateful that more LGBT Christians have come out of the closet even in very conservative Christian traditions. It’s harder to feel alienated when you know other people like yourself.

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.

Sometimes, I just need a date night…

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A reflection by Lindsey

I call after Sarah, “Please don’t change into your being-at-home clothes quite yet!” After raising one eyebrow, “Well, why not?” she makes eye contact before I say, “Because I want to take you out on a date.”

A couple of weeks ago, I found myself at my wit’s end. I have been on the job market for about a month. Unexpected job loss can take quite a toll on a person… and on a family team. My temperament has been off, fluctuating through the range of distressed to desperate to oddly hopeful to plain annoyed to…. you get the idea. The Big Financial Squeeze has its way of zapping energy out of me. Earlier in that day, I had a job interview. I drove the long-ish drive to the office building, had a reasonable-length interview, and was home before lunch. I made sure to drive all the way home because the cheapest food is food you already have. As I sat in the quiet eating my pasta, I couldn’t help but hear the voices that said, “HA! You just had a ‘day’s work’ and you were home by lunch!” and “Do you realize you spent more time traveling to the interview than you spent time interviewing? You’re a loser!”

These accusations are par for the course when navigating something like chronic depression. You know they aren’t true, you know they aren’t even coming from your own thoughts, and you know there is precious little you can do under your own power to make them shut up and give you a moment’s peace. I have gained some practice in overcoming the inertia of my own tapes. I started by looking at any objective evidence that the tapes might be uttering truths. Taking stock forward from that week, I realized I had secured some freelance work, likely had some additional temporary work on the way, and just finished an interview for a full-time position. Not surprisingly, the tapes were complete and utter hogwash, and I could consider an alternative. There was cause for cutting myself a break, for finding some space to be myself, and for celebrating. There was space for date night.

I began the practice of “Date Night” many years ago by taking myself out on dates whenever I felt so inclined. Panera, a walkable neighborhood, Noodles and Co., the local park, neighborhood coffee shops, and Pizza Hut offered me sanctuary at key moments when I needed to show myself an extra special dose of kindness. Although I was a cheap date (and very much relish in the skills associated with practicing Date Night on a budget), I began learning how to extend radical hospitality to others by first offering it to myself. I learned how to check in with myself and ask, “Lindsey, what do you really want to do right now?” I came to see myself as a worthwhile person and practiced simply being alone. The video below has some great pointers if you’re looking for a way to start.

As Sarah and I have gotten to know each other, I’ve brought my “Date Night” practice with me. It is something that we look forward to doing together. We never know when the other one will pull on the cord that opens the Date Night parachute, so we do our best always to have a few possibilities. We love cupcakes, Restaurant.com certificates, walks to various free things to do, outings to some of our favorite places if the day and time permits, and getting dinner together. We keep options open for every Date Night budget. I do my best to watch for when Sarah needs the time in addition to monitoring how I am feeling. We figure out what we are going to do, always knowing that a “plan” amounts to little more than figuring out travel directions. I think the only “rule” we have is that we must definitely get out of the house when enjoying a date.

A couple of weeks ago, we decided it was high time to use a Restaurant.com certificate that we had been sitting on for several months. It felt like a day where it was best to break completely from the routine. We tend to purchase certificates in bulk on different promotional days, and we bantered back and forth before deciding on a German restaurant. Truth be told, I don’t know much about German food, but I was feeling up for a culinary experience. We found ourselves in a small restaurant we wouldn’t have even known existed. As we looked over the menu, we listened to a live pianist and breathed a bit. We laughed as we realized that we could meet our certificate’s minimum spending guideline just choosing the two entrees and desserts we wanted to try. I always try to pick my meal so that it has components Sarah and I can share. Culinary adventures are more fun with multiple people; and, I thought the bread dumplings sounded interesting as I looked to pick the side dishes that would go with my dinner. Time seemed to stand still as we sat together, broke bread, shared a meal in a delightful venue, refreshed our spirits, and enjoyed one another’s company. We left the restaurant revitalized, and promised to return again and continue sampling from the dessert menu.

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.