What Your Celibate Friends Can Teach You About Sex

I am the mother of nine children, who is (unfortunately) divorced and therefore celibate.

Yet, because I was married for a good long time, I know a thing or two.

Being celibate in my 40s was something I never planned on. I had planned to be happily married. However, in this stage of my life and faith, I find myself single, celibate, and learning to embrace the struggle. Because, yes, it is a struggle. It isn’t a cross I felt called to carry and not one I willingly took up. Like Simon of Cyrene, I was drafted. However, there is something of an internal transformation that takes place when you give your consent to the will of God.

Some of the greatest and most transformational understanding about sex and sexuality has come from celibate people, notably the saints of the Church, who offered their sexuality to the service of the Gospel. Some of them remained chaste all their lives. Some embraced celibacy after some twists and turns in life. Either way, they offer us a treasure of truth to guide our own journeys.

So what can celibate people teach the world about sex? Here are five things: 

1) You are called to live out your sexuality, even if you are not having sex. 

You don’t leave your sexuality in the bedroom. You are either intrinsically female or intrinsically male. That reality is lived out in every aspect of your existence. Through the lens of the Theology of the Body, celibate St. Pope John Paul II says that we discover “the meaning of the whole of existence, the meaning of life.”

Consistent with our human dignity, we are called as humans to not just love but to love as God loves. God didn’t just write this command in Sacred Scriptures. He also inscribed this call to love in our very bodies: male and female, drawn to a one-flesh union.

When it comes to religion, there is a tendency to focus intently on spiritual realities, while ignoring or perhaps downplaying the role of physical reality. However, a healthy and theological understanding of the physical tells us that it mirrors the spiritual. In our very bodies—in all its minutiae of function—we are directed to the reality of who God created us to be and who we will be for all eternity. 

God uses the stuff of earth to work salvation in us. Bread and wine become Body and Blood. Water initiates us into Christ’s family. Oil seals us with the Holy Spirit. And our sexuality demonstrates to us the creative and life-giving force of God.

So even when you are celibate, your body is a walking, breathing, living testimony of a God who is creative, passionate, loving, and unitive. 

2) You can respect the sacredness of sex and still take it lightheartedly.

In The Four Loves, CS Lewis’ iconic work on the subject of love, he says “...the psychologists have so bedevilled us with the infinite importance of complete sexual adjustment and the all but impossibility of achieving it…” I would go out on a limb to say that theologians today have so convinced us (rightly so) of the sacredness and awesomeness of sex that it is impossible for us to ever achieve contentment there. 

I believe we can take a reverent and appropriately sacred view of sex and still find it comical and still take the subject with the lightheartedness that comes naturally.

Celibate Pope Benedict XVI said, “I’m not a man who constantly thinks up jokes. But I think it’s very important to be able to see the funny side of life and its joyful dimension and not take everything too tragically.”

If we fall into the trap of taking sex so seriously that we cannot discuss it in polite company, laugh about the comic nature of its technicalities, and long for it when it is not part of our lives without exalting it to the level of an ultimate goal, then we can create a false god out of it. We can unintentionally create an idol—one that we can never approach outside of marriage because it is forbidden, nor inside of marriage because it is supposed to be always transcendent.

3) Self-control is not just a virtue for celibate people.

Not originally, but eventually celibate St. Augustine famously said, “Lord give me chastity and self control—but not yet.”

If we were to list the top virtues to be exercised by single people, “self-control” would probably top that list. But you know what? Married people need to practice self-control too, and perhaps even more so. There are an untold number of times a married couple will have to exercise and strengthen their self-control. Such as abstaining because of illness or exhaustion, the need to postpone pregnancy, the needs of children or each other, and so many other reasons. There are limits on sexual expression, even for married people. 

4) Women are visual too. Men are emotional too.

If you listen to chastity speakers or Christian books on love you often hear two generalities preached almost as gospel. The first is that men are visual (therefore, women, check that hemline) and that women are emotional (therefore men, be super sensitive if you want to connect with her). And while it is true that men are generally visual and women are generally emotional, these are not absolutes.

Acceptance and respect should be at the core of how we interact with one another, without resorting to stereotypes and assumptions. Don’t assume your sister or brother in Christ isn’t struggling in the same way you are. Extend grace and acceptance.

Celibate Servant of God Dorothy Day said, “We are one flesh in the Mystical Body as man and woman are said to be one flesh in marriage. With such a love one would see all things new; we would begin to see people as they really are, as God sees them.”

5) Christ makes all things new.

I remember attending a chastity talk when I was a teenager. The girl had a big red paper heart. As she “gave her heart away” to multiple young men, she would tear a piece of the heart and literally give it away. Until the day she found The One (you know, the one she was destined to marry) and had no more of her heart left to give.

It has taken years to undo this false idea of the heart. We are not made of paper. And we serve the one who says in Revelation, “Behold, I make all things new.”

Regardless of what you have done or what has been done to you, Jesus renews, regenerates, heals, and makes new. Your worth is incalculable no matter your past.

So, as we each take up our crosses—either the ones we knew all along we had a vocation to, or the ones we were drafted to carry—remember that we live the Gospel of grace always.