Learning to Want Her Rightly
There’s a way of talking about chastity that can make Catholicism sound mainly concerned with keeping teenagers from having sex.
How far is too far? What counts as a mortal sin? Where exactly is the line? How long can you kiss? Where can your hands go? At what point should somebody’s father emerge silently from the woods?
Some of those questions have real answers, and boundaries matter. But they’re too small to carry the Catholic vision of chastity.
The deeper question is what kind of man you’re becoming.
More specifically:
Are you becoming the kind of man who can receive another person as a gift, desire her without possessing her, see her clearly without consuming her, and love her without using her?
That’s harder.
And it’s much more beautiful.
Your Body Is Good
Christianity begins somewhere modern people sometimes find surprising: the body is good.
God made it.
Male and female He created us. The Son of God took flesh. Jesus ate, slept, worked, wept, suffered, touched people, died bodily, and rose bodily. We believe in the resurrection of the body, not our eventual escape from it.
So Catholicism doesn’t look at sexual desire and say, There’s something shameful here.
It says something much more demanding:
There’s something holy here. Learn what it’s for.
The desire for intimacy, affection, marriage, sex, children, and a shared life can belong to something profoundly good. Sexual desire reaches toward communion. At its deepest, it points beyond pleasure toward the desire to know and be known, to give and receive, to belong to another without ceasing to be oneself.
That’s why the Church takes sexuality so seriously.
The Catechism describes chastity as the “successful integration of sexuality within the person” (CCC 2337). That word integration matters.
A boy can be badly divided within himself. His conscience wants one thing, his imagination another. His body surges in one direction while his faith calls him somewhere else. He can genuinely care about a girl and still want things from her that aren’t good for either of them. He can love Christ and be aroused. He can want to be honorable and still discover that desire is remarkably talented at hiring lawyers.
Chastity doesn’t make desire disappear.
It teaches desire its proper place within love.
That’s why chastity isn’t primarily learning not to want.
It’s learning how to want another person rightly.
Chastity Is Training for Self-Gift
This is the larger Catholic vision.
Your life is a gift.
Your body is a gift.
Your sexuality is a gift.
And gifts reach their fulfillment by being given.
This is one of the deepest truths Christianity teaches about being human. Jesus says, “Whoever loses his life for my sake will find it” (Matthew 16:25). The Second Vatican Council says that man “cannot fully find himself except through a sincere gift of himself” (Gaudium et Spes, 24).
That isn’t merely a teaching about sex.
It’s a teaching about the human person.
We’re made for communion. We become ourselves through love, and love eventually requires self-gift.
Sexuality participates in that mystery.
The male body itself is ordered toward someone beyond itself. So is the female body. Neither makes complete sense considered only in isolation. Sexual difference contains a kind of invitation outward: toward communion, toward fruitfulness, toward the possibility that two lives might become one and that from their union another life might come into existence.
This is why Catholic sexual morality can’t finally be understood as a list of things God arbitrarily forbids.
The question is always larger:
What is sexuality for?
If sex is merely pleasure, Christian teaching will inevitably look restrictive.
If sex is a bodily language of faithful, fruitful, total self-gift, then chastity begins to look very different.
It becomes the virtue that teaches us how to become capable of making that gift truthfully.
The Body Has a Language
The body doesn’t merely exist.
It communicates.
Before you say a word, your face can welcome someone or reject him. Your posture can say, I’m open to you or Stay away. A handshake can express respect. An embrace can say, You’re not alone. Kneeling can express worship. Turning away can express contempt. A wedding ring can announce a promise even when the person wearing it is silent.
Our bodies carry meaning because the body isn’t a detachable object we happen to possess.
The body is part of who we are.
Through it, the person becomes visible.
That’s why bodily actions can tell the truth or tell a lie.
A man can say, “I love you,” with his mouth while his actions communicate, I want what you can give me.
A couple can say, “We’re just having fun,” while their bodies are speaking a much more serious language of sexual intimacy.
A person can say, “This means nothing,” but the body often knows better.
Touch can awaken attachment. Sexual intimacy can create a sense of union. Repeated physical intimacy can make promises the couple hasn’t consciously chosen and can’t yet faithfully keep.
The body isn’t mute.
It speaks through presence, touch, distance, clothing, gestures, affection, and sexual union.
And just as words can be honest or deceptive, the body can express a truth or make a false promise.
This is one reason chastity matters.
Chastity teaches the body to speak truthfully.
The Question Beneath the Question
Jesus gives us the pattern: “Love one another as I have loved you” (John 15:12).
That changes things.
Christ doesn’t consume the beloved. He doesn’t manipulate vulnerability. He doesn’t take because He can. His love seeks the good of the other, finally at the cost of Himself.
Look at a crucifix long enough and Christianity’s definition of love becomes difficult to sentimentalize.
Love says:
I give myself for you.
Lust reverses the direction:
I take you for myself.
So beneath a hundred questions about dating sits a simpler one:
Do I want what’s good for her, or do I mostly want something from her?
The answer will often be mixed.
That’s part of growing up.
A young man can sincerely care about a girl while also enjoying how her attention makes him feel about himself. He can want her happiness and want her body. He can want to protect her and possess her. He may not know where affection ends and ego begins.
The point isn’t to become suspicious of every desire.
It’s to become truthful about them.
Because lust isn’t simply strong attraction. You can be intensely attracted to someone without lusting after her.
Lust begins reducing a person to the satisfaction she can provide.
Chastity does the opposite.
It keeps restoring the whole person to view.
Chastity Makes Love More Creative
There’s another gift chastity gives a relationship.
It forces love to become more imaginative.
If sexual intensity becomes your main way of feeling close, you can become surprisingly lazy about love.
You kiss because you don’t know what else to do.
You make out because silence feels awkward.
You escalate physical intimacy because it creates an immediate feeling of connection.
But if you decide that love has to mean more than getting each other worked up, you have to learn another language.
You learn to listen.
You remember what she told you three weeks ago.
You make plans.
You notice when something’s wrong.
You meet her family.
You help when she’s overwhelmed.
You learn what makes her laugh.
You pray for her.
You sacrifice your convenience.
You spend an ordinary afternoon together without needing to make it sexually intense.
You begin discovering whether you actually enjoy one another as people.
That’s not less romantic.
It may be the beginning of learning whether you know how to love another person rather than merely enjoy what she makes you feel.
Chastity doesn’t impoverish love. It forces love to become richer.
Dating Is for Seeing Clearly
This matters because romantic attraction is powerful.
That’s part of its goodness.
But powerful things can also make it harder to see.
Physical and emotional intensity can create a sense of closeness faster than two people have actually built a relationship capable of sustaining it.
You can feel profoundly connected to someone while still knowing very little about how she handles disappointment, conflict, family, faith, money, work, sacrifice, stress, or responsibility.
You can be strongly attracted to someone who’d make a terrible spouse.
She can be strongly attracted to you even if you’d make a terrible husband.
Chastity creates room to find out.
Can you talk?
Can you disagree without punishing one another?
Can you hear “no” without becoming resentful?
Can you forgive?
Can you be bored together?
Can you be around each other’s families?
Do you respect the people she loves?
Does she respect yours?
Does the relationship make you more honest?
More generous?
More responsible?
More faithful to Christ?
Are you becoming more yourself, or more anxious and dependent?
Are you actually getting to know her, or mostly getting addicted to how the relationship makes you feel?
Sexual intimacy can’t answer those questions for you.
Sometimes it can keep you from asking them.
That’s one reason dating has a purpose.
Dating isn’t marriage on a trial subscription.
And it isn’t merely recreational intimacy.
At its healthiest, dating is a growing friendship between a man and a woman in which they’re discovering whether they might eventually be capable of giving their lives to one another.
That requires something surprisingly difficult: clarity.
Chastity creates space between desire and possession. And in that space, two people can actually come to know one another.
Your Body Says Things
Physical affection has meaning.
Sex has meaning.
We sometimes pretend otherwise because pretending makes life easier.
A kiss is just a kiss.
Touching is just touching.
Sex is just sex.
Two bodies are simply doing things that feel good.
But the body belongs to the person.
What we do with our bodies says something about who we are and what we’re giving.
A kiss can say, I delight in you.
A caress can say, I’m drawing near to you.
Sexual union says something far greater:
I give myself to you.
Not just my body for an evening.
Myself.
Freely.
Faithfully.
Exclusively.
Fruitfully.
Without holding back.
The body’s language is powerful precisely because it reaches places words sometimes can’t.
A spoken promise can be dismissed, forgotten, or contradicted. But bodily intimacy can bind the heart even when the mind is still uncertain.
The body can begin living as though a covenant exists before the couple has actually made one.
That’s why sexual acts can’t be treated as meaningless gestures.
They’re bodily words.
They say something about the relationship, about the persons involved, and about the kind of gift being made.
Marriage is the covenant in which a man and woman actually make that promise. Their sexual union then becomes bodily language corresponding to the vows they’ve spoken publicly before God:
I am yours.
The vows give the body permission to speak what the body is trying to say.
This changes the usual question.
Instead of asking:
How far can I go before this becomes sinful?
Ask:
What am I saying to her with my body, and have I made the commitment that gives me the right to say it?
That question reaches well short of intercourse.
There’s a difference between affection and deliberately arousing one another sexually, and most young men are capable of recognizing the difference when they aren’t busy trying not to.
If you’re intentionally trying to get each other sexually worked up, don’t call it merely being affectionate.
Your body may be saying something your relationship isn’t ready to say.
Honesty is part of chastity.
You Can Use Someone Without Touching Her
There’s another kind of chastity we talk about less.
A guy can keep his hands completely to himself and still use a girl.
He can make her responsible for his loneliness.
He can need constant texts and immediate replies.
He can become jealous of her friends, anxious when she’s unavailable, wounded when she doesn’t provide the reassurance he’s come to expect.
He can tell her everything almost immediately and invite her to do the same.
He can begin speaking about forever before he’s demonstrated that he can faithfully manage Thursday.
None of this is necessarily sexual.
But the underlying movement can be very similar:
I want intimacy before I’m capable of carrying the responsibility that belongs to it.
That’s worth seeing.
A girlfriend isn’t a wife on a trial subscription.
A boyfriend isn’t a husband with fewer legal documents.
Dating can become serious, and serious relationships naturally involve vulnerability and growing emotional intimacy.
But intimacy should grow roughly alongside commitment.
When it races far ahead, somebody usually pays for it.
So don’t ask a girl to give you the privileges of a relationship you haven’t yet made the commitments necessary to sustain.
That applies to her body.
It also applies to her heart.
And it applies to the language you’re teaching her to hear.
If your words promise permanence while your actions communicate convenience, you’re speaking falsely.
If your body invites a level of intimacy your commitment can’t support, you’re asking her to live inside a message you may not be prepared to fulfill.
Modesty Protects the Person
Chastity has a companion virtue: modesty.
Modesty sometimes gets reduced to rules about clothing, especially rules directed at girls.
That’s too narrow.
The Catechism describes modesty as protecting “the intimate center of the person” (CCC 2521).
That’s a beautiful way of putting it.
Modesty begins with the recognition that not everything about a person belongs to everyone.
My body is personal.
My sexuality is personal.
My deepest emotions are personal.
My vulnerabilities are personal.
Intimacy is good precisely because some things are meant to be given gradually, freely, and within relationships capable of receiving them.
Modesty isn’t embarrassment about the body. It’s reverence for the body.
And boys need modesty too.
A young man can seek sexual attention through the way he presents himself.
He can brag about sexual experience. He can turn intimacy into entertainment for his friends. He can tell stories about a girl that were never his to tell. He can share screenshots, photos, messages, or details about a relationship that were given to him in trust.
Modesty says:
Some things are sacred enough not to be displayed.
It preserves something our culture often destroys: mystery.
Mystery doesn’t mean manipulation, pretending not to care, playing hard to get, or making another person chase you.
It means recognizing that a person can’t be consumed all at once.
She has depths you haven’t yet seen.
Knowing her requires time.
Trust.
Patience.
Permission.
Reverence.
Love doesn’t demand immediate access.
It waits to be welcomed.
Strength
Young men are sometimes taught to think of restraint as weakness.
Real masculinity is appetite, conquest, sexual experience, getting the girl.
But there’s nothing especially impressive about obeying an impulse.
Dogs can do that.
Freedom begins when desire is real and obedience to it isn’t automatic.
A man should eventually become capable of saying:
I want you very much. And precisely because I care about you, I won’t take what isn’t mine to take.
That’s not sexual numbness.
It may require considerably more strength when the desire is intense.
And this is where chastity becomes part of something larger:
Christian freedom.
Freedom isn’t simply the ability to choose whatever I happen to want.
That would make my strongest appetite my master.
Christian freedom is the growing capacity to choose the good, even when another part of me wants something else.
Chastity trains that freedom.
The young man who learns to govern sexual desire is learning something he’ll need everywhere else:
how to sacrifice,how to wait,how to remain faithful,how to endure frustration without making someone else pay for it,how to hear “no” without resentment,how to give himself when giving costs him.
A wedding ring doesn’t magically turn a selfish man into a self-giving one.
Marriage reveals whether he’s been becoming one.
Chastity Is Training for Marriage
And don’t imagine this discipline becomes unnecessary once you’re married.
Marriage will ask for the same freedom in new ways.
There’ll be seasons when your wife is exhausted.
She may be pregnant.
She may be recovering from childbirth.
She may be sick.
She may be grieving.
She may be overwhelmed.
There may be times when you want sex and she doesn’t.
There may be times when she wants closeness and you’re distracted or tired.
There may be long stretches when love feels less like romance and more like getting up at 2:00 in the morning because somebody’s crying.
Marriage requires a man who understands that desire doesn’t create entitlement.
A man who’s learned to wait.
A man who can sacrifice without keeping score.
A man who can remain faithful when gratification is unavailable.
A man who knows that his wife’s body is still hers, even after she’s given herself to him in marriage.
Chastity before marriage isn’t merely waiting for sex. It’s training for fidelity after the wedding.
It forms capacities marriage will eventually require.
The Pornographic Imagination
Pornography forms precisely the opposite habit.
Chastity asks:
Who is this person, and what is good for her?
Pornography asks:
What can this body do for me?
The damage doesn’t necessarily end when the screen goes dark.
Pornography can teach a man to carry its way of seeing into ordinary life.
A woman enters the room and, almost before he knows anything about her, she’s being assessed.
Beautiful.
Not beautiful.
Sexy.
Not sexy.
Available.
Unavailable.
Her body arrives before her person does.
Pornography also teaches a false bodily language.
It presents bodies as if they speak only one message:
I am here for your consumption.
It strips touch, nudity, and sexual union from covenant, history, vulnerability, fruitfulness, and responsibility.
It turns the body’s capacity to reveal the person into a tool for hiding the person.
Christian chastity slowly reverses that vision.
The attractive woman isn’t a temptation disguised as a human being.
She’s a human being.
More than that, she’s someone created in the image of God and destined for communion with Him.
She has a name.
Parents.
Fears.
Friends.
Memories you know nothing about.
Wounds she may never tell you.
Hopes for her life.
A vocation.
A relationship with God that began before you noticed her and will matter infinitely longer than whether she ever notices you.
She isn’t scenery in the story of your sexual development.
She belongs to God.
And if she’s baptized, something even more astonishing is true:
she’s your sister in Christ, a member of His Body, someone in whom the Holy Spirit dwells.
Pornography trains consumption. Chastity retrains sight.
It also retrains the body.
Instead of allowing your eyes, imagination, and hands to say, You exist for me, chastity teaches them to say:
You’re a person, and your good matters.
What We Practice
The Church also teaches that masturbation is contrary to chastity (CCC 2352).
That teaching can sound arbitrary if sexuality is understood merely as the management of pleasurable sensations.
But Christianity understands sexuality as ordered beyond the self.
Ultimately, it belongs to communion and self-gift.
So there’s a deeper question underneath the particular act:
What am I training my sexuality to become?
Habits teach desire where to go.
They also teach the body what its actions mean.
If I repeatedly train myself to seek sexual pleasure apart from relationship, commitment, and self-gift, I’m teaching my sexuality to turn inward.
I’m practicing a form of desire in which communion becomes unnecessary.
That doesn’t mean every involuntary experience is sinful.
Temptation isn’t sin.
Attraction isn’t sin.
Bodily arousal isn’t sin.
An intrusive thought isn’t sin.
The body does many things before the will has been consulted.
Freedom enters in what we choose to do with what’s arisen.
That distinction matters, especially for adolescent boys.
Otherwise, Christianity can become a miserable project of feeling guilty for possessing a functioning endocrine system.
The moral life begins not with pretending desire isn’t there.
It begins with learning what to do with it.
Her Heart Matters Too
There are forms of sexual exploitation everyone recognizes.
There are quieter forms of selfishness that pass more easily for romance.
Don’t tell a girl you love her because you want something from her.
Don’t imply a future you don’t intend to pursue.
Don’t keep her emotionally attached because being wanted feels good.
Don’t collect female attention to reassure yourself that you’re attractive.
Don’t make promises because the night is beautiful and both of you are feeling things you’ll have to live with tomorrow morning.
Don’t encourage attachment and then disappear because the relationship became inconvenient.
Don’t exploit vulnerability.
And don’t reduce love to consent.
Consent matters enormously.
But Christianity asks more of a man than:
Did she let me?
It asks:
Did I honor her?
Those aren’t the same question.
Honor means that your words, your actions, and your bodily language belong together.
It means you don’t say “I love you” with your mouth while saying “I want to use you” with your hands.
It means you don’t invite a girl into a bodily intimacy that communicates a covenant while privately treating the relationship as temporary or disposable.
It means that even if she’s willing to cross a boundary, you may still need to be the one who says:
No. We’re not going there.
Not because you don’t want her.
Because you do.
And you want her good more.
Chastity Has a Destination
Here’s something we often fail to tell young people.
Chastity isn’t the virtue you practice until you finally get married and are allowed to stop.
Married people are called to chastity.
Priests are called to chastity.
Religious are called to chastity.
Single people are called to chastity.
Every Christian is.
Because chastity isn’t ultimately about abstinence.
It’s about learning to love according to your state in life.
The married man learns to love his wife as wife, faithfully and fruitfully, refusing to reduce even her to an instrument for his gratification.
His body must continue to speak the truth of the vows he made.
Tenderness, sexual union, fidelity, patience, and sacrifice should all belong to the same language:
I am yours, and I am for your good.
The priest gives up marriage not because sexuality is dirty, but because marriage is so good that surrendering it can become a radical sign of another marriage, Christ and His Church.
The consecrated religious bears witness with his or her body that our deepest hunger for communion will finally be fulfilled only in God.
The unmarried Christian lives chastity not in a meaningless waiting room, but as a real form of discipleship now.
Different vocations.
The same underlying school.
How do I receive my body, my desires, and the people God gives me without grasping at them?
That’s chastity.
And its destination isn’t repression.
Its destination is communion.
Becoming Free
This is why practical boundaries matter.
Decide some things before desire gets a vote.
Know where your physical boundaries are.
Don’t negotiate them in the moment when both of you are aroused and suddenly discovering sophisticated theological reasons why this particular situation is probably different.
Avoid situations in which you already know your judgment gets worse.
Don’t request or send sexual images.
Don’t share intimate messages or images someone has entrusted to you.
Don’t use alcohol or drugs to manufacture plausible deniability for choices you wanted to make anyway.
Don’t isolate yourselves constantly and then act surprised when your boundaries collapse.
Spend time with friends.
Spend time with families.
Go places.
Do things.
Learn how the other person lives in the world.
Keep your male friendships.
Stay close to your family.
Exercise.
Work.
Serve somebody.
Sleep.
And live sacramentally.
Pray.
Go to Mass.
Receive Christ in the Eucharist.
Go to Confession.
Ask Our Lady for purity of heart.
Ask St. Joseph to teach you what masculine love looks like when it’s strong enough to protect without possessing.
Catholic chastity isn’t a self-improvement project accomplished by white-knuckling your way through adolescence.
It’s a virtue formed through grace, habit, friendship, prayer, failure, repentance, and beginning again.
Christ isn’t standing at the finish line waiting to see whether you can become pure enough to approach Him.
He’s the one who makes purity possible.
No One in the Room Is “The Pure Guy”
This matters because some young men hearing a talk about chastity have already failed badly.
Some are watching pornography.
Some masturbate habitually.
Some have crossed boundaries with girlfriends.
Some have done things they’re ashamed to remember.
Some may believe they’ve already ruined something that can never be restored.
Christianity doesn’t divide the room into the clean boys and the dirty ones.
The Church has Confession because sin is real.
She has Confession because mercy is more real still.
You’re responsible for what you do.
Christianity never rescues us from responsibility by pretending our choices don’t matter.
But you aren’t reducible to what you’ve done.
Your dignity isn’t erased because you sinned.
Neither is hers.
Another person’s past doesn’t make her worth less.
Your past doesn’t make you incapable of holiness.
Peter denied Christ.
Augustine knew something about disordered sexual desire.
The saints aren’t people who somehow avoided needing a Savior.
They’re what happens when sinners keep surrendering themselves to one.
Grace doesn’t call evil good.
It forgives.
Heals.
Reorders.
Strengthens.
And then sends us back into the world to love again.
Chastity can begin today.
The Man You’re Becoming
There’s a useful question for a young man to ask himself:
What kind of man would I trust with my sister?
Or someday, perhaps:
What kind of man would I want my daughter to date?
Patient.
Honest.
Strong enough to hear no without sulking.
Capable of desire without entitlement.
Protective without becoming possessive.
Able to apologize.
Able to wait.
Able to walk away.
Able to tell the truth when telling the truth costs him something.
A man whose words and actions agree.
A man whose body doesn’t make promises his character can’t keep.
A man who can enjoy a woman’s beauty without imagining that beauty creates a claim upon her.
A man who can be attracted without becoming possessive.
A man who sees clearly enough to ask not simply, Do I want her?, but also:
Are we actually good for one another?
Fine.
Now comes the harder question.
Am I becoming him?
Because the Catholic vision is finally much larger than avoiding sexual sin.
God is making saints.
Someday a young man may stand before a woman at an altar and promise his whole life to her.
He’ll place a ring on her finger and say, in effect:
Everything I am is now given to you.
Their bodies will later speak the same promise their mouths made before God.
Another man may lie face down on the floor of a cathedral while the Church invokes the saints over him, then rise to give his life to Christ and His people as a priest.
Another may offer himself to God in consecrated life.
And some will live long seasons of faithful Christian singleness none of them anticipated.
The vocations differ.
The training begins now.
Every act of chastity is practice in self-gift.
Every time you refuse pornography, you’re learning to see.
Every time you govern an impulse, you’re practicing freedom.
Every time you refuse to manipulate a girl’s affection, you’re learning reverence.
Every time you allow a relationship to develop without forcing intimacy faster than commitment can carry it, you’re learning patience.
Every time you make your bodily actions agree with your words, you’re learning truthfulness.
Every time you choose to know a woman rather than consume her, you’re learning love.
Every time you go to Confession after falling, you’re learning that holiness depends more upon grace than upon your ability to maintain an impressive record.
Every time you choose her good over your gratification, something in you becomes more capable of giving yourself.
That’s the positive vision of chastity.
Not less desire, but desire redeemed.
Not fear of the body, but the body restored to truth.
Not a body used as an object, but a body allowed to reveal the person.
Not intimacy seized, but intimacy received as gift.
Not urgency, but patience.
Not blindness, but clarity.
Not words separated from actions, but a life in which the body speaks truthfully.
Not isolation, but communion.
Not possession, but gift.
And before the woman in front of you is someone you desire, she’s someone God desired into existence.
Someone Christ thought worth dying for.
Someone the Holy Spirit may be preparing for a holiness neither you nor she can yet imagine.
You don’t need to possess her to appreciate her.
You don’t need to consume her to love her.
You don’t need immediate access to know her.
See her.
Really see her.
Then become the kind of man capable of loving what you see.
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