What are Celibate Partnerships? Are They Wise?

This article was revised in May 2026 to reflect fuller anecdotal evidence about the accessibility of intentional Christian community for gay celibate Christians in the United States. I am grateful for the scholarship of Greg Coles (Center for Faith, Sexuality, and Gender), Eve Tushnet (Catholic Futures), Josh Proctor (Wholly Ourselves Podcast), Timon Lee, The New Kinship Podcast, Aaron Taylor, and others who have helped clarify this conversation.

A couple years ago, I wrote that celibate partnerships were, in many cases, an unnecessarily risky answer to a real problem.

I was not dismissing the problem. Gay celibate Christians need real companionship, shared life, and durable family in the body of Christ. I knew that because I need those things too. At the time, I believed the better answer was intentional Christian community. I still believe that. At least, I believe it should be true. But I am less confident than I once was that this better answer is actually accessible for most gay celibate Christians today.

By celibate partnership, I mean committed companionship between two Christians who intend to abstain from sex.¹ Some celibate partnerships² are exclusive and lifelong, others are more temporary (see endnote for a comparison of spiritual friendships and celibate partnerships).³ Some use dating language, others avoid it. Some are emotionally and physically romantic, some are not.  Some involve mutual attraction, others do not. While these partnerships don’t consider themselves to be married in the eyes of God, some are open to entering into a government marriage for financial and legal benefits. Some celibate partnerships share a home, while others live hundreds of miles away. So even when two people talk about celibate partnerships, they may not be talking about the same thing. 

That ambiguity tends to push Christians toward snap judgments. Some want to bless these partnerships without qualification as long as the partners are sincere. Others want to reject them altogether. I understand the second impulse, and I’ve shared it in the past. At the same time, I’m increasingly convinced that Christians cannot answer this question well unless we first reckon with the modern Church’s failure to offer celibate Christians robust solutions to loneliness that were available for most of Christian history prior.

Celibacy isn’t a Call to Alone-ness

The Christian answer to celibate loneliness has never been, “Stop needing intimacy.” That would be strange advice for people created in God’s image to enjoy intimacy in the context of committed human family. 

Our sexuality is our need for intimacy, to know and be known, to give and receive love. Because we are mind, body, and spirit, we need connection on an emotional level, intellectual level, physical level, and spiritual level–including those of us called to lifetime celibacy! Neither sex nor marriage is promised in Scripture, and neither is necessary to meet our intimacy needs or to be whole.

Yet many Christians talk about vocational singleness as if it’s a calling to loneliness for the sake of the gospel. In contrast, the early Church practiced celibacy as a call to just as much companionship as married people. The Church has most consistently understood the Scriptures to teach that while vocational singleness is a call to permanently give up marriage, sex, and biological children to do kingdom work parents struggle to find the time, energy, and focus to do, it’s still a call to intimacy in family. 

In Matthew 19, Jesus compares the celibate to Old Testament eunuchs who served in the king’s household. They often out-lived the patriarch. They were a part of the family. In Luke 18, Jesus promises 100-fold spiritual brothers, sisters, and children now in this present time to those who permanently give up spouse and children for the sake of kingdom work. He promises family, 100-fold family, to those committed to vocational singleness. In 1 Corinthians 7, Paul recognizes that those called to vocational singleness still need human companionship by blessing an early Church form of family for celibates. In 1 Timothy 5, Paul recognizes a proto-convent house that provided family to widows.

Every time Jesus and Paul speak of vocational singleness, they seem to recognize in some way that celibates still need human intimacy in permanent, lived-in family. And the wisdom of the Church has been for celibates to find that family and intimacy in committed community with other celibates. However, the early Church experimented with a variety of solutions for celibate companionship, offering modern Christians ideas and lessons.

A Historical Analog for Celibate Partnerships

When Christ-followers first began responding to Christ’s invitation to vocational singleness, most celibates continued to live with married units in their extended family, but many soon found these communities of unequally yoked adults to lead to a sense of loneliness.^4,5 A person called to celibacy could live among married relatives and still experience a distinct kind of loneliness. Shared blood is not the same as shared vocation. A household can provide shelter while still leaving a celibate person spiritually isolated.

A longstanding interpretation of 1 Corinthians 7:36–38 understands Paul to be addressing something like an early form of syneisaktism or spiritual betrothal and encouraging celibate Christians in such a partnership to remain celibate and faithfully steward their commitment, if they can (see endnote for interpretive discussion).⁶ Syneisaktism or spiritual betrothals were non-sexual partnerships between two Christians of the opposite sex committed to celibacy. In the first decades of the Church, the urban committed celibate communities of the 3rd and 4th centuries and the monasteries of the middle ages were not yet available to offer celibate Christians committed companionship. Additionally, large numbers of female Christian converts were committing to celibacy, and therefore lacked the physical security and financial stability that 1st century marriage afforded. As a result, some celibate Christians appear to have entered into spiritual betrothals as a source of companionship, safety, and economic partnership. Yet, while Paul honors the celibate aim of such a partnership, he also recognizes the risks the spiritually betrothed run and suggests they marry if they cannot keep their vows of celibacy. Paul’s words are understood to be a limited allowance for spiritual betrothals considering the limited options available for celibates to find community while still pointing out the risks. While other interpretations of this passage exist and became historically dominant in many periods of church history, this remains a serious ancient and modern reading that arguably makes the best sense of several features of the text, especially Paul’s language of “his virgin,” “let them marry,” and the emphasis on personal resolve rather than paternal authority (see endnote for deeper analysis).⁷

However, the remnuoth and spiritual betrothals were eventually replaced by the sprawling system of formal monasteries in the 5th century and beyond that come to mind when we popularly think of monks. Around that same time, the Church also moved to forbid spiritual betrothals as the record of failed celibacy grew and wiser alternatives became available. Councils at Antioch, Elvira, Ancyra, and Nicaea all addressed concerns about clergy or celibate men living with unrelated women.^8,9 Later voices such as John Chrysostom,¹⁰ Jerome,¹¹ Athanasius,¹² and Tertullian¹³ reinforced the warning. Max Thurian summarized the logic well: “[w]ith the appearance of ascetic groups which gave birth to regular communities, the dangerous and temporary practice in certain churches of spiritual betrothal had no longer any reason for survival.”

The nuance of that history is instructive. The Church did not discourage spiritual betrothals because celibates stopped needing companionship. It discouraged them because more stable forms of companionship became available, and because paired arrangements concentrated too much emotional, practical, and possibly romantic dependence in one fragile relationship.

That logic shaped my earlier argument. If gay celibate Christians today can reasonably find committed, lived-in, intentional Christian community, then celibate partnerships may be unnecessarily risky. We would not need to revisit something like spiritual betrothal if churches continued to provide stable family for vocational singles.

But are they? Is the relational climate in the Church in the United States today more similar to the 1st century Church that Paul spoke into or the formal monasteries that dominated the 5th century and beyond?

Church Failure to Provide Intentional Christian Community

Back in 2023, I wrote an article for Equip Insights where I strongly cautioned against celibate partnerships. I argued that celibate Christians today could easily join or start intentional Christian communities (so the prohibition against spiritual betrothals / celibate partnerships applies today), and my biggest piece of evidence was the success of the Nashville Family of Brothers at the time. We’d been steadily growing both in numbers and depth of relationship for five years. Seven of us were living in a home together, a majority of us under 3+ year commitments, and I was mere months away from making lifetime commitments to the Nashville Family of Brothers. I pointed to the Nashville Family of Brothers as proof that “anyone can build it.”

I still believe we were reaching for something beautiful. I still believe churches should help celibate Christians build that kind of family. And I still love the brothers who shared that life with me.

I won’t narrate the whole story here, but the depth and permanence we were trying to build proved harder to sustain than I had publicly imagined. As our community discerned a pivot in 2025 toward a more dispersed community in Nashville, open to more kinds of single Christians and involving shorter-term commitments, we were excited about what that new form might make possible. But we were privately carrying the reality that a prolonged period of community challenges had fatally wounded our brotherhood. Moreover, as we reached out to peer communities that had attempted similar depth and length of commitment, we discovered that many of them had already collapsed or significantly changed form.

Part of the difficulty was not mysterious.

Most churches are not raising up straight Christians to discern between marriage and celibacy. As a result, the people most urgently seeking celibate community are often gay Christians already wounded by the closet, shame, secrecy, and years of relational deprivation. Then, when they try to build community, churches often offer more suspicion than support. They worry about celibacy commitments. They worry about gay people living together. They worry about anything that looks too intense, too permanent, or too unusual. So the very Christians most in need of stable family are asked to build it with the least institutional support.

We asked wounded people to build family while giving them suspicion instead of scaffolding.

I am not claiming intentional Christian community is impossible. I still believe churches should build it. But I no longer believe it is accessible enough to serve as the default answer for most gay celibate Christians right now. Our current relational climate is closer to the earlier period when paired companionship emerged because better structures were not yet available, rather than the age when the Church could rightly discourage spiritual betrothals because better structures were available. So how does that apply to gay celibate Christians and the prospect of celibate partnerships?

Reasonable Objections to Celibate Partnerships and Dating/Romance

Some will say the analogy to spiritual betrothal fails because those pairings were opposite-sex, while a meaningful number of contemporary celibate partnerships are same-sex, romantic, and exclusive. Skeptics are right to point that out. Christian marriage requires sexual difference. If celibate partnerships are functionally a form of marriage or dating/romance is a direct theological on-ramp to marriage, then the sexual difference required for Christian marriage would seem to apply.

But that conclusion depends on another claim: that romance or dating is necessarily a theological on-ramp to Christian marriage.

I’m convinced that the Scriptures provide a clear theology of Christian marriage. Genesis 2, Matthew 19, and Ephesians 5 all point to Christian marriage as a lifelong union between one Christian woman and one Christian man, ordered toward mutual love, faithfulness, and openness to raising children for the sake of the kingdom. The Scriptures also give us a clear theology of vocational singleness. Jesus and Paul both commend a life of abstinent singleness for undivided kingdom work.

But the Scriptures don’t offer us much, if anything, on modern dating and romance (see endnote for a definition of romance).¹⁴ They don’t talk about high school crushes or casual situationships. The Scriptures don’t speak to whether it was wise for 1st century Christian teens to go for a swim in the Jordan River together, kiss goodbye at the end of the hangout, and giggle to their respective families afterward. Dating as practiced today is a modern concept that the Bible couldn’t have commented on. And the Scriptures never speak directly about the morality of non-sexual but romantic connection outside of marriage. In many churches, dating functions as a socially accepted arena for romantic exploration, emotional intimacy, and some degree of physical affection outside of marriage.

That does not make it good. It just means we should be honest about what we are doing.

Most Christians over the past two thousand years would likely be startled by the level of emotional and physical intimacy that many contemporary Christians allow in dating relationships. Many would see modern dating less as a carefully Christian practice and more as a secular cultural form that the Church reluctantly baptized with a few added rules. We told young people they could explore romance, enjoy affection, and pair off emotionally, as long as they did not cross certain sexual lines. It’s closer to a permission slip to cuddle and passionately kiss outside of marriage that Christians were afraid to resist because they worried every adolescent would leave the Church.

Again, I am not saying this was the best approach. If I were designing Christian practice from scratch, I would probably discourage much of what currently passes for dating and invite Christians back toward something closer to courtship. But we are not starting from scratch. We are ministering in churches that have already made broad allowances for straight romance outside of marriage.

When offering pastoral care to gay celibate Christians, we can’t ignore the reality on the ground.

If dating is necessarily ordered toward marriage, then gay Christians should not date, but neither should straight Christians who are not actually discerning marriage. Most teenage dating would be out. Much college dating would be out. Opposite-sex dating that is mostly about emotional enjoyment, attraction, self-discovery, or romantic experience would also be out unless it is meaningfully ordered toward marriage.

Some Christians may want to make that argument. I respect that more than the alternative.

But most churches do not operate that way. They allow teenagers and college students to explore romance as part of social and emotional development. They permit hand-holding, emotional exclusivity, affection, and often even forms of physical intimacy that earlier Christians would have found alarming. They may hope these relationships eventually prepare people for marriage, but they do not usually require dating to be a clear act of marriage discernment from the start. And they should be honest about that.

However, churches cannot bless casual or exploratory romance for straight Christians while treating every gay celibate version as categorically corrupt. If the problem is romance itself, then say so to everyone. If the problem is exclusivity, say so to everyone. If the problem is affection or emotional dependence or intense pair-bonding outside marriage, then disciple straight Christians accordingly, too.

But if churches allow straight Christians to engage in non-sexual romantic attachment without clear intent or capacity to marry, they need a stronger argument before declaring that every gay celibate version of the same thing is automatically forbidden.

I am not pretending the two situations are identical. Same-sex celibate partnerships (particularly if they are romantic and exclusive) are not identical to opposite-sex dating. They may involve different temptations, different forms of confusion, different public meanings, and different pastoral concerns. But “different” does not automatically mean “settled.” Christians who had a gut-level resistance to celibate partnerships still need to do the careful work of explaining which feature makes the relationship unwise or impermissible: attraction, romance, exclusivity, cohabitation, legal entanglement, public commitment, physical affection, or something else.

Scripture gives us clear teaching about marriage, sex, and celibacy. It gives us nothing about modern romance or dating outside marriage. If modern romance/dating is not theologically tied to Christian marriage and the modern western Church trusts straight people to discern the wisdom of romance/dating outside of marriage, then we should also trust gay Christians with the same discernment. That does not make every form of romantic attachment wise. It simply means we need more than a gut reaction. We need discernment, community, and the patience to ask what a particular relationship is actually forming in the people who enter it.

Most Viable Solutions and Related Risks

Romance, exclusivity, shared life, and attraction are all powerful. Powerful forces do not make celibate partnerships automatically unwise, but it does mean they require honesty, maturity, and outside support. Without those, affection can outrun wisdom, the relationship can become sexually charged, or the pair can become too isolated from broader Christian community.

I have seen some gay Christians begin with a desire for celibate companionship and later move away from historic Christian sexual ethics. That does not mean celibate partnerships always lead there. In fact, preliminary qualitative research of celibate partnerships out of Fairfield University has found that such partnerships can be a meaningful source of spiritual growth, reliable support, practical stability, and virtue formation.¹⁵ Several research participants described their partnership as positive ways of pursuing holiness and shared service, not as workarounds for celibacy. Still, the accounts of some celibate partnerships eventually moving away from historic Christian sexual ethics mean the risks should be named honestly.

For that reason, I would not recommend celibate partnerships as the simple or universal solution for gay celibate Christians. They may be especially difficult for those who are spiritually fragile, emotionally isolated, newly committed to celibacy, or still carrying deep wounds from shame and secrecy. Romantic and exclusive partnerships call for careful discernment.

But intimacy and community are always risky.

Marriage is risky. Ministry is risky. Friendship is risky. Intentional community is risky. Raising children is risky. Living alone is risky. The question is not whether a form of life can fail. The question is whether, given the actual alternatives available, it may sometimes sustain faithfulness better than loneliness does.

Risk requires wisdom. If the Bible does not directly address romance/dating outside marriage, and if dating is not a theological on-ramp to Christian marriage, then we are not left with only two options: forbid romance for everyone or turn it into a free-for-all. The modern Church has already declined to forbid non-marital romance among straight Christians. But gay celibate Christians would be mistaken to indulge in romance/dating as a free-for-all. There’s a third option: wise discernment. Not everything permissible is prudent. Celibate partnerships are not a permission slip to engage unthinkingly in dating/romance. Instead, we can reject the false dichotomy and discern fearfully, humbly, and cautiously. Some will discern that celibate partnerships are unwise for them. Others may discern, with community and accountability, that a celibate partnership is a possibility they can consider while recognizing the risks. Either way, wise discernment must replace reflexive dismissal or casual experimentation.

For some gay celibate Christians, a celibate partnership may be the most viable form of companionship available.

I don’t say that lightly. Celibate partnerships should not become a substitute for the Church building better forms of family. But we still need to be honest about what some gay celibate Christians are discerning with the options actually available to them.

Part of that honesty includes helping celibate Christians discern the possibility of celibate partnership with the help of their siblings in Christ (and giving them better tools to do so), instead of summarily dismissing the possibility and driving their discernment into secrecy. Eve Tushnet has made a similar point, arguing that the more unusual a vocation is, the more actively it needs wise spiritual guidance from someone embedded in the Church’s tradition. She also warns that celibate partnership should not collapse into “marriage minus sex,” and that other models such as monasticism, siblinghood, and spiritual friendship may help partners resist the cultural default of private couplehood.

Churches need to offer celibate Christians better distinctions between sexual activity, erotic behavior, romance, affection, attachment, householding, public commitment, legal partnership, and spiritual kinship.¹⁶ We need pastors, theologians, historians, counselors, and celibate Christians at the same table. We need more research into the actual fruit of these partnerships, including whether they sometimes fail, but also whether they deepen faith, sustain chastity, reduce loneliness, and keep people connected to the Church. The aforementioned preliminary research out of Fairfield University is a helpful beginning. Participants reported meaningful fruit, including spiritual growth, reliable support, shared Christian practice, financial stability, and virtue formation. They also reported real challenges, including sexual-boundary questions, disclosure strain, family responses, church suspicion, progressive rejection, and ongoing minority stress. Many also described the strain of having a relationship that is easily misread as too gay for some conservatives, too celibate for some progressives, too intimate to be “just friendship,” and too nonsexual to fit ordinary assumptions about partnership. That mix is exactly why we need more careful discernment, not less.

We also need accountability structures that can be honest without being dismissive.

Many celibate partnerships struggle to find Christians who can provide real support. On one side, some affirming friends may view their celibacy as self-hatred and pressure them toward sex. On the other side, some conservative Christians may dismiss the partnership as playing with fire before they understand what the pair is actually seeking. Both reactions can drive these relationships underground. That’s dangerous.

If gay celibate Christians learn that no one can be trusted with the complexity of their discernment, they may re-enter a closet of another kind. They may hide their longing for companionship, their friendship, their affection, their confusion, their fears, and their questions. Hidden things rarely become healthier in the dark.

Conservative Christians are right to have questions about celibate partnerships.¹⁷ I still have questions too. But those questions should not stop at the partnership. They should move upstream to the conditions that make such partnerships feel necessary.

Gay celibate Christians are not asking whether they need sex. Many are asking whether they will have anyone to come home to, anyone to build a life with, anyone who will stay. If the Church has no answer except “run the other direction,” we should not be surprised when some begin searching for forms of committed companionship the Church has not yet learned how to name.

Continued Hope for Retrieving Early Church Solutions

The broader hope is still for churches to cultivate the forms of Christian community of the 3rd century and beyond where vocational singles found durable, lived-in family with reasonable effort. That requires churches to teach children and teenagers about both Christian marriage and vocational singleness. It requires straight Christians to discern celibacy alongside gay Christians, so celibate community is not built only by those already wounded by the closet. It requires pastors to celebrate vocational singleness, help celibates build family, and support intentional Christian communities with the same seriousness they bring to premarital counseling and young family ministry.

I want that future.

I want churches where celibate Christians can come home to brothers or sisters who pray, eat, confess, serve, vacation, grieve, and grow old together. I want churches where spiritual family is a durable way of life, not just a metaphor printed in the bulletin. I want churches where gay celibate Christians have more forms of faithful companionship available to them, particularly if they find the possibility of celibate partnerships to be too risky for them personally.¹⁸

Until that future is more widely available, we should speak about celibate partnerships with more humility than I once did.

Celibate partnerships carry real risks. But loneliness carries risks too. So does relational starvation or asking wounded people to carry a costly vocation without the family Jesus promised.

The Church should keep building sturdier forms of family. And as we do, we should be careful not to dismiss every imperfect attempt at companionship made by Christians trying to remain faithful with the options actually available to them.

This article reflects my own developing judgment as Equip’s Executive Director. Others on our team may phrase or weigh some of these prudential questions differently, and I’m grateful for the conversations that continue to sharpen our shared work.

1.  Gregory Coles’s pastoral paper for the Center for Faith, Sexuality & Gender is one of the more careful recent attempts to map this terrain. Coles notes that “celibate partnership” does not have one universal definition and that relationships differ across language, purpose, number of participants, permanence, proximity, financial integration, civil marriage, romance, physical affection, attraction, temptation, and accountability. (Gregory Coles, Understanding Celibate Partnerships and Committed Friendships) ↩︎
2.  Celibate partnerships are sometimes instead referred to as queer platonic partnerships when they involve a non-straight, non-cisgendered person. ↩︎
3.  Some Christians appeal to biblical examples of spiritual friendship, such as Ruth and Naomi, David and Jonathan, Jesus and John, or Paul and Timothy, as support for celibate partnerships. I share the desire to recover those thick forms of friendship. They expose how thin many modern Christian friendships have become. But I do not think they are the closest analogy for the partnerships considered here. Those biblical friendships were not romantic, were not exclusive in a marriage-like sense, did not prevent other deep friendships or marriage, and do not appear to have functioned as paired celibate households ordered toward mutual economic and practical support. Spiritual betrothal is the closer comparison. Eve Tushnet similarly distinguishes vowed friendship, spiritual friendship, and celibacy in partnership as overlapping but distinct lineages of nonmarital love, each with its own history and integrity. (Eve Tushnet, Celibate Partnership and/vs Devoted Friendship) ↩︎
4.  Ville Vuolanto, “Single Life in Late Antiquity? Virgins between the Earthly and the Heavenly Family,” in Sabine R. Huebner and Christian Laes, eds., The Single Life in the Roman and Later Roman World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 276–291. ↩︎
5.  Elizabeth A. Clark, “Antifamilial Tendencies in Ancient Christianity,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 5, no. 3 (1995): 356–380. ↩︎
6.  This interpretation has been associated with both ancient and modern commentators who understand 1 Corinthians 7:36–38 to describe a celibate man and woman in some form of pledged companionship rather than a father deciding whether to give his daughter in marriage. The interpretation became especially associated with discussions of syneisaktism or subintroductae (“spiritual marriages”) in later patristic Christianity. While evidence for fully developed forms of syneisaktism becomes much clearer in the 3rd and 4th centuries, some scholars argue that Paul’s discussion may reflect an earlier and less formal version of the same phenomenon. Max Thurian notably defended this reading, arguing that the passage reflects a spiritually betrothed couple discerning whether they can continue faithfully in celibacy together. See Max Thurian, Marriage and Celibacy (London: SCM Press, 1959), 30–39. Jean Hering likewise treats the passage as referring to a spiritually betrothed couple rather than a father-daughter arrangement. See J. Hering, La première Épitre de saint Paul aux Corinthiens (Neuchâtel: Delachaux et Niestlé, 1949), ad loc. For discussions of syneisaktism and spiritual marriage in early Christianity, see Elizabeth A. Clark, “John Chrysostom and the Subintroductae,” Church History 46, no. 2 (1977): 171–185; David G. Hunter, Marriage, Celibacy, and Heresy in Ancient Christianity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Greg Peters, The Story of Monasticism: Retrieving an Ancient Tradition for Contemporary Spirituality (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2015), 25–29; and John Martens, “Children and Marriage in 1 Corinthians 7,” in T&T Clark Handbook of Children in the Bible and the Biblical World (London: T&T Clark, 2019), 463–466. The historical evidence does not establish with certainty that Paul is directly describing later institutionalized syneisaktism, but many scholars acknowledge that the spiritual-betrothal reading is an ancient and serious interpretation of the passage. ↩︎
7.  Several features of the Greek text are often cited in support of this interpretation. First, Paul refers to “his virgin” (tēn heautou parthenon) rather than explicitly saying “his daughter,” even though Greek possessed ordinary words for daughter (thygatēr). Second, Paul’s statement “let them marry” (gameitōsan) appears to refer naturally to a man and woman within the relationship itself rather than to a father arranging a daughter’s marriage. Third, the passage repeatedly emphasizes the man’s internal resolve and personal vocational discernment: “firmly established in his heart,” “under no necessity,” “having authority over his own will,” and “has determined this in his heart” (1 Cor. 7:37). Many scholars argue this language fits more naturally with a man discerning celibacy or marriage for himself than with paternal authority over a daughter. Advocates of the father-daughter interpretation argue that guardianship language and ancient household structures sufficiently explain the passage, and this interpretation became historically dominant in much of the medieval and Reformation traditions. Nevertheless, many modern scholars believe the betrothed-couple or spiritual-betrothal interpretation better accounts for the internal logic and grammar of the text. See especially Max Thurian, Marriage and Celibacy, 30–39; J. Hering, La première Épitre de saint Paul aux Corinthiens; Gordon D. Fee, The First Epistle to the Corinthians (NICNT; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1987), 355–363; Anthony C. Thiselton, The First Epistle to the Corinthians (NIGTC; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000), 585–595; and David E. Garland, 1 Corinthians (BECNT; Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2003), 338–345. ↩︎
8.  Hefele, Karl Joseph von, Joseph Hergenröther, Alois Knöpfler, and Henri Leclercq. 1907. Histoire des conciles d’après les documents originaux. 236. Paris: Letouzey et Ané. http://www.llmcdigital.org/default.aspx?redir=87181. ↩︎
9.  Jurgens, W.A. “First Council of Nicaea.” In The Faith of the Early Fathers: Pre-Nicene and Nicene Eras, 283. Liturgical Press, 1970. ↩︎
10.  “John Chrysostom: Instruction and Refutation Against Those Men Living With Virgins.” Translated by Patricia Cox Miller. Women in Early Christianity: Translations from Greek Texts, 124-125. Washington, DC.: Catholic University of America Press, 2012. ↩︎
11.  St. Jerome: Letters and Select Works, tr. W. H. Fremantle. Select Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Ser. 2, Vol. VI (Edinburgh, 1892). ↩︎
12.  Miller, Patricia Cox. “Athanasius of Alexandria: Second Letter to Virgins (selections).” Women in Early Christianity: Translations from Greek Texts, 118-123. Washington, DC.: Catholic University of America Press, 2012. ↩︎
13.  W. P. LE SAINT, Tertullian, Treatises on Marriage and Remarriage (ACW 13). Westminster, Md., 1951,42-64. ↩︎
14.  By romance, I mean something distinct from both sexual activity and ordinary friendship, though the boundaries are not always perfectly clean. Some acts are unavoidably sexual, like intercourse. Some acts are ordinarily romantic, like making out. Other forms of affection, like holding hands, may be romantic or platonic depending on the relationship, context, and desire behind them. This is admittedly inexact, but these guideposts generally correspond to gut-level Western sensibilities about romance. ↩︎
15.  Forthcoming qualitative research from Fairfield University, based on interviews with adult LGBTQ+ Christians currently in celibate partnerships. The study examines how participants define, form, disclose, and maintain these relationships, including reported benefits, challenges, and sources of support. Manuscript on file with the author; summarized here with permission in broad terms pending publication. ↩︎
16.  Gregory Coles’s work is a helpful start here. He maps celibate partnerships across a series of practical registers: language, purpose, permanence, proximity, financial integration, civil marriage, romance, physical and emotional intimacy, attraction, sexual temptation, and connection to Christian community. Churches need more of that kind of careful mapping, not less. (Gregory Coles, Understanding Celibate Partnerships and Committed Friendships) ↩︎
17.  Aaron Taylor has made a similar distinction, arguing that chaste gay couplehood can be “a valid vocation, a holy thing, a place where virtue and love might flourish,” while also warning against treating it as a “magic bullet” for gay loneliness or a substitute for more radically inclusive Christian community. (Aaron Taylor, Chaste, Gay Couples and the Church) ↩︎
18.  Eve Tushnet has described this broader shift as moving Christian approaches to gay people “from chastity to vocation.” That is the right frame. The question is not only what gay Christians must refuse, but what forms of love, kinship, service, and shared life the Church can help them receive and offer. (Eve Tushnet on Catholic Discipleship and Vows of Partnership, New Kinship Podcast) ↩︎