How Far Is Too Far?

This is the most-searched question in Christian dating, and it has been answered badly in two directions for fifty years. The youth-group answer draws a diagram of the body with lines on it, like a butcher's chart, and dares you to memorize the map. The shrug answer says "you're adults, just be prayerful," which everyone correctly hears as permission.

We are going to do neither. We are going to tell you the actual ruling, which is stricter than the shrug and simpler than the chart, and then show you why the reasons are better than the rules. Fair warning: the ruling is a VERDICT. This is one of the places where the canon is clear, and we do not blur registers on this site.

The question is asking for the wrong kind of answer

"How far is too far" pictures sex as territory: a field with a fence somewhere in it, and the game is to walk as close to the fence as possible without touching it. Notice what that picture assumes. It assumes the thing you are managing is legality. It assumes the other person is terrain.

Now listen to how the Church talks about the same subject. Sexuality, says the Catechism, "is not something simply biological, but concerns the innermost being of the human person as such." ¹ It is a language: the body saying, with total physical candor, I give you all of myself and I hold nothing back. That sentence is either true or it is a lie, and there is exactly one arrangement in which it is true: the public, permanent, exclusive promise we call marriage. Sex outside that promise is not "going too far." It is saying the most serious sentence a body can say to someone you have, as a matter of verifiable fact, not yet said it to.

Once you see that, "how far is too far" translates into a question you would never ask out loud: how much of the total-gift language can I speak before it counts as speaking it?

The verdict

Here is what the canon actually holds, quoted, because receipts are the house style.

On sex outside marriage, the Catechism does not hedge: "Fornication is carnal union between an unmarried man and an unmarried woman. It is gravely contrary to the dignity of persons and of human sexuality which is naturally ordered to the good of spouses and the generation and education of children." ² St. Paul is two words shorter: "Fly fornication." Not negotiate with, not see how close you can stand to. Fly. And his reason is the anti-Gnostic bombshell people never expect from the Bible: ³

Or know you not that your members are the temple of the Holy Ghost, who is in you, whom you have from God: and you are not your own? For you are bought with a great price. Glorify and bear God in your body.

1 Corinthians 6:19–20

The Christian argument for chastity is not that the body is dirty. It is that the body is expensive.

On the couple who are serious, headed toward marriage, maybe engaged: "Those who are engaged to marry are called to live chastity in continence. They should see in this time of testing a discovery of mutual respect, an apprenticeship in fidelity, and the hope of receiving one another from God. They should reserve for marriage the expressions of affection that belong to married love." ⁴ Note that the Church says this precisely about the couple most in love, most committed, most "basically married anyway." Called to continence. That settles the "but we're engaged" clause, and it settles it in writing.

And on everything short of intercourse, the operative word is not a body part. It is lust: "disordered desire for or inordinate enjoyment of sexual pleasure. Sexual pleasure is morally disordered when sought for itself, isolated from its procreative and unitive purposes." ⁵ Read that definition like a lawyer, because it is one. The line is not anatomical. The line is purpose. Acts chosen in order to arouse and enjoy what belongs to the marriage bed are chosen lust, whatever the diagram says, however dressed everyone stays. That is why the butcher's-chart approach fails: it maps the body when the Church is reading the intention. Two college students at a bus stop can cross the line without moving; a married couple can't reach it.

So the verdict, in one sentence: sexual arousal deliberately pursued belongs, all of it, to marriage; and a couple who cannot yet say the whole sentence should not be rehearsing its grammar.

That is stricter than the culture and stricter than the shrug. We are aware. It is also the plain content of the texts, and you deserved to be shown it rather than protected from it.

The reasons are better than the rules

Why would a good God rope off the most intense pleasure available to human beings? He didn't. That framing has the geometry backwards. The tradition's claim is that the fence is not around the pleasure; the fence is around you, because you are the expensive thing ("bought with a great price"), and because what you practice is what you become.

The Catechism's line about engagement repays a second look: "an apprenticeship in fidelity." Courtship is training camp for a marriage, and the skill under training is precisely the ability to hold desire inside a promise. A couple who spend their engagement practicing mutual restraint are practicing the exact muscle their marriage will one day hang from, in illness, in separation, in the ordinary long deserts of any real life together. A couple who spend it practicing escalation are practicing that too.

There is a strange old witness for this in the book of Tobias, the wedding-night prayer this site's whole tradition of seriousness about marriage descends from: "And now, Lord, thou knowest, that not for fleshly lust do I take my sister to wife, but only for the love of posterity, in which thy name may be blessed for ever and ever." ⁶ A bridegroom, on his wedding night, with full permission, stops to name the difference between using and receiving. If the distinction matters there, inside the promise, it is not a technicality outside it.

And St. Paul again, to the Thessalonians, with the sentence that reframes the entire topic: "For this is the will of God, your sanctification: That you should abstain from fornication." ⁷ People beg God for years to tell them His will for their life. On this one subject, it is in writing.

The counsel coda

The verdict draws one line. Below it live a hundred particular questions the Church deliberately does not legislate, because they are questions of prudence: kissing and its meanings, what affection fits a second date versus a courtship versus an engagement, how long an engagement should even be, what times and places and couches a particular couple can be trusted with. Here the register changes to COUNSEL, the reasoning is shown, and the judgment is yours.

Decide the standards outside the moment, together, out loud. The Catechism lists, among the means of chastity, "an ascesis adapted to the situations that confront him." ⁸ Translation: make the plan before the situation, because inside the situation nobody is planning.

Ask the direction question, not the distance question. The honest test of an act of affection is what it is for. Affection that expresses the actual current promise (we are dating; we are engaged) builds. Acts selected for arousal are answered above, by the verdict.

Guard the conditions, not just the line. Modesty, says the Catechism, "requires that the conditions for the definitive giving and commitment of man and woman to one another be fulfilled." ⁹ Late, alone, horizontal, and secret is a set of conditions with one historical outcome. Changing the conditions is not prudishness; it is the same seamanship we counseled about drink.

Mismatched standards are data. If one of you is holding the line and the other is negotiating against it, that is not a chemistry problem. You have learned something important about how this person treats a boundary they promised to respect, and you learned it cheap.