What About Cohabitation? | Fr. Gregory Pine & Fr. Joseph-Anthony Kress
February 20, 2025
Fr. Gregory: This is Father Gregory Pine.
Fr. Joseph-Anthony: This is Father Joseph-Anthony Kress.
Fr. Gregory: Welcome to Godsplaining. Sorry, I’m like, channeling Fr. Bonaventure here. Thanks to all those who support us. If you enjoyed this show, please consider making a monthly donation on Patreon. Be sure to like and subscribe to Godsplaining wherever you listen to podcasts. My favorite part about doing episodes with Fr. Bonaventure, I mean, I like a lot of parts of doing episodes with Fr. Bonaventure…
Fr. Joseph-Anthony: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.
Fr. Gregory: One of my favorite parts is the fact that, like, he can’t figure out what tone of voice, to use so he uses all of them. Yeah. Yeah. It’s nice.
Fr. Joseph-Anthony: You ever see that Will Ferrell sketch where he’s like, “I don’t know how to modulate my voice!”
Fr. Gregory: I don’t know that sketch, but I can guess.
Fr. Joseph-Anthony: Oh my gosh.
Fr. Gregory: Yeah. Back in the day, man that was like, our main comedic entertainment/formation was Will Ferrell. Which is wild to think. He’s still funny. Okay. So speaking of funny things. I don’t know if people realize this but we went to the novitiate together.
Fr. Joseph-Anthony: We did.
Fr. Gregory: We were in the novitiate together. We didn’t just go there. Show up and then…
Fr. Joseph-Anthony: We were hand in hand when we showed up. Yeah, yeah.
Fr. Gregory: Arm and arm as it were. We skipped there together. But, we had some number of rooms in the priory there at St. Gertrude and that number of rooms was not actually equal to the number of human beings there.
Fr. Joseph-Anthony: It was less than, actually.
Fr. Gregory: Yeah. It was less than. It was fewer than the number did not amount to the total of beds required. So we, [in British accent] we had flatmates there, as they say in the British world, and we roomed together.
Fr. Joseph-Anthony: We did.
Fr. Gregory: For a period of six months.
Fr. Joseph-Anthony: Roomie!
Fr. Gregory: So this is a roomie episode.
Fr. Joseph-Anthony: Yeah. Oh, taking it back.
Fr. Gregory: Exactly. And we don’t just have to be roomies. We have to also be homies. So that made us like, ‘romies’.
Fr. Joseph-Anthony: Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, totally.
Fr. Gregory: ‘Hoomies.’
Fr. Joseph-Anthony: Hoomies?
Fr. Gregory: Hoomies, never mind. Any favorite, like shareable thoughts from the time of our, I mean we like, cleaned the bathroom together every morning, not just, like, at the advice or counsel or suggestion of our novice master.
Fr. Joseph-Anthony: It was the fear. Under the fear. Direct precept. I didn’t fit in on, like, the bunk bed…
Fr. Gregory: I didn’t fit in on, like, the bunk bed…you know, I made like this ‘bijacked’ plywood contraption such that I was flush with the headboard and full board so I could spill over both.
Fr. Joseph-Anthony: Right. Because you need an extra long mattress. But the bed, the bunk beds we had couldn’t accommodate. So you had to sleep on the top bunk, which meant you had, like what, a seven inch gap between the mattress and the ceiling.
Fr. Gregory: Yes and I hit the ceiling fan with frequency
Fr. Joseph-Anthony: Way too often.
Fr. Gregory: It was great.
Fr. Joseph-Anthony: But my favorite moment of our time as roommates was when there was a turtle in our bathtub. Do you remember that?
Fr. Gregory: I do remember that.
Fr. Joseph-Anthony: Yeah. There is. Because. Because we were roommates, they tried to split us up on different things so that there would be a period throughout the week where we could kind of not have always somebody, like, attached to our hip. And so we would schedule our, like, apostolic ministry placements, which was a once a week thing. And when they would be on an opposite basis. So like you would go on Tuesdays and I went on Thursdays or something like that.
Fr. Gregory: Did you go to Saint Boniface or did you go to St. Francis Seraph?
Fr. Joseph-Anthony: No, I did the Home Ministry.
Fr. Gregory: Ah, right I forgot about that.
Fr. Joseph-Anthony: Yeah. Yeah. We would just travel around the city and visit people in their homes, which was a very, very good, met a lot of really good people there. [I] pray for them. But I remember I got back. And I walked in my room and you were at your desk asleep because you were, you were studying but.
Fr. Gregory: My typical posture.
Fr. Joseph-Anthony: And I walk in and I started making noise or whatever. And then you just spun around in your chair, and you’re like [whispers] “hey” because we couldn’t talk. We had silence on the dormitory floor. You’re like, “hey, I gotta show you something.” I was like, what? You took me in the bathroom and pulled the shower curtain across, and there was a turtle.
Fr. Gregory: Yeah. That turtle presented itself to us…
Fr. Joseph-Anthony: It did. So tell the back end of it…
Fr. Gregory: It wandered up to our back door. And, who were we but to accommodate it?
Fr. Joseph-Anthony: Yeah. Give it a home.
Fr. Gregory: As there was not room at the inn for our Lord. There was room at the inn, or the Priory, I suppose for this little turtle whose name is still unknown to us. I think we dubbed it something, but I forgotten.
Fr. Joseph-Anthony: Oh! [thinking] There was a name given. That’s, that’s okay. We’ll try to jog our memory to every enjoyable turtle thing that we’ve ever seen on the internet. Drop a comment in, drop a comment on this video what name we should have given that turtle.
Fr. Gregory: And if we can invite that kid from that state fair with the skeleton facepaint.
[Both, in unison] I love turtles.
Fr. Gregory: Yeah. That’d be delicious. My brother exclusively pronounces turtles as ‘trutlers’ also, which is, I think, is a bold strategy and a move that I’d encourage among the listening public. So if you’d like further thoughts on trutlers, you can email my brother Matt Pine. Okay. So yeah, and I remember when Father Bonaventure told Father Basil the prior at the time that a turtle had shut up at our back door. He’s like, I bet you a young child in the neighborhood did that and Father Bonaventure was like, I bet not. He just, he just, he did not do his own power.
Fr. Joseph-Anthony: How long did we keep him?
Fr. Gregory: Some number of days.
Fr. Joseph-Anthony: It was a few days. It wasn’t just like a one over night thing. Like it was a few days and we were, I felt probably the most childish I’ve ever felt my life where you’re having an animal and you’re trying to hide it from your parents and feed it and let nobody find out about it, but everybody starts finding out about it.
Fr. Gregory: I don’t even know if we tried it, how long we tried to hide that from the novice master or if we did because we had also hosted toads in the house for a while.
Fr. Joseph-Anthony: We did do that for a while.
Fr. Gregory: We did a big, earthen box because we were going to put them in our toad garden which took us a while to construct. We were given permission to like build, never mind, the – It was wild. Okay, so speaking of roommating, this episode is about cohabiting. So we thought that we would transition there seamlessly. But I think like folks were talking about this more, maybe 20 years ago. And they’re talking about it less now, and it’s in part because the culture has just drifted into oblivion. I think a lot of people have given up on whatever, that was a problem 20 years ago. So as to focus on, let’s just not kill innocent children, and let’s not kill old people, and let’s not kill ourselves and let’s not like change, you get it. All right, so like, you know, we talked about like the transgender issue on the podcast a couple of times in the past several months. So it seems like like as more contemporary issues have become more urgent, we’ve like not like stopped caring about certain things, but we just kind of throw in our hands up and said, like we can’t be angry about everything.
Fr. Joseph-Anthony: Right. Right.
Fr. Gregory: Nevertheless, it’s helpful to return to perennial issues with some frequency. Lest we forget the principles that stake the arguments that need to be deployed in the way in which we can actually help those concerned by it. So, okay, let’s say theoretical situation, theoretical situation. Let’s say that you’re preparing a couple for marriage theoretically. Let’s say that that couple comes in, they fill out their prenuptial investigation. And let’s say that they list the same address. That’s right. Theoretically. What’s going through your mind? What’s going on in your heart? And then how are you going to begin like broaching this issue with a couple?
Fr. Joseph-Anthony: I do it right out of the gate.
Fr. Gregory: Nice! Like my name Father Joseph-Anthony. You should live in separate houses.
Fr. Joseph-Anthony: Yes. Exactly. No and the way I approach it is that like, when they fill out the P&I we do that individually and then we come back and I walk through the rest of marriage prep and what to expect over the next few months before their wedding and all that kind of fun stuff and I say, okay, one of the things that I noticed is that you have the same address. And I was like, so you guys are living together. Yes, and I say, okay, that’s fine. When I see that, I make some assumptions. Okay, and I’m happy to be wrong. You can tell me whether I’m correct or incorrect. But these are the operating principles that I’m operating off of. Okay, so I’m gonna lay that in front of you just so we’re all transparent that we’re on the same page. So when I see that you’re in the same address to your cohabiting, I assume then that you’re sleeping in the same bed and having intercourse before you’re married. So I’m happy to be wrong on that. And if I am, please tell me now so I then can change how I interact in how we do this marriage prep. But just so that’s my assumptions that I’m making because you’ve given me this address and if I’m wrong let me know, if not I want to continue on this path and that’s how we’re gonna move forward Nice and I’ve yet to add a couple tell me I’m wrong.
Fr. Gregory: Tremendous!
Fr. Joseph-Anthony: And I just I find that When it’s this elephant in the room that we’re gonna dance around until meeting three four five It’s problematic.
Fr. Gregory: When was the last time you danced around anything?
Fr. Joseph-Anthony: I dance a lot, man.
Fr. Gregory: No! Okay. I mean, like you physically danced a lot, but like spiritually, I don’t know. I don’t see you as much of a dancer around.
Fr. Joseph-Anthony: Yeah. So it’s like, I’m much more comfortable calling it out from the very beginning. And once we’re all on the same page, and then I say, okay, so from this point on, that’s not gonna happen.
Fr. Gregory: Nice!
Fr. Joseph-Anthony: And that’s gonna be how we approach this.
Fr. Gregory: Dude, coach Kress.
Fr. Joseph-Anthony: Yeah. That’s what you get! (laughs) But I just find that you have to be able to call it out for what it is, and then we can have an honest conversation about that. And I feel so much better about that, and the couple tends to be hell of a lot more at ease because they tend to, it’s in the culture that is like, oh, we shouldn’t be cohabiting and if the priest knows we are, is he going to be angry at us or is he going to like kick us out of the church or things? But if we just deal with it right out of the gate and know where, where we all stand and what the expectations are from there, then we can actually have freedom to move forward with this. And then we have some conversations and dealing to the kind of nuances of it and the kind of getting in the weeds of the reality. But yes, cohabiting still a sin, not a prerequisite for marriage is not part of the kind of preparations is to move in beforehand. No, we can deal with it that way. But when it shows up in a marriage prep situation, I just go straight at it.
Fr. Gregory: Okay. Next thing in marriage prep, I want to communicate to the couple why sex is reserved for marriage. So like why is the church somewhat jealous about sexual intercourse within the setting of the Sacrament of Matrimony? Because I think a lot of people don’t understand and don’t sympathize. They assume that it’s an arbitrary rule so that the Church can rule more of your life and like extract from you more in the way of tithe. But actually it’s super sensible because when the church describes the Sacrament of Marriage she says that it has two ends. I like the shape and the goal. All right, so like the shape of marriage, the mutual support of the spouses. So it’s a comprehension sharing of life, physical, emotional, psychological, spiritual, which entails, you know, like physical sharing of a comprehensive sort, entails sexual intimacy. So it’s like, it’s something after the manner of a friendship, but it’s unlike any other friendship. And yet it’s a friendship, the shape of which produces to its goal, which is the procreation and education of children. So like, that is the logic of marriage as a natural institution and as dignified and raised to the sacramental kind of dispensation. It’s for, you know, like, begetting life. And now there might be persons who are beyond childbearing years who get married and we can talk about how nature obtains always or for the most part. And we can describe how exceptions of one sort are different than exceptions of a none sort like because they’re still playing the game and they’re playing a different game. Yeah, that and such. But like basically marriage, the mutual support of the spouse, the spouse is it’s kind of form or shape, but it’s ordered to the procreation and education of children. That’s it’s goal or end. And in effect, children are to be brought into a world where they know they’re certain they are confident that they have the love of those who begot them, that they have the love of those who brought them into it. So like we just know based on sociological data that children who grow up with their biological parents have a much, much, much, much, much, much greater chance of success or flourishing than do children who grow up without one or both of their biological parents. It doesn’t mean if you grow up without one of your biological parents or both of your biological parents in the home, does that mean that you are doomed or destined to failure? No. God’s gonna do what God’s gonna do and we all come before Him, we all come before the throne of grace as beggars. But like when it comes to our social and political life and what we do as kind of like legislators and policy makers, we’re trying to provide for the good of those concerned by the law. So we’re trying to defend this thing. And so the Church in her law is kind of just clarifying or promulgating, making known as it were, what obtains in the order of nature as it’s blessed by Grace, but I’m running on right now. So it’s like it’s good that marriage, like that men and women come together with the hope of conceiving and be getting children who will then have the certainty and confidence that they’re going to live with these people who will see them through infancy, adolescence, and young adulthood until such times they’re ready to be about their business on their own.
Fr. Joseph-Anthony: I think so many couples see the church as being the pleasure police and they’re like, “You just don’t want us to have pleasure.” And it’s like, “Well, sex is actually a hell of a lot more intricate than just the pleasurable side of things.” Now there’s a reason that the pleasure is as ecstatic and intense as it is, right? This one act, it’s a very physical act that the Lord invites us into in the spousal relationship, is that through which new life is generated in the creating of new life is actually an action only proper to God. This is only the Lord creates. And so in a real sense, the reason why the pleasure is so intense and truly estatic is ’cause the couples are almost lifted out of themselves in participating in a proper act of the deity. There’s a reference for that act, not just reducing it to a way to intense pleasure. In that demands a certain stability to that, that this is given to only one person and it’s not given to multiple and that it’s done in this kind of spousal relationship in that way. And I also love, I mean, there’s so much wisdom, so much wisdom in the Church and how she approaches the Sacrament of Marriage. Look at the ritual of marriage, right? Lex orandi, lex credendi you, know, as we pray, we so we believe. The actual ritual of marriage lays us out so perfectly, right? You have the questions before consent, right? There’s an investigation of your intellect. Do you know what you’re about to entail? You know, and this says, “Have you come here freely and wholeheartedly? Have you, do you intend to follow the path of marriage for as long as you live? Do you intend to beget children God willing and raise them up according to the laws of Christ in his Church? And there’s an investigation of do the couple understand in their intellect what’s about to happen. And immediately on the heels of that, there’s an exchange of consent from spouse to spouse, right? And if you look at the ritual, it’s that exchange of consent that is where the marriage takes place. It’s an act of will, right? And if you look at the ritual, everything’s that exchange of consent that is where the marriage takes place, an act of will. Right? And if you look at the ritual, everything up to that says bride, groom and bride say this, bride, groom and bride stand here. But after that exchange of consent, it says the husband and wife, the husband and wife places to the ring on each other’s finger. So it’s the exchange of consent. There’s no vows in the Catholic ritual actually. It’s an exchange of consent. There’s no vowels in the Catholic ritual, actually. It’s an exchange of consent, given from one to the other. And then what happens is in that place then, our passions become perfectly ordered towards each other in the mutual embrace of the Spousal Act. So having sex within the context of marriage and consummating the marriage is the perfect ordering of the passions towards their proper end of the generation of new life, both the shape and the goal, as you so beautifully said. So what do you see here in this spousal reality? Well you see, intellect informs the will and the will governs their passions for the perfect good. So now the human person has become perfectly ordered again in their created glory and redeemed because we just walked through all of that. Now if you separate those things out and put them in different orders, now that’s a disordered relationship and those are disordered actions. And so there’s a real wisdom and beauty to how that is approached. And that’s why we want to safeguard that reality. We don’t want to invert it, right? We don’t want to act and live as if we’re married before that has actually happened. And that’s where the inversion comes into play. And that’s why we are actually caution and hesitate and actually have strong prohibitions and say, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, a premarital sex, no bueno. Cohabiting, no bueno, nah, nah, like no. No. Cohabiting, no way I know. Like we want to do this in the right order because it’s actually the proper redemption of the individual in the grace of God to restore us back to the created glory of the Garden of Eden.
Fr. Gregory: Yeah. Okay. When folks, you know, when folks gain some purchase on that, it can have a profound effect on their lives. It can open their eyes as to like, what the Lord is proposing the goods that are on offer, which we can lay hold of, provided that He affords us what we need in order to do so. But I think a lot of us that we’re just contented to settle for something less. And then as a result, we’re trying to build out reasons for which rationalizations, justifications of our behavior, to try to kind of buffer ourselves from the recognition that the choices that we may not in fact, be the best. So we’re just kind of consequentialists or we’re just driven by expediency or lazy or sluggish or whatever it is. But when people cohabit, oftentimes it takes a little bit of whatever you would call that. This is like what the French do and they say that something [French] It’s gonna take a little get up and go to move them from the position of whether it’s just like lastitude or whether it’s obstinacy or yadda yadda. So you’ll hear any number of arguments as to why I should live with my significant other. So let’s just take them each in turn and afford them as much time and space as we think that they merit. So let’s say this, it’s more convenient.
Fr. Joseph-Anthony: Yeah! Absolutely.
Fr. Gregory: Like we can share stuff. And we don’t have to like travel as far to visit each other. We can just like go down the stairs or as we’re rollover. So convenience, tell me, is convenience a sufficient paradigm for, well, what? Engaging in this type of behavior.
Fr. Joseph-Anthony: No, absolutely not.
Fr. Gregory: Blammo. Talk to me.
Fr. Joseph-Anthony: Well, we’re not made for comfort. We’re not made for convenience. This life isn’t convenient. The goal of our life isn’t to be easy. The goal of our life isn’t to be, let’s do the effort that it takes to make this as easy as possible. We live in a fallen world, we live with a fallen humanity. This pilgrimage of our earthly existence is not going to be easy. So if the only goal is to work in such a way that we’re aimed at what is the easiest, the most comfortable, the path of least resistance, then we actually end up finding that we never became truly ourselves. And yes, it’s not gonna be convenient to live across town. And you’re gonna have to be intentional with the time that you spend with each other. And maybe you have to have boundaries that you don’t stay overnight. And then because of that now, the relationship has the opportunity to grow and mature because you have a certain kind of then intentional sacrifice to say, “Actually, I’m choosing you. I’m choosing to spend time with you. And I’m choosing to make the sacrifice of spending the gas money, driving and cross town and sacrificing a few hours of sleep because I’m in transit.” So there’s this kind of implicit way of saying, you’re not worth my convenience. You’re worth my sacrifice. And my love pushes me, motivates me, and your love for me demands that I respond with sacrifice and not comfort or convenience.
Fr. Gregory: Yeah, I think that there’s a big way in which modern and contemporary life is very comfortable and very convenient. You can see the devastating effects of that, as people just kind of shrivel up and die. And it’s not insignificant that folks are like laying claim to ancient medieval philosophies and theologies, especially as they entail discipline and sacrifice, because they’re looking to be challenged. Even though they know that like they’ve been made weak, they have been wounded by whatever they’ve interacted with and of course the last five, 10, 15, 20 years with their technology or with their sensuality or whatever, whatever, what are they? It doesn’t matter. They know that about themselves, but they want to be challenged, they want to be held accountable. It’s for reasons like this that Exodus 90 has so much success. We were talking to Luke Kornet who plays basketball for the Boston Celtics and he was saying that like, yeah, he’s always been Catholic, he’s always practiced the faith. I think he said that. But like for him a big kind of turning point was Exodus 90 and so far as it encouraged him to live his faith with greater and bigger and bigger. And he’s just, he’s pumped, he’s on fire. Okay, so a variation on the, it’s a more convenient theme is it’s more economical. And I think we can take it with a similar disposition in the sense that like, okay, you might be saving money by living together, but you’re also entangling your lives in a way that begins to compromise your freedom, which compromises your consent. So whereas like you might see, all right, this person’s abusive or this person is problematic or this person is toxic and perhaps it’s time to end the relationship and to disentangle to distance myself from it. Now you’re paying out of the same account or you’re sharing expenses and you’re thinking about it not so much in terms of like your own integrity or your own like physical, emotional, psychological well-being as you think it’ve been in terms of like your pocketbook, nobody says pocketbook anymore, but wallet, your wallet, your well-being, as you think it’d been in terms of your pocketbook. Nobody says pocketbook anymore, but wallet, your wallet, your Venmo account, your whatever.
Fr. Joseph-Anthony: Your Apple wallet.
Fr. Gregory: Yeah, exactly. Blammo which is like, that’s a whole different thing. So talk to us about economy.
Fr. Joseph-Anthony: Yeah, it’s similar on the same lines of this is more convenient that way. Let’s save some money. And financial security is a real thing. And I encourage people like, yeah, don’t be afraid to actually move towards financial security, don’t be reckless with money or things like that. But also this is getting back to what we were talking about earlier, you know, we don’t want to, you know, act in a stage of life that we are not actually in. And so to sign a lease, cosign a lease together, that actually, in many respects, entangles the two individuals in such a way that they don’t have freedom. If something goes sour in the relationship, they don’t have the freedom to leave now, because their finances are wrapped up. They don’t have another place to go. Because the relationship isn’t, there hasn’t been that kind of level of commitment and that spousal union in such a way to say, “Okay, we’re on a persevere through this,” but now it’s still a transitory stage of the relationship. Dating is a transition. Engagement is a transition. The permanent one is marriage. And so if you’re in that way, then you’ve kind of entangled yourself in such a way that you have now a different pressure or a different voice that is making demands on you that you don’t have the freedom to actually invest in the relationship now, that there’s a different demand that is kind of then pulling the strings and maybe forcing you to stay in the relationship longer than what you would rightfully stay in or anything like that. So yeah, those types of environments actually do rob the person of the freedom to invest in the relationship and be free to invest in this person that you’re dating. Right? And so it’s a weird place to say that like, yeah, you’re actually not progressing the relationship. Oh, we are moving in together. We’re taking the next step in our relationship. You’re actually restricting the relationship because you’re acting in a way that is too far down the line than what you should be.
Fr. Gregory: Yeah. And I think too, like, I mean, if life is just about like sparing or saving expenses, right, it’s just going to end up lonely and like weird. And it’s what it, I mean, like we see the kind of general tendency of the culture is to have fewer and fewer children to have them later in later in life. So it’s like once I’ve established myself financially, once I have promoted myself kind of business wise, once I have attained myself kind of business-wise, once I have attained to whatever goals that I have said for myself, given my kind of workplace or otherwise trajectory, then it’s like children are introduced as the kind of crowning glory, as it were. And that’s somewhat fast and loose, and that probably doesn’t do just the motivations of the people themselves.
Fr. Joseph-Anthony: I want to push a little further on that, like what’s the motivation there? Like I have to establish the most comfortable convenient lifestyle through which I can introduce these kids into, you know? And that’s once again being motivated by kind of comfort and ease, instead of saying, well, life is a struggle. And there’s many things of life that we don’t get a chance to dictate, you know? And suffering is a real part of life. No matter how fabricated it may be, no matter how kind of manufactured the comfort is, suffering is still real. And so to kind of keep delaying this and saying like, well, I have to get myself, you know, to a certain level of comfort. That’s different to saying I need to actually be stable. Like, you know, stability is a real reason to say, okay, we’re not stable. We shouldn’t have kids right now. That’s a different thing. But if I’m saying I need to be at a certain level of comfort in my status or comfort in my job before I bring these kids into it, then we’re being motivated by the wrong things. And it’s not actually helpful to the rearing education in the maturation of those children.
Fr. Gregory: Yeah. Okay. Let’s take on a couple more before we round out the scoring here. So some people will say like they want to try it out first.
Fr. Joseph-Anthony: Try it before you buy it.
Fr. Gregory: They’re like made a little nervous at the prospect of marriage. Maybe they themselves come from divorce. You know, so like they’re married, they’re parents divorced. They realize that the chances that this succeed statistically is like around 50%, which is a little nerve wracking. And so you see people retreating more and more from terminal commitment. You know, so it’s like they’re having a harder and harder time actually choosing a thing which will remove from them the possibility of another thing. And so somewhat paralyzed at the prospect of decision, nevertheless, they want to advance in a certain manner. And so they tell themselves, cohabiting, that’s a way of progressing in this relationship. That’s a way of showing some modicum of commitment. What do we do with that?
Fr. Joseph-Anthony: Yeah. It’s weird. I’ve seen situations where I think once again 20 years ago, 25, 30 years ago, cohabiting was a situation that was kind of like people feel backed into it by the circumstances of their life. Like, oh, you know, I can’t pay for my own place, but if we go together, we might be able to get a place like the circumstances of my life are kind of pushing me to take this action. Well, now it’s like a weird celebrated thing. I’ve seen, you know, in social media where there’s a celebration, a party, and it’s like, well, what do we celebrate? Oh, he asked me to move in with him. It’s like, is that an engagement? You’re celebrating this as a stage of life, a stage of the relationship that has this big kind of ostentatious kind of celebration around it, because we’re taking the next step of it. We’ve been dating for a while. Now we’re going to celebrate the fact that we’re moving in together. And that’s kind of now where it is. And we’re not sure if we’ll get married or not, but this is worth celebrating, because we’ve made a level of commitment. We’ve progressed the relationship further. And thus, we can kind of figure this out in the context of living together, whether or not this relationship has a future. And that’s kind of terrifying. That is not the environment to figure it out. Being that proximate and that intimate with each other before there’s a, before you’re ready to commit, you’re withholding. St. John Paul II talks about in the spousal relationship in the spousal action, there’s a total gift itself. Well, to do these types of things with reserved gifts to not give the fullness of oneself is lying. And that’s your testing the relationship, establishing the relationship off of reservations and kind of withholdings. And then are you really testing it? Are you really actually doing the thing you said you were going to do is to see does this have a future? So one of the things that is actually the greatest predictor of the stability of a future relationship is the ability to make a sacrifice, the ability to endure suffering together, the ability to kind of prioritize the others good, you know, by sacrificial actions. Those things are better predictors and better testings of the relationship than just saying we’re on a tribe before a buy and let’s move in to the next phase of our relationship because there’s no, it’s open ended, right? We’re going to live together for one year and then at the end of the year, make the decisions like we’re just going to live together for one year and then at the end of the year make the decisions. We’re just going to move in together and see where this goes. That’s terrifying. That doesn’t end up well.
Fr. Gregory: Yeah. And I think it’s interesting when you think about marriage after the matter of shape and goal, right? So it’s a comprehensive sharing of life, physical, emotional, psychological and spiritual. But there are certain things which are appropriate to a time where you’re getting to know each other to a time where you’re dating to a time when you’re engaged and then to a time when you’re married. And when you short circuit the development or you skip ahead in the context for which it’s not intended, there’s a real way in which you can do damage by inflicting wounds or exposing weaknesses, which there hasn’t like, a grace hasn’t been given for that. And you think about this in the setting of like, Sacramental life. So, so marriage is a sacrament. And it confers a Sacramental grace, whereby that consent is ratified. And whereby that consent becomes a conduit through which, you know, like, you know, I think about husband and wife, like his consent to her, her consent to him actually begets grace in the life of the other and in the lives of their children. So in a certain sense, you like you can’t try it out until the grace has been given until you’ve been capacitated for the living of the thing itself. And in trying to do so, you actually upset the equilibrium of the relationship and introduce all kinds of new sources of trial, temptation, stress and strain, which actually like it said that you have a 50% greater chance of getting divorced if you cohabit beforehand. And I think this has to do with it in large part or this has largely to do with why in that you’ve actually upset the equilibrium, the ordinary organic development of a relationship whereby you grow in trust so that when it comes time to make that consent be compensated in the mediation of grace, you have there the kind of natural helps in place. All right. So last one then is, um, sometimes people will say like, this is a great way by which to get to know each other more. In the sense, like we’ve been getting, you know, like things have been going well for however many months. And we’ve been getting to know each other, but like we want to get to know each other in this more intimate intense context. Like we want to share plates and we want to do dishes and we want to divide chores and we want to [whispers] sleep in the same bed. You know, so like, um, what do we say to this? Like my first thought is that there’s real ways in which it’s short circuits. The intense and intimate connection for which we long because like, I think a lot of kind of being together in a relationship is realizing that the other person is good, but also boring and then we have to find ways by which to account for that. I think often of the fact like in marriage, you come before the other and you say like this person’s wonderful. I think I could share a life and specifically, I think I could raise kids like it like draws you out of yourself and into that life of sacrifice and commitment beyond, but that requires some creativity, like you’re going to have to figure out date nights and you’re going to have to manage as it were, the seemingly irreconcilable. But as it turns out, reconcilable differences, which arise when you apply yourselves to a similar task. So what do you think about this idea of getting to know each other?
Fr. Joseph-Anthony: Yeah, I think that it’s, once again, this is a brutal way to say it. I think it’s lazy. Like, there’s, especially when it comes to a physical intimacy, sexual expressions of affection are, you know, in our presentation is in the faith, that’s reserved for spouses in the context of marriage, right? And I find a lot of couples think that the only way to physically express their affection is a sexual expression. And we as human beings need to express internal realities in physical ways. And we think that’s the only way to do it. So if we’re very intimate, we’re very trust like we click, we connect, you know? And the only way to now express that physically is intercourse then then you’re actually overlooking entire horizons of physical expressions of giving each other physical pleasures that are not necessarily sexual pleasures, you know, sharing good meals, delicious meals, a physical pleasure. We can do that. That’s a real physical expression of affection. Walking in the mountains, going for a hike, seeing a sunset, so those are all physical pleasures to share. And that actually opens new horizons to the relationship and going to a concert of her favorite band. This is one of my favorite ones, being with her as she enjoys her hobby. Like that’s physically delighting in the other. It’s not sexual. You know, and so if there’s this big push of like, well, we’re ready because we click and we connect so much, we’ve ready to take this next step and to, you know, kind of play house a little bit, it’s like, but you’re not there yet. And if that’s the only direction, especially on the sexual side of things, there’s many, many other ways to do that. And if that becomes the only expression of physicality, you know, I remember a situation in my novitiate, our novitiate we were washing dishes and the dishwasher was broken. And I think I’ve told this story before, but we had a repair guy in there, and he was wide-eyed. Like, what is this? What kind of cult did I just walk into? ‘Cause a bunch of guys in white robes and whatever. And I was talking to him and explaining all the vows to him. And I was talking about the vow of chastity that we take in a celibate manner. He was in the dishwasher fixing it and then he pulled out of the dishwasher and looked up at me and goes, I’ve been married for 16 years and at some point we all become celibate. And if that becomes your foundation of physical affection, it’s gonna cease. And so what do you do then? And if you don’t put in the work to actually build up real relationships, then it’s going to break down.
Fr. Gregory: Yeah, I think when you have access to the most pleasurable of modes of physical expression, you know, namely sexual intercourse, then it’s going to short circuit the development whereby you would actually grow on your friendship and find a thousand ways in which to share your life, of like relating well of interacting well and of cultivating the kind of intense intimacy that you want because, you know, when it comes time, you know, to be married, you still need the virtue of chastity, you still need the virtue of purity. If not only for times of periodic, you know, continents, you know, like your wife’s nine months pregnant or somebody’s sick or whatever else, you know, like there are reasons for which at the very least just for self possession, because the man who has failed to cultivate the virtue, the virtue of chastity has failed to possess himself and if he can’t possess himself, then he can’t offer himself. So I think there’s a whole lot of like kind of like slumping and gravitating as it were to the easiest course of action, even though there might be things about it that are hard. It’s just like you need to take a stand at a certain point and choose what’s difficult, not ’cause it’s difficult, but because it’s good. And because it’s requiring of you the type of maturation, which need to be in place, if you’re gonna be a good husband and a good father or a good wife and a good mother. Yeah. Boom. Any final thoughts?
Fr. Joseph-Anthony: Nah, that’s it.
Fr. Gregory: Dude, my only final thought is to thank you, the listener/viewer for tuning into this episode of Godsplaining. One cool announcement, you’ve heard it a couple times now in the podcast, but we’ve got a Young Adult Retreat coming up in the metropolis of Dallas, Texas. That’d be March 21st through 23rd. I think it’s like the St. Rafael Retreat Center if I’ve got that right, but you can find more details out on Godsplending.org. Other things besides, be sure to like the episode, share the episode. Leave a five-star view, all of which helps to get the word out. And you can follow us on socials where we leave occasional like whatever things and other things besides. I don’t know what this stuff’s called anymore. But occasionally it’s filled with whimsy and capris, so I’m here for it. And then also at Godslaining.org in addition to that event, you’ll find other events for which you can sign up, join on, and you’ll find some merchandise options, some of which are hilarious. So cheers to that. All right, squad, know of our prayers for you. Please pray for us, and we’ll look forward to chatting with you next time on Godsplaining.