I’ve been blessed with a wonderful Christian upbringing, but I’ve been struggling with questions about physical boundaries in dating relationships.
My recent breakup has made me reflect deeply on whether I crossed any lines by sharing kisses with my ex-boyfriend, even though we never went beyond that. While I know in my heart that I’ve stayed pure in terms of sexuality. The Bible speaks so clearly about sexual purity, but seems less direct about other forms of physical affection, and I’d love to hear how other believers navigate this delicate balance.
What about kissing before marriage?
I’m so grateful that God continues to guide me through these questions, and I pray for wisdom as I move forward in my journey of finding a godly marriage. Amen!
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I don’t think kissing before marriage is automatically sinful.
Scripture is pretty clear about sexual immorality, but there’s no rule about kissing anywhere in there. So it comes down to self-control and what you’re actually doing it for.
A kiss can just be a display of simple affection. It can also stir up stuff that makes your boundaries a lot harder to hold. Ask yourselves whether it helps you honor God and each other or just keeps pulling you toward temptation. Have that conversation early… and before emotions are running the show.
Kissing your ex doesn’t mean you failed at purity. Pray about it and move on. Don’t drag the guilt around with you.
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You didn’t do anything wrong. I want to say that first.
When a relationship ends, a lot of us go back through it looking for where we messed up, and physical affection is an easy target because you can point at it. An ending doesn’t reach back and turn affection into sin. You showed care to someone you cared about, inside the limits you had set for yourself. It was a relationship that ended, which hurts plenty on its own without a second layer of self-examination stacked on top.
The Bible says less about this than about sex, and I think that’s on purpose. Clear commands where they were needed, and room for judgment everywhere else. The people I’ve known who tried to turn that room into a rulebook (like no kissing or never being alone together) sometimes ended up more anxious and less honest about what they were actually feeling.
I’d ask what kissing means to you. For me, it carried a lot of emotional weight, so I needed to move slower than some of my friends did, and my spouse and I talked about that pretty early on. For other people it just doesn’t carry that weight, and neither of us is holier for it. The standard that’ll hold up is the one that fits who you actually are, and a painful ending is a bad reason to pick a harsher one.
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You kissed someone you cared about and stopped there. That means you already knew where your line was and held it, and that’s the skill that actually matters going into a marriage.
My spouse and I waited until the wedding day to kiss and we’re not the only ones but I wouldn’t turn that into a standard for anyone else.
Romans 14 covers exactly this kind of thing, the stuff Scripture doesn’t spell out. The same passage that tells you not to look down on the brother with the stricter conscience also tells you not to judge the one with more freedom.
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A kiss says something. It communicates trust and a level of commitment. If the relationship is still uncertain… that closeness can create a sense of unity that hasn’t yet been built through knowing each other and sharing your faith.
So it’s coming from somewhere else.
So it comes down to loving someone without overstating what you are. Affection can deepen something healthy but it can also be a way to reassure yourself or hold onto someone you’re scared of losing and skip the harder conversations in the process. So communication is important.
Ask what those kisses meant and whether they matched the level of commitment at the time. Treat the answer as information about how you date, nothing more. Your past doesn’t need to rule your purity of the future.
Asking what kissing actually means to you is a gentle place to start, and writing that answer down before dating again could make that early conversation easier.
Speaking as someone with zero credentials beyond a lot of regret, kissing to skip the harder conversations just postpones them until they’re even harder.
Talking about it beforehand is probably the better move. You can ask afterward what the kisses meant and get some insight, but by then the affection has already taken the place of the harder conversation, and that conversation is part of how you build trust in the first place.
Affection overstating the relationship is a real thing. A kiss doesn’t always mean the same thing to both people when it comes to commitment, and that gap is probably where the confusion and hurt start.
My partner and I found that the physical stuff carried a lot more weight the longer we were together. The boundaries we set in the first few months were the ones we ended up talking through again and again as things got closer and the ‘stuff’ you mention started showing up for real.
So I’d add one thing to your advice about having that conversation early.
You have to keep having it. As feelings grow, a kiss that helped you honor God and each other can start pulling you somewhere else instead. A boundary set with clear heads at the beginning needs a second look once emotions are running the show. I (personally) think that’s when it matters most, and also when it feels least convenient to bring up.
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A breakup doesn’t retroactively turn affection into a sin… but I don’t think a painful ending is a good reason to reconsider your standards. It might be one of the few times you can see clearly. While you’re in a relationship, it can be hard to be honest about what kissing meant, because you want it to mean the right thing. We’ve all been there at one point or another.
Then it ends, the fog lifts, and sometimes you probably find it carried more weight than you admitted at the time.
You said kissing carried a lot of emotional weight for you and you had to move slower than your friends. My guess is you learned that by experience. That’s all I want people to hear. If looking back tells them it meant more than they thought, that’s more information about who they are, which is the kind of standard you said would hold up.
Self-punishment is a terrible reason to change anything, but self-knowledge is a pretty good one. A breakup can hand you either.
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Vow of Celibacy Can Work.
Thanks for this.
Going forward, I want to have the honest conversation first and the physical affection second. Looking back, if my ex and I had talked about what kissing meant before it happened, it would have saved us some confusion. Hindsight.
Figure out your own foundation first. The specific boundary questions get a lot easier after that.
You’re asking good ones about kissing and boundaries, which shows more self-awareness than most people bring to dating. But if you’re looking to strangers online to define where the line is for you, that’s probably the deeper issue to work through before worrying about physical affection.
My husband and I were friends for a year before we got married. Learning that neither of us could read the other’s mind was what made us work.
So we said things out loud. What they meant to us. You can’t assume a kiss or a conversation carries the same weight for both people.
My wife and I hit this same issue while we were dating. She grew up thinking any physical affection before engagement was off limits. I didn’t feel that way. But I was reading Romans 14, and Paul’s take on these gray areas stood out to me.
He says if your conscience says something’s wrong, then it’s wrong for you. The part that got me was how he’d give up meat for good if it meant not tripping up someone else.
So I made it about loving her and not pushing her to go against what she believed was right.
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That unsettled feeling might be your answer. Sometimes our conscience speaks up before our theology has a chance to catch up. If you walked away feeling like you crossed a line, then maybe (for you, anyway) it was one.
It doesn’t make it universally wrong, but you learned something about yourself.
It’s a pretty normal part of dating. Nothing to feel guilty about.
There’s a lot of subconscious stuff going on when you’re physically close to someone, and kissing is part of how you figure out if you’re compatible on a deeper level, not just emotionally.
The issue is whether it’s helping you learn about each other or filling the space where a harder conversation should be.
What feels like nothing to one couple can be a real struggle for another, and I wonder if that’s why Scripture doesn’t give us a detailed rulebook on this.
Maybe that’s the point, it’s between you and God.
Start with one question. Is Scripture calling you to a specific boundary here, or are you hearing other people’s rules dressed up as faith?
If Jesus is leading you somewhere through the Word, follow that. Pressure to perform is something else entirely. No one has ever behaved their way into heaven.
