What It’s Really Like Being a (Almost) 40-year-old Virgin Christian Man in 2025

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By John Matthew Southers

There’s a moment in the 2005 comedy film “The 40-year-old Virgin”, when the main protagonist, Andy Stitzer, portrayed by the hilariously funny Steve Carell, explodes in utter frustration: “Why does everything have to be about sex?”

Credit where it’s due, that question he asks is among the few redemptive bits in an otherwise hopelessly bawdy movie. I mention that moment not as a recommendation that anyone watch the film but as a cultural reference point. I also mention it because I can relate to it because as far as 40-year-old virgins go, in a few short months, I’ll be one.

Yes, we are out there. I’m one of those sometimes-derided Jesus freaks who, like former NFL star Tim Tebow (God bless that guy), decided to commit to waiting for marriage before having sex. And unlike my Christian friends who likewise made that commitment but successfully managed to get married in their early to mid 20s like I hoped to do, we’ve known a struggle that no one in their right mind would ever want – learning how to steward a primal (dare I say bestial?) sex drive and live with unmet desires for the better part of two decades. It’s extremely challenging in a highly sexualized – er, pornified – culture.

Indeed, as Carrell’s character wonders, why does everything have to be about sex? For those of us who aspire to live in keeping with our faith, the frustration is acutely felt.

Over the years, strange circumstances have arisen where the subject of my decision to wait has come up and it has been interesting to see the responses. I’ve been labeled a “unicorn in the wild.” I’ve been gay-baited a few times. I’ve seen and heard all the questions (“Are you self-loathing or something?”); fielded incredulous statements (“You cannot be for real”); and was once quite surprisingly told by another guy who was quite the player, that he admired me for it (“You know what, man? Mad respect”).

And so since God doesn’t waste anything, here’s hoping that this strange journey of faith on a most unwanted path inspires and encourages fellow travelers to continue in similar faithfulness to Christ.

An 8 year-old boy learns about the birds and the bees

I’m sitting at the lunch table in the 3rd grade and I tell the classmate next to me that I like this one girl who is across the table and about 7 seats down from me. As some 4th grade boys exit the cafeteria, one of my classmates tells the 4th grade boys that I fancy the blonde gal I’d pointed out to him.

One of the fourth grade boys starts to tease me along with his friend, “You mean her? Her? HER?”. He starts pointing at her with his finger, loudly laughing, and as he’s pointing he’s doing so repetitively through a circle he has formed with his index finger and thumb of his other hand. At that, their laughter grew even louder and more obnoxious. He is simulating a sex act with his hands but my innocent 3rd grade mind doesn’t realize that yet. I’m wondering what’s so funny while also feeling a tinge of strange embarrassment.

Later that afternoon, I’m at home in the kitchen getting a snack and I ask my mom, genuinely curious, “What does this mean?” and I reenact the crass gesture with my hands. Caught off guard and uncomfortable, her eyes grow wide and she tells me, “your dad is going to have to talk to you about that.”

I legitimately had no idea what I’d done to make my mom want to avoid the subject but I suspected it was something serious.

A few days later, my dad sat me down and had “the talk” with me, and he explained it all.

When he told me what’s involved in the act of sex, I laughed out loud. I thought it was funny. I wondered, why would anybody ever want to do…that? But his explanation of what sex is, what it is for, and why God reserves it for marriage and not before, was thorough and age-appropriate. I knew I could ask him questions and he’d answer them (I had several follow-ups). He also explained to me what that gesture the 4th grade boys did in the cafeteria meant and it all clicked.

After “the talk” I went back to my room and, at the tender young age of 8, knelt down and prayed, promising God I would wait for marriage. It was a promise I intended (and still intend) to keep.

The Struggle Years

Fast forward 22 years and I’m house-sitting for a friend and I’m praying, lying face down and prostrate on the carpet, having it out with God. To say I’m struggling is putting it mildly. I’m not a happy camper.

“You can’t make me keep doing this! This is not normal to keep waiting this long. It’s unfair. Are you punishing me?” I almost shouted. Then I buried my head into a pillow and let out the loudest holler of frustration I had in years. Just keepin’ it real here, y’all.

There I was, age 30, wondering why in the world men had such ferociously strong sex drives. I no longer thought the sex act was funny like I did when I was 8. I wanted it and it was driving me absolutely crazy that I couldn’t have it. What even was this primordial, borderline spiritual forcefield inside my body? Physiologically, the limbic system is doing its thing, and testosterone coursing through my bloodstream, a kinetic energy stored up and screaming to get out.

There’s just one problem. If I’m to follow Jesus like I intended, I have no morally licit means in which sexuality can be expressed and, worse yet, no foreseeable prospects anytime soon. So what do I do?

“Please God, I do not want to be a virgin when I’m 40,” I remember praying at the time. Now that I’m almost 40, looking back I wonder if I shouldn’t have kept my praying mouth shut on that count.

The struggle to wait is compounded by the ubiquity of online pornography. While I can honestly say that I’ve never been addicted to porn, let me tell you, in those moments of struggle it’s a real battle. It’s under our noses, a few clicks away, seemingly everywhere we turn. Some seasons have been worse than others. The easy availability of pornography has caused me and countless others more heartache and mental turmoil than I ever thought anything would. I hate it with a passionate fury.

I truly can’t emphasize enough how porn complicates things. The first time I was exposed to it online was when I was 14 and was innocently surfing the web. The protective software my parents had installed was somehow bypassed and I had typed in “blonde jokes” into a search engine. I clicked on a link that seemed fine and before I knew it a pop-up of five naked blonde women was in front of my face. That first unwanted exposure ate at my soul for months.

In college, guys on my dorm floor had a stack of smutty magazines and the culture was awful. But even then I was a sincere Christian and did my best to avoid all of that but it really helps when your surroundings are conducive to living out your noble goals and my freshman dorm surely wasn’t.

I read books on living with sexual integrity, installed Covenant Eyes software on my laptop, and from time to time attended church accountability groups and classes. Some of those things get a bad rap and they are dismissed by disaffected millennials as “purity culture”. I understand and even agree with some of the criticisms of said “culture”, but much of it was genuinely helpful.

The churches I was a part of were theologically orthodox environments whose congregants were earnest, godly people who did not want to twist biblical standards and bow to the spirit of the age. Since I consider so-called progressive Christianity to be a distortion of the Gospel, I genuinely desired to do the same. The much-derided “purity culture” or not, theological liberalism and spiritual compromise was not for me. It still isn’t.

And yet, while those people were good and helpful, there were still many nights spent hugging a pillow. Oh, how I have hugged that pillow like an absolute boss! It’s bad some nights, and there have been moments when I thought my heart was going to tear out of my chest, wrenching and twisting in pain, palpably reminding me of what I do not have yet but still hope for someday. I promise I’m not melodramatically exaggerating here. It’s tough.

And yet those painful heart twinges are also an invitation for me to go deep with God. I’m not trying to sound super-spiritual here. Well OK, maybe I am, but I have had to learn the hard way how to cope with the crushing disappointment. It’s testing indeed to long for love like this, and sometimes, there’s little comfort to be found. There’s no way to get over it but to go through it. I’m still learning.

To be sure, some nights I don’t really want to have sex, because all I desire is a hug or two and clinging to that pillow doesn’t cut it. The companionship and intimacy would be nice – just to be held. Yes, men want that too.

The worst times are what you might call “dark nights of the soul” and you begin to wonder if God is truly good. And yes, it’s actually true that in Christian circles many of us who’ve decided to wait, myself included, have hoped that Jesus doesn’t return before we get to experience the delights of a conjugal union.

By far the hardest mental hurdle to overcome was thinking that if I did my best to “do it right” that marriage – and by extension, a great sex life – would happen according to my timetable. That, I would find out, was spectacularly false.

It wasn’t as though I thought I was entitled to marriage. Had you asked me point-blank if I thought God owed me a spouse, I would have told you no. Nor did I see it in a transactional “do this, get this” sense because I’ve never believed that that’s how God works and that mindset is indicative of prosperity gospel thinking.

But I did unwittingly believe that this area of life was, at least to some degree, formulaic. I thought that if I was intentional in living with integrity and obedience to God here, things would sort of work out on this front as they appeared to for many people. I thought I’d be able to discover this thing called love, find a lifelong mate, and do what seemed to be normal and get married when I’m 24 or 25, maybe 27 or 28 at the very latest. That was the plan, and all the waiting through the teen years and 20s would prove to have been worth it. Being single, chaste, and not starting a family until 40 or after? Absolutely not, hard pass, no thank you, no.

Is this waiting (and suffering) worth it? Am I a truly pitiful fool and the biggest weirdo ever? I can almost understand why people accuse us virgin men of being “self-loathing.” It sure doesn’t feel normal. No one ever died from lack of sex, but man, it’s hard. For the Christian man (and woman), sexual desire is the one natural impulse that can’t be met except under certain circumstances. And for some people, it never is.

A few years ago I met a man who was en route to becoming a Catholic priest. I was impressed with how fully aware he was of his career implications and what it would cost him. And yet, he willingly embraced it. It was a helpful dose of perspective for me, an evangelical Protestant who, though I hadn’t taken a vow of lifelong celibacy (perish the thought!) might end up in a similar position. In an odd way, that priest in training spurred me on with my own commitment.

The Ongoing Journey

When you’re approaching 40 and are still single, you also wonder if your chance to have your own children has faded away. It’s kind of scary and sad. This is especially true for women whose biological clocks tick more loudly. But for men like me, we start thinking that we should probably date someone several years younger because we know that a woman’s fertility window is closing as she ages. We know that if she conceives a child at 35 or older it’s often called a “geriatric pregnancy.”

Then you realize that there are no guarantees because, for all you know, you could marry someone much younger and still have fertility problems. Regardless, it’s a dizzying thing to have to think about and it affects how you approach dating. When you’re in your 20s you don’t consider it so much because time is on your side, or so it seems.

You also realize how hard it is for increasing numbers of people to start families because of socio-economic pressures and the relational chaos of the dating world, which has been upended and splintered in all kinds of ways by the ravages of the sexual revolution. There’s a humorous but sobering phrase (I think I’ve seen it in meme form) that circulates on social media every so often that reads: “Does anyone ever take a look at the dating world of today and feel like they caught the last chopper out of ‘Nam?” I’ve seen Boomers and GenXers semi-regularly post that and they caption it with an enthusiastic “YES.”

For those of us who are millennials and are increasingly single in our 30s and 40s, watching your peers who did manage to get married and start their families is bittersweet. It’s wonderful to see them thriving. It’s wonderful seeing them post engagement, marriage, and then sonogram photos on social media. Then you turn around and gulp, realizing that your friends now have teenage kids. How did they grow up so fast? Where did all the time go? And yes, you feel jealous. You wonder what you did wrong, why marriage and family isn’t working out as you’d hoped. You ask yourself: why can’t I manage to kick things into gear and get started too?

Surrendering to God

While it does become somewhat easier the more you surrender to Jesus, as the days go by it also becomes harder in some ways. It’s quite the paradox. Yes, it’s true that most men, me included, think about sex every day. If I’ve gone a day or two not thinking about it’s because I’ve either been so busy, distracted, or sick. But even on those busy days, when my head hits the pillow every night, boom, there it is – the conscious realization that, not going to lie, that the marital embrace would be amazing right about now.

Despite my faulty thinking that if I “did it right” it would work out according to my preferred time frame, I still do want to do it right by making a lifelong covenant with my future wife first. But where is she? Then the frustration builds again and I grab the pillow and hug it for, oh I don’t know, maybe the 3000th time.

When I was going through an extremely bitter phase of struggle a few years ago, I remember clamming up for a few weeks and growing angry. During this time, I remember journaling and sensing that unmistakable still small voice of the Holy Spirit asking me a haunting question: “If you never get married (and never get to have sex), will you trust me?”

I really didn’t like hearing that one. I almost resented it. I couldn’t bear the thought of facing that prospect. If I live to be 90 that might mean several more decades of this struggle journey, which is morphing with every passing year. So I shut down emotionally and shoved that nagging question into the basement of my psyche until one day, in the middle of my misery, I knew I couldn’t continue on with what felt like an anvil around my neck.

I called a counselor friend and told him all about my smoldering, angsty discontent. He prayed with me and I surrendered it all as best I could, telling God that, yes, I’m willing to count the cost no matter what. I was sincere, but those words tasted like vinegar as they exited my lips.

Why it matters to be faithful

The testimony of what Christians do with their sexuality is one of the most important they can give to the world. None of us does it perfectly, of course, but it matters.

As feminist Louise Perry, author of the book The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, pointed out in First Things in Oct 2023, it was the moral innovation of the Christian faith that gave rise to tremendous dignity for women that was previously unheard of in the ancient pagan world. She writes:

[The Apostle] Paul’s prohibition of (to use the Greek term) porneia — that is, illicit sexual activity, including prostitution — upended an ethical system in which male access to the female body was unquestioned and unquestionable. Whereas the Romans regarded male chastity as profoundly unhealthy, Christians prized it and insisted on it. Early converts were disproportionately female because the Christian valorization of weakness offered obvious benefits to the weaker sex, who could—for the first time — demand sexual continence of men. Feminism is not opposed to Christianity: It is its descendant.

Many of the moral and ethical norms that secular Westerners value, though they are loath to admit it, stem from the contributions of the Christian faith over the centuries. In the moments of heartache of the wait, I think about how much worse it would be if I violate my commitment, go ahead and have sex, and then maybe impregnate a woman out of wedlock. And then what? That heartache and regret seems infinitely worse than anything I’ve known.

What is more, the evidence continues to pour in as to just how far social norms that upheld the dignity of all persons have eroded. We are living in Isaiah 5:20 days, where thought leaders and intellectuals bearing sparkly credentials call good evil and evil good. Today, in one of the most convoluted manifestations of moral insanity that I’ve ever seen, vaunted “human rights” groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch now defend prostitution, referring to it by the disgusting euphemism, “sex work”. They are enabling human rights abuses and exploitation under the banner of human rights. The moral innovation of the Christian faith that gave rise to dignity for women about which Perry so eloquently wrote has historically informed the standards for what we know and value as actual human rights. But they have now been thrown into reverse and perversely rebranded as progressive.

Why do I even mention that in the context of remaining a virgin at 40?

It’s because, at the very least, I can choose to not personally contribute to this morass with my own life and do my best to exhibit what I say I believe about God. I’m an individual, yes, but my choices have social ramifications. I can continue to live out that moral innovation that once transformed the world and, I believe, can and will again.

Following Jesus is a cross, and suffering is a part of life in Christ. There’s no getting around that inescapable fact. But, and this is crucial, that’s not where it ends. There is more to life to be experienced; joy in the midst of suffering is my portion. Additionally, though I’m not a Catholic, I’m moved by a major emphasis in Pope John Paul II’s Theology of the Body, which is that the human body, by its very physical structure, possesses a distinctly spousal meaning.

In other words, all men are called to be spiritual husbands and fathers, whether they are actual husbands and fathers. The Polish pontiff, who was a transformational figure in human history, maintained there are many ways we can live out this calling. I’ve found this to be true even amid the ongoing hardship of life as a single man who longs to be married and have a family. For in the Story of the Gospel, I am already a husband and father to many even in my chastity.

King Solomon famously declared that God “made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end" (Ecclesiastes 3:11). And I’ll admit that though I have countless years to enjoy God, as a creature of time and space, eternity often seems like an abstract concept and it doesn’t exactly comfort me in the here and now. But He knows all of this, and if I take His Word to be true that “no eye has seen, no ear has heard, no heart has imagined, what God has prepared for those who love Him (1 Corinthians 2:9) I may as well rest assured, confident in His goodness.

To that end, I’ll keep waiting on Him. And I’ll keep waiting for her even if it means a few more years of hugging a pillow every night – so help me God.