If you’ve ever felt like your spiritual life and your dating life exist in two separate compartments, Saint Josemaria Escriva has a word for you: stop doing that. The founder of Opus Dei spent his entire life teaching one radical idea – that holiness isn’t reserved for convents and monasteries. It happens right where you are, in the middle of your work, your friendships, and yes, your dating life.
The Deeper Story
Josemaria Escriva was born in Spain in 1902 and ordained a priest in 1925. In 1928, he received a vision that would shape the rest of his life and eventually transform the Church’s understanding of the laity: God was calling ordinary people – not just priests and religious – to seek holiness in the middle of the world. He founded Opus Dei to help people live that call.
His core insight was deceptively simple. Every human activity, when done with love and offered to God, can become a path to sanctification. Work, friendship, suffering, celebration – none of it is spiritually neutral. The Church affirmed this vision at Vatican II, declaring the universal call to holiness that Escriva had been preaching for decades.
Escriva understood that “love is united to conjugal chastity, which, manifesting itself as continence, brings about the interior order of married life” (TOB). But he also knew that the interior order doesn’t begin on your wedding day. It’s built in the years before, in how you treat the people you date, in whether you bring Christ into the mundane moments or leave Him at the church door.
The Christian family’s vocation is grounded in something real and tangible. As the Church teaches, “the Christian family’s sanctifying role is grounded in Baptism and has its highest expression in the Eucharist, to which Christian marriage is intimately connected” (Familiaris Consortio). Escriva would say: start living that Eucharistic connection now. Don’t wait for marriage to take your faith seriously in relationships.
What This Means for Your Dating Life
Escriva’s teaching gives you permission to stop waiting for some future “holy” version of your life to begin. That awkward first date? Holy ground. The patience you practice when someone ghosts you? An opportunity for virtue. The honest conversation where you share what you actually believe? Sanctification in real time.
This doesn’t mean slapping a spiritual label on everything. It means bringing intentionality to your dating life the same way you’d bring it to prayer. Pay attention. Be present. Offer it to God – the good dates and the terrible ones. Holiness isn’t somewhere else. It’s here, in the life you’re already living.
Where to Go from Here
Read our explainers on Intentional Dating and St. Therese of Lisieux’s Little Way to see how other saints lived this same truth. Then try it this week: before your next date or conversation, pause and ask God to be present in it. That small act changes everything.