How do traditional catholics and other traditional christians date?

I am having a hard time with this. I guess it would be very different if I had been a raised with a traditional sense of morality regarding . I have been having since I was sixteen, and was cohabititing or married or separated for 15 of the last 18 years and I wasn't exactly chaste even before that (like since 10 years old), or when I wasn't with anyone. I can't understand how two people can get really close to each other, enough to make a committment like marriage, when they haven't been close enough to have . I have a hard time understanding how someone can be that restrained in intimate situations to stop short of , of how people can get really close to each other, enough to make a committment like marriage, and at the same time not put themselvs in intimate situations. If I never made out with my girlfriend, I wouldn't feel she was my girlfriend. If I do make out with my girlfriend, i would have a very hard time stopping there, if she wanted to go further. I have never had the experience of being in live with a girl and not having with her. I just don't know if I can. It isn't the . It isn't lust im talking about. I can't go all that long without sex, if it is available, so to speak, but I don't go out looking for empty relationships or flings and one-night stands. Im talking about closeness. I'd feel I had a close friend if there was no kissing, and I'd feel that I was not ready to marry a girl if i had never had sex with her. I'd feel as if I was jumping blind into a relationship that i didn't fully understand, that wasn't developed to the point of being on the level of marriage. I cannot imagine marrying someone who I haven't even spend the night with. I don't mean sex, I mean sleeping together in bed. I certainly can't understand marrying someone if I haven't at least slept under the same roof. I know you aren't supposed to think this way. I just don't know how to do what I hear people doing--living chaste lives and courting and eventually getting married. I don't even know what it is that those people do. No one talks about it. I get the impression that a whole lot of people are having pre-maritial sex and then becoming christians once they are respectably married, or giving the outward appearance of living chastely until marriage. I don't even know anyone claiming to do that. Heck, out of a hundreds of people at my church, I cannot name one who is single and over the age of 18 who isn't i their 30s and doesn't appear to be perpetually celibate. For that matrer, there are practically no single 20-somethings in my church. Then, how does one expect a girl to stick around if you tell her that you aren't going to have sex or sleep in the same bed until marriage? You have to find those kinds of girls on the internet on ave amria or something. What about me? I was a practicing catholic. I mean, I tried to do what was right all the time, but my wife left me and now I'm getting divorced and persuing an annullment. What if the annullment is turned down? What about between now and then? I met a girl and we've been dating and I don't know how to make her understand that I cannot get married until after the annullment is completed. I can't tell her that I might not get it at all. I am pretty sure that I would not have the strength to lose her or even remain celibate in that case. I have never been able to remain chaste or celibate before, even after I became a catholic. I feel like such a phony, and I don't know what to do about my new relationship. I have gone about this the wrong way, I know. but I feel that I am not good enough for the kinds of girls who are waiting for marriage, and I know I really am not strong enough to go for a long time without sex. I know I'd be a good husband and a good christian, but I feel I was never given a chance to do that. I don't want to be a bad example for my kids either I want them to be better than I am. I see their mother giving them exactly the opposite example, suddenly running off and moving in with a very young guy, and divorcing me and, it breaks my heart to be anything to them but the perfect example of chastity and virtue, but I am very much in live with my new girlfriend and really don't know what to do.