Wondering if you should take the plunge and move in together? Sounds daunting enough as it is. Now try this: you and your beloved are in a spiritual partnership rooted in a commitment to always stay within 15 feet of each other — and your love nest is a 22-foot-wide yurt in the middle of the Arizona desert.

Oh, and you’ve both taken a vow of celibacy.

According to a recent feature in the New York Times, the relationship between acclaimed Buddhist teachers Michael Roach (also a monk) and Christie McNally — which includes eating off the same plate (to allow for a smaller drying rack, I’m guessing) and non-sexual touching (some don’t buy it) — has aroused both praise from their followers and fury from the Tibetan Buddhist community (wherein monks are prohibited from having partners). Their “insistence that they share both purity and intimacy drives traditionalists to distraction,” according to the Times. The Dalai Lama himself: not a fan.

More: “The couple did a three-year silent retreat in this yurt from 2000 to 2003, while their relationship was a secret to all but the few people who brought them food. Soon afterward, Mr. Roach determined it should be public, even if it flew in the face of two millenniums of Tibetan Buddhist tradition,” the Times reports. “He acted for two reasons, he said. One, he felt that it was impossible to keep secrets in this age of Google Earth. Two, he decided that if Buddhism was really going to succeed in America, it would have to be more inclusive of women.

‘If these ideas that will help people are going to make it in the West,’ Ms. McNally said, ‘it can’t be a male-dominated culture, because people are not going to accept that.'”

In addition to seeing themselves as reformers, the couple, at least in the context of this article, seems much more interested in what their admittedly extreme example can teach others about patience and grace than they are in answering the impertinent but obvious question: You guys seriously don’t have sex?

“There are very rare instances in the Indo-Buddhist tradition of an individual’s being considered holy enough for a chaste spiritual partnership,’ said Lama Surya Das, an American Buddhist who studied in Tibet and wrote Awakening the Buddha Within : Tibetan Wisdom for the Western World, published in 1997. But Mr. Roach, Lama Surya Das said, has not convinced colleagues that he has reached that level. ‘He is a good guy and learned person, but the Bill Clinton question lingers over him,’ he said of Mr. Roach. ‘He is with a much younger blond bombshell. What is a deep relationship that is not sexual? It is hard to understand.'”

Side note to the Lama: women have sex drives, too. But his point is taken. Hard to understand? Sure. But is a deep non-sexual relationship possible? Jury’s out. (These folks, for example — though they’re coming from a different place — would say, emphatically, yes.) What do you think?