The Prodigal Daughter

I won't apologize for my three-month hiatus. I am going to blog as it suits me. You read as it suits you. If I turn this blog into one of my many obligations to the world, I will fear and avoid it.

Last week I had a beer with a long-lost friend of mine. For the purpose of this blog, I will call him William Cowper. Now Mr. Cowper was not so much long-lost as periodically-lost. For the years that I've known him, he has swept in and out of social life. He will delete his Facebook page, cancel his phone, and keep to himself for months at a time. Then he will call, announce that he is rejoining the land of the living, and after a few months, the process repeats. I take little notice. I am happy to be his friend when he is friendly, and I do not judge him when he withdraws.

Last Thursday brought one such call, "Hey Kelly, it's William. Are you going to be out tonight? Maybe we could meet up." Around ten o'clock that evening we met in front of Dawson Taylor and decided on a place to go. As a joke, Mr. Cowper suggested that we go to quarter-beer night at Mac & Charlie's. I said, "My friend tells me that is a great place to get laid," also joking. The significance of this exchange was lost on me until later.

We decided on 10th Street Station, ordered a pitcher of amber, and got to work. Mr. Cowper brought up the subject of my friend who gets laid every week after quarter-beer night. I corrected him, "Oh, that was a joke. For a couple months she was sleeping with the same guy, and they hooked up after quarter-beer night on a regular basis.

"However," I felt the need to add, "as long as she is having safe sex with someone she trusts, I don't think it matters how much meaningless sex anyone has. Sex can be profoundly meaningful in the context of a relationship, but it can also be an itch that wants scratching." I think this was the moment that I lost Mr. Cowper's friendship forever, but that was lost on me until later.

Mr. Cowper's agitation, however, was not lost on me. He told me that my friend's behavior is disgusting. Any sexual activity without meaning, outside of the context of a relationship, is vile, and the fact that I would enable that behavior makes me disgusting too.

Now I have listened to too many Dan Savage podcasts, and read too many Dan Savage articles, to be swayed, but I was surprised. Mr. Cowper was, to me, a man who had no religious affiliations and had never taken a position of moral authority, let alone such an unforgiving one.

I believe this is the point where we began having two separate conversations. My subject of primary interest was that his judgments should be so harsh and cruel against people whose lives he knows nothing about. His subject, though he took it up with a pious universality, was only sex and the meaning that it ought to imbibe - his sole conclusion: that anyone who strips it of meaning is nothing short of evil.

I argued against his point with empirical data. Jason and I started as a one-night-stand. We had such a fantastic time together, that we decided to date afterward, but I made my intentions clear from the start - this is all I want from you. If we had never progressed beyond a one-night-stand, it still was a spectacular experience that I look back on with fondness.

I told him that now, a year-and-a-half into our relationship, sex is rarely an expression of our love. It is an experience of a mutual pleasure, and a sating of mutual cravings. Washing the dishes together is more often an expression of our love than sex is.  Just because sex exists sometimes in a vacuum of meaning does not mean that the act is spoiled from meaning anything forever or with anyone.

Mr. Cowper's points were far more scattered and riddled with personal attacks. I am disgusting. My friends are disgusting. Our lives are meaningless. Our relationships are meaningless. My friends do not represent the bulk of human experience and they are a disease that is infecting our culture.

I would say, "If sex is only meaningful to you in the context of a greater commitment then you should have sex within that context and with people who want the same thing. However, I am telling you that my life and my experiences are wonderful and that I have no regrets. You are calling me a liar."

I spent much time trying to convince my friend that his moral absolutes discounted the diversity of human experience. After our argument roamed across the topics of marriage, religion, hubris, the biological purpose of sex and the propagation of the species, Mr. Cowper's disgust overwhelmed him to the point that he had to leave. He left me with one more assurance of his hatred for me and his fervent hopes that we never meet again.

I have thought a lot about this conversation since last Thursday. A friend that I have had for several years flipped on me like a coin. All of our experiences and conversations together were summarily discarded and he left me with words of hatred and anger.

I didn't mention to Mr. Cowper that several months before a friend of his and a friend of mine had a one-night-stand that we were both aware of. He kept his friend and had no problem with me at the time. I also forgot to say that in his words of harsh condemnation for others, he was truly condemning himself by creating a standard that was impossible to meet.

His argument was so tiny and so contained, that I found it difficult to break through, even though I knew in every part of my being that he was wrong. In the days following the break, I kept opening G. K. Chesterton's Orthodoxy to a chapter called "The Maniac."

"The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason. The madman's explanation of a thing is always complete, and often in a purely rational sense satisfactory. Or, to speak more strictly, the insane explanation, if not conclusive, is at least unanswerable[...]

"Nevertheless he is wrong. But if we attempt to trace his error in exact terms, we shall not find it quite so easy as we had supposed. Perhaps the nearest we can get to expressing it is to say this: that his mind moves in a perfect but narrow circle. A small circle is quite as infinite as a large circle; but, though it is quite as infinite, it is not so large. In the same way the insane explanation is quite as complete as the sane one, but it is not so large. A bullet is quite as round as the world, but it is not the world. There is such a thing as a narrow universality; there is such a thing as a small and cramped eternity; you may see it in many modern religions. Now, speaking quite externally and empirically, we may say that the strongest and most unmistakable mark of madness is this combination between a logical completeness and a spiritual contraction. The lunatic's theory explains a large number of things, but it does not explain them in a large way. I mean that if you or I were dealing with a mind that was growing morbid, we should be chiefly concerned not so much to give it arguments as to give it air, to convince it that there was something cleaner and cooler outside the suffocation of a singe argument."

I regret my inability to give Mr. Cowper "air." I can only hope that, as he has often been fickle about his friendships in the past and come back to them, he will come back to my friendship again. I will know what to say next time.