More on the Connubial Couch

As I was saying in Secrets of the Connubial Couch, I think I have found a way to reason to something I previously resisted believing: that there is an inner sanctum of connubial bliss whose secrets are shared among married couples ... but only if they are heterosexual couples. There is an impenetrable barrier between heterosexual couples and homosexual couples that keeps their respective "bliss secrets," however similar on the surface, ultimately disparate.

There is a marital inner sanctum, I said, which contains secrets that are unlike any other sorts of secrets. Connubial intimacies alone produce something of timeless beauty, because their secrets alone possess an inner essence that renders them universal and enduring.

Now I would like to point out that the discussion in that prior post is founded on two separate pillars of thought. I'll call the pillars those of the "right brain" and the "left brain."

My "right brain" pillar relies on gut feelings and intuition. Somehow, though I've never been married, I "just know" it's true that marital intimacy is somehow unique. Further, I just know that a heterosexual couple and a homosexual couple can never be marital "sidekicks" with fully interchangeable knowledge of this connubial inner sanctum.

At that point, my "left brain" takes over with its skill at philosophical reasoning. It reasons that secrets either do or don't have an essence. (An essence, philosophers say, is the idea or form which unites objects that mutually partake of it. A table, for instance, like every other table, partakes of the form/idea/essence of Table-ness.)

Philosophers disagree as to whether forms and essences are in fact real or only imaginary, but as I said in On Secrets, I tend to agree with those thinkers who say this: timeless beauty is real, and it could never be incarnated as art if there were not a universal and eternal form or idea of Beauty.

So, supposing that there are forms and essences, I went on to ask whether our personal secrets possess them. In general, I think I was able to argue successfully that they do not. There is typically nothing intrinsic to a run-of-the-mill secret that makes it a secret.

Yet, as I hope I was able to demonstrate, the secret intimacies of the marital couch are an exception. Betrayals of those intimacies constitute a betrayal of more than the personal secrets of the respective individuals involved. The mingling on a marital couch of two individuals' bliss secrets instantiates something of eternal, timeless beauty. Ergo, couples' bliss secrets do, unlike other secrets, have an essence.

In that way the left side of my brain was able to ratify what the right side believed anyway.


The discussion concerning homosexual couples was similar to that first one. I began with an intuition that I ought to be able to devise an argument to the effect that homosexual couples are somehow barred from the inner sanctum to which all heterosexual marriages readily gain admission. Casting about for what precisely such an argument might be, I found this: it just "popped into my head" that extending the argument about secrets shared by two spouses in a single marriage to cover secrets shared between two married couples, as marital "sidekicks," might reveal the distinction I wanted to expose.

My right brain was feeding a button of thought into my left brain in hopes that the latter could sew a vest on it. And that's exactly what happened. I concluded that the inability to share inner-sanctum secrets make heterosexual and homosexual couples akin to oil and water: unable, in the final analysis, to mix.


That's the status of the discussion so far. Now I find myself wondering where it goes from here.

If there is something extraordinary about the intimacies of heterosexual marriage which turns the dross of ordinary sex into the gold of something untarnished, beautiful, and timeless, so what?

Of course, as a Catholic, I find that one of the first answers that presents itself for consideration is the one I think of as the "full Pope" position on matters sexual and familial. By this I mean what the late Pope John Paul II called the "theology of the body."

As all Catholics and most non-Catholics are surely aware, the Church has some fairly un-modern ideas about sex. The previous Holy Father gathered all the traditional strands of Catholic sexual morality into a unified teaching he dubbed the "theology of the body." Many of these strands are ones I have found myself in opposition to in the past.

Since one of the strands of traditional Catholic teaching is that homosexual relations are "gravely disordered," or words to that effect, and since I have in the past aligned myself with the contrarians who say the Church ought to sanction gay rights and gay marriages, for me now to doubt that erstwhile stance opens up the possibility that my new way of thinking implies a "full Pope" position on sexual morality.

More on that in the next post ...