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 ...

Secrets of the Connubial Couch

In my last post I talked about sex and secrets. I said that secrets are strange: although two people may insist they share the same secret simply because the words that would be used to state one person's secret are identical to those used to state the other's, in reality all secret-originators are keeping their own personal secrets, distinct from everybody else's secrets, however alike.

It's a violation of trust for me to reveal a secret that you have shared with me, even if my own deepest, darkest, most intimate secret can be stated in exactly the same words as yours, and so would seem to be exactly the same secret. If your secret is that you are gay, and my secret is that I am gay, it would be a violation of trust for me to reveal your hidden sexual identity — even if I'm in the process of coming out of the closet myself.

I don't possess your secret, and it's not mine to give away.

Because this is so, I said that secrets in general have no "essence" of the sort philosophers talk about. They do not partake of any abstract form or idea that sets their need for secrecy from within, as it were. In general, there is nothing intrinsic to gayness or anything else that makes secrecy absolutely necessary. In a different world (such as that of the ancient Greeks, where homosexual behavior was rife) there would be no point to being in the closet.


I went on to say in my earlier post that we have no deeper secrets than those concerning sex. The secrets of the connubial couch, if we view them as being kept separately and individually by each marital partner alone, might seem to be his-and-hers secrets, not theirs. His unutterable delight might be his ephemeral own, as might hers also be.

In philosopher-speak, again, connubial secrets might accordingly seem to have no "essence," no universality. There would be no occasion of timelessness, of beauty, of transcendence. Put another way, the two partners' hidden, inner awarnesses might never mingle to make something enduring.

But that's not the way it is.

No, different rules apply to married couples and their shared secrets. A couple may, for instance, reserve from public awareness the fact that they use whipped cream for fun and games in the bedroom. I would be a betrayal for him to tell his buddies about the earthly delights of Reddi-Wip if she doesn't want him to, even if he doesn't see why everyone shouldn't know.

But the reason it's a betrayal is different from that of the previous example; it's their secret — "their" being a plural pronoun with a singular thrust.

In the earlier example, you and I are (we imagined) both hiding the fact that we are gay. We are not lovers; there is no connubial couch for us. Perhaps you are female, and thus a lesbian, while I am a male homosexual. We simply don't have eyes for each other. If either of us reveals the other's secret, it is a violation of trust ... but it is not a betrayal of connubial proportions.

On the other hand, if a wife tells a casual girlfriend about her husband's liking her to wear thongs under her business suits, what is being betrayed is a plural secret. What is being broken faith with is the timeless essence of connubial trust.

From something without an essence — the secrets of a sexual encounter, as kept separately by those individuals whose brief contact produces them — can, in marriage, become something with an essence, a universality, and a timelessness: the beauty of real sex. Real connubial bliss may be the only personal secret with a timeless essence.


Let's give our married couples names. The first couple, the one with the liking for whipped cream and other delights, are Sam and Diane. The second, with the racy underwear thing, are Chip and Dale.

Now, let's say the two couples are best friends.

That means, among other things, that it's now OK for Dale to let on to Diane that Chip likes her, Dale, to wear the skimpiest of undies. And Sam can tell Chip how Reddi-Wip puts spice in his and Diane's love life. Why? Because both couples are on the same exalted plane of marital intimacy, it is somehow not a violation for them to compare notes.

At the same time, these shared secrets cannot be blabbed to outsiders without it being a betrayal at the connubial level. If Diane tells her casual friend — call her Susie — about Dale's thong-wearing, it's not just a garden-variety breach of trust ... it's as bad as if Sam himself had done the blabbing.

Connubial secrets can be shared, but only with others who are personally known to share the same holy paradise of marital secrecy. All who enter the inner sanctum are alike. All who keep its secrets outwardly may share them inwardly.

Yet there are limits. It would utterly destroy the holiness if Sam were to sleep with Dale, or Chip with Diane. Nor is group sex allowed, à la the movie Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice. The inner sanctum does have private compartments.


What if Dale were a he? Would everything I just said remain the same?

Of course, Dale's naughty secret might not involve the same kind of thong undies, owing to the idiosyncrasies of the male anatomy. But would all else remain as it was?

In other words, could Sam and Diane treat a male couple as fellow celebrants in the inner sanctum, with full privileges of note-comparing and shared intimacies?

I'm not sure that if I were Sam, I could. It would seem to be necessary that our imaginary "sidekick couple," mine and Diane's, be heterosexual. Somehow, the meanings of naughty underwear and dairy-oriented enhancements to bliss change when the respective partners don't match up, gender-wise.

You don't agree? Imagine if Sam and Diane's secret is the same as Chip and Dale's: in each case, the wife, Diane or Dale, wears naughty undies to work. The secrets here are not just alike, they're identical.

But if Dale's a guy, the twin secrets drop to the level of being "just alike." They're no longer identical.

You may object that the problem here is due to Sam, Diane, Chip, and a female Dale having imbibed the homophobia of the culture. Change the culture, and Dale could just as well be a guy.

I'm not so sure. Even in ancient Greece, I doubt a heterosexual pair could be marital "sidekicks" with a homosexual couple. But even if you're right and I'm wrong about that, there can be little doubt that as our culture stands right now, gay and straight couples can never occupy the same connubial inner sanctum.


Time for a summary: I am reasoning from a gut-level feeling that the secrets of the connubial couch are different from other secrets. They alone, if shared inappropriately, represent a violation of a plural entity's trust. Other secrecy violations violate only the trust of a single individual.

Moreover, my gut tells me that marital secrets can in fact be shared (at least, some of them) between married couples who know each other so well that neither one can doubt the other's right of admission into the inner sanctum of marital understanding. There is, in effect, a secret handshake that two married couples can use to validate one another's admissibility to the sanctum.

Third, this "secret handshake" is categorically unavailable if one of the couples is made up of two guys (or two gals).

On Secrets

A confession: I've been looking at porn on the Internet. Smut. Naughty stuff ... what used to be called, quaintly, "French postcards." Yet I've found that what you can see if you enter the right words in the Google Images search box goes way beyond naughty. And it isn't really all that much fun to look at, truth be told. The question is, why not?

An answer crossed my mind today as I pondered the nature of secrets.

Secrets are things we don't want to tell others, don't want them to see or know about. That much is unremarkable. What seems to me to be more remarkable about secrets is that each one is unique.

That's a big deal if you are like me and tend to agree with the protagonist of Muriel Barbery's award-winning novel The Elegance of the Hedgehog. Renée Michel is the concierge in a Parisian hôtel particulier who ponders thoughts above her station. At one point she glimpses the master's thesis of one of her tenants' daughters and is set to musing about the philosophy of William of Ockham.

Ockham held that there are no universals, just unique and particular entities that only seem to participate in a universal form or ideal. There is no such thing as the quintessence of table-ness, only this table, that table, this other table. The notion that the abstract idea of the table is real is a trick of the human capacity to use language, thereby to invent (non-existent) general categories.

But Renée Michel disagrees:

As far as Will of Ockham is concerned, things are singular, and the realism of universals is erroneous. There are only particular realities, generality is merely in the mind and to presume that generic realities exist is merely to make what is simple complicated. But can we be so sure? Was I not seeking congruence between Raphael and Vermeer only yesterday? The eye recognizes a shared form to which both belong, and that is Beauty. And I daresay there must be reality in that form, it cannot be a simple expedient of the human mind classifying in order to understand, and discerning in order to apprehend: for you cannot classify something that is not classifiable, you cannot put things together that cannot be together in a group, or gather those that cannot be gathered. A table cannot be a View of Delft: the human mind cannot create this dissimilarity, any more than it can invent the deep solidarity connecting a Dutch still life to an Italian Virgin and Child. In every table there is an essence that gives it its form and, similarly, every work of art belongs to a universal form that alone confers its seal upon the work. To be sure, we cannot perceive this universality directly: that is one of the reasons why so many philosophers have balked at considering essences to be real, for I will only ever see the table that is before me, and not the universal "table" form; only the painting, and not the very essence of Beauty. And yet ... and yet it is there, before our eyes: every painting by a Dutch master is an incarnation of Beauty; a dazzling apparition that we can only contemplate through the singular, but that opens a tiny window onto eternity and the timelessness of a sublime form.

Eternity: for all its invisibility, we gaze at it.

Yet, it seems to me, we can never gaze upon the essence of a secret, for a secret has no essence. A secret is what it is only by virtue of the intentions of the person who is keeping it.

Suppose you are gay, but keeping it a secret. Suppose also that you have a friend — not a lover — who is also in the closet. It may seem that you share the same secret, and that therefore secrets have universal essences.

But now imagine that your friend tells someone else that you and he (let's say your friend is male) are both gay. What will be your reaction? Isn't it apt to be that it's well and good for him to part with his own secret if he bloody well wants to, but he has no right whatsoever to betray your confidence?

Secrets belong only to their originators. Even if the gist of a secret is identical between two secret-keepers, each person's secret is an entirely separate entity. Ergo, secrets (though they have gists) have no essences.


It all has to do with consciousness. Animals don't have secrets, because they are not conscious. (Or, if they do possess consciousness at some level, it is only to that extent that they are capable of secrecy.)

Jung had it that human consciousness lies along an arc from the pre-conscious "participation mystique" of infancy to the advanced awareness of a guru on a mountaintop — which amounts to the same oceanic, all-is-one immersion, now at a fully conscious level.

If you are a pre-conscious infant, there can be no hiddenness, no secrecy. The same is true of the mountaintop guru, to whom all secrets are revealed. And the same goes for God, from whom no secrets can be kept. In fact, Jung spoke of the advanced stages of consciousness as the realization of the Self as the imago Dei, the image of God.

But most of us spend our days at stages of consciousness that are somewhere in between these endpoints. Everyday consciousness is secret-keeping consciousness. If our lives were open books to everyone who is not a baby or a guru, and their interior lives were equally open to our own view, life would be impossible to deal with.

I have often fantasized about what it would be like if one could see each innermost thought of another individual, blazoned on his or her forehead: "I don't really like Alice, but I have to pretend to since her husband is my husband's boss"; "I don't want the buddies I hang around with to know I like medieval French poetry"; "I'm planning to dump my girlfriend, but I'm not ready to tell her yet."

Those pieces of inner dialogue would be bad enough, if revealed to one and all. Far worse, though, would be thoughts about sex: "I'm sure horny today"; "I'm not horny, but would like to be — where can I score some Viagra?"; "I'm sleeping with my secretary and don't want my wife to find out"; "I can't keep my eyes off her breasts/his behind"; and so on.

Well, then ... why are thoughts about sex more secret than other thoughts? I think the answer is that secrecy is the essence of sex.


If not secrecy per se, then intimacy. Confidentiality. What goes on between us is nobody else's business. That sort of thing. Otherwise, it's just friction and heat, spanning and delving, pumping and orgasm.

The eternal essence of sex retches at the thought. The eternal essence of sex knows that sex involves holding, and being held, close. You aren't really holding someone close if you know that what the two of you are doing is being filmed and will wind up on the Internet.

So, from something without an essence — the secrets of the bedroom, as kept separately by those who share the bed — comes something with an essence and a universality: the beauty of real sex. Go figure.