happier even than Jane; she only smiles, I laugh

society moved on too quickly from Grease Live (2016) with Aaron Tveit, Vanessa Hudgens, Carly Rae Jepsen, Keke Palmer, and Jordan Fisher

the book I’m (primarily) working on starts out with the male lead just so totally frustrated that he has to work with the female lead that he barely wants to acknowledge her existence, and that was very difficult because as long as I was writing from his perspective I simply could not reflect on their dynamic at all because he just refused to think about it. he is thinking about anything else. he is talking to her and paying her zero attention. he does not know what color her hair is. but I have finally gotten to the part where he notices her for the first time, and hee hee hoo hoo I am having fun. he’s not in love yet but he will be 😈😈😈

another great thing about having a robust understanding of the theology of the body is that if we say the body speaks a language, that means it has the capacity to speak a whole array of different words. some Christians act as if the body (especially the female body) is just speaking about sex all the time. this is wrong! the body is about more than just sex! not everything we do can be reduced down to a sexuality that has to be tamped down and hidden and feared! you genuinely don’t have to be puritanical about kissing and dancing (and modesty), because they are their own words with their own meanings, and they can have their own proper place without us treating them as equivalent to sex. the body has a lot to say.

this is so kind of you!! thank you!

oddly enough I actually have not experienced any pushback at all. I think maybe I have just been on this site for so long that everyone who hates the way I think has already blocked me 🤷🏻‍♀️

raise your hand if one of the companies you ordered a Christmas present from absolutely sold your information and now you’re getting five robocalls from Potential Spam every day

the queue used to hide what a freak I am. essays would be hidden amongst two dozen gifsets of a movie I saw two years ago. now I’m just letting it all hang out I guess

so for the purposes of this discussion I’m going to assume that we all agree that it’s not a desirable state of affairs to be sexually intimate with a whole bunch of people just for fun. I know not everybody agrees with that *gestures vaguely to the sexual revolution and the hookup culture*, but if I have to prove that first then that’s going to take forever and I don’t think it’s what we’re talking about anyway.

we’re going to assume that our interlocutor believes sex and love do have something to do with each other, and wants to know why we shouldn’t treat sex the way that most television shows these days treat sex: like kissing on the lips. you’re in love with your boyfriend so you kiss him on the lips. and then you might break up, and fall in love again and kiss a new boyfriend on the lips. in certain circumstances you might kiss someone on the lips who isn’t your boyfriend, like if they save your life or you go through a bonding experience together or something. and eventually you get married to someone and you only kiss that guy on the lips from then on, but you have kissed a few other guys before and it’s not a big deal or a scandal at all. why, is the question, can’t we treat sex exactly the same?

so, point one is: because the whole physical world is infused with symbolic meaning, the human body speaks a language of its own. we don’t assign meanings to the “words”, they’re inherent and universal. you can’t twist bodily actions to mean whatever you want them to mean, they’re going to go on saying what they really mean whether you want them to or not. a slap does not mean love; its violence is not and cannot be loving. a kiss does not mean hatred; Judas betraying Jesus with a kiss adds an extra layer of hurt to his deception.

point two: in order to exist happily and healthily in the world, we need to speak the truth with our bodies, and not try to twist the language of the body into saying something it isn’t. when we lie with the body, the whole real world we live in resists us. we’re trying to impose our own meaning by our own will onto something that already has its own meaning, given it by God, and quite frankly, God’s meaning is stronger and it’s gonna win. think of this as living in a state of denial—even if you can stay in your denial for a little while, eventually, reality will have its say, it will make itself felt. more on this later.

point three: sex, as a word in the language of the body, is saying something other than just “I feel love for you”—i.e. it is saying something different than a kiss. how do we know this? first of all, sex causes bonding on a chemical level in a way that kissing absolutely does not! secondly, sex creates children—and therefore exists on a very different level than kissing! both of these differences point to this: kissing as a “word” speaks about love as desire, when it says “I feel love for you” it’s mostly saying “I want you”. sex as a word speaks something more, it says something in itself about a commitment which is forever. what sex is saying is “I give all of myself to you and I receive all of you in return, we belong to each other forever”.

point four: the only circumstances in which sex can be spoken truly is marriage. sex speaks in the body the same total commitment that is made in the marriage vows, reiterating and confirming the mutual gift that has already been given.

this is sort of where it gets tricky (and where I think TOB speakers often fail their listeners), because when you’re dating somebody, if you’re not being disingenuous and stringing them along until you find something better, you do hope that you’ll be together forever. and so the more you fall in love with someone, the more you naturally (and appropriately, I’d say!) want to have sex with them, because you want to be able to express your longing for that forever. you don’t intend to lie with your body! you want to say what sex says and make it true in the saying of it!

I think the usual Christian response is to say “ah yes, but that forever isn’t yet promised or guaranteed, so you don’t know if it’s ever going to come”. and as much as the person currently head-over-heels in love doesn’t want to hear it, unfortunately it is very real. for every Jack who meets his first serious girlfriend in college, has sex with her because he really wants them to be together forever, and then marries her six years later having had sex with no one but her, there’s just as many (if not more) Jill’s who meets her first serious boyfriend in high school, has sex with him because she really wants them to be together forever, then is blindsided by a breakup and goes on to repeat the pattern with several more boyfriends before she finally finds the “one”. it’s a tragically common story, so common that the trauma of it is becoming harder to recognize. but it causes severe emotional and psychological harm, to give all of yourself to a person hoping for the gift to be received, only to have your whole self be rejected, or trivialized, or used and discarded. it takes tremendous courage for Jill to pick herself up and believe in love again, and often she’s disappointed over and over again. even when the “one” does appear and the gift is finally received completely in marriage, the scars don’t fade completely. I think a lot of people who get their happy ending end up experiencing that phenomenon of psychological backdraft, all their old sexual traumas bubbling up again now that they finally have a healthy sexual experience to know how it should have been. they then have to spend the honeymoon years of their marriage healing from everything that came before. so the usual Christian guidance is “you don’t want to go into marriage with all that baggage, so better to wait just to make sure”.

and while I do think avoiding trauma is generally a good idea, I think this is a little bit of a cop-out. for one thing, it kind of seems to be saying “don’t have sex with your significant other, because you don’t really know if they’re telling the truth about wanting to marry you”—that is, it’s encouraging you to not trust your partner. sure (she said sarcastically), that sounds healthy!! there has to be a better, more loving reason not to have sex with a significant other before marriage. and it’s this: if the Church’s teaching about sex and marriage are really true, then it is just as wrong for Jack to have sex with his girlfriend before marriage as it is for Jill to have sex with her boyfriend—Jack’s eventual marriage to his girlfriend doesn’t retroactively validate every instance of premarital sex! and if Jack having sex with his girlfriend before they got married is wrong, then what we’re saying is it must be hurting them. even though their love story ended happily! even though they did end up giving and receiving the gift of self completely! getting things “out of order” is hurting them and making them unhappy. this is the burden of proof, and it’s much harder than proving Jill’s sexual history is hurting her. and yet if we believe Church teaching, it must be true!

so we return at last to my above point two—in order to exist happily and healthily in the world, we need to speak the truth with our bodies, and not try to twist the language of the body into saying something it isn’t. and here’s the kicker: we are not God. we cannot make a thing so just by saying it. so no matter how understandable it is to try to create a relationship that will last forever by speaking forever with our bodies, it simply does not work that way. when the word is spoken out of the context which makes it true (i.e. when you have sex outside of marriage), it does not and cannot bring that whole context into being—it doesn’t create a vow of fidelity, it doesn’t create a shared life, it doesn’t create a public commitment. someone can have sex with you and then break up with you, someone can have sex with you and then get in their car and go home leaving you there by yourself to sleep alone, someone can have sex with you and then pretend you don’t exist. the sex, on its own, doesn’t create a slippery slope that leads swiftly and inevitably to marriage. it just creates tension between the life you actually have, unmarried, and the unreal life you’re pretending you have in sleeping with one another. it makes all those parts of yourselves that you haven’t shared stand out more strongly, making you feel every little separation as a wound. and instead of creating a sense of peace and security, it leads to a kind of desperate grasping feeling—“we’re acting like us being together forever is a done deal, but it’s not a done deal, it’s not set in stone, so what can I do to make it work, how can I control this, how can I make him want me enough to stay?” even if in the end Jack proposes, the foundation of the relationship has been damaged. it can be healed, and rebuilt! but it is not good for a relationship to develop under that kind of strain. not good, and not necessary.

what’s the alternative? when you wait to have sex until marriage, your dating years with a partner can be years of expectantly looking forward in hope, while also living in the moment. you are not married yet—so your relationship is not set in stone, you’re still deciding what kind of relationship you want to have together, which means it can still get better and better as you build it. talk a LOT! talk about everything! talk about your pasts, talk about your dreams for the future! work out your issues in the present instead of covering them over with physical affection! because you’re not burdened by the anxious desperation to turn a lie into the truth, you will be able to see more clearly what the strengths and the weaknesses of the relationship really are, which allows you to address your weaknesses and work on them! and because you’re not pretending like you’re already totally committed, the prospect of actually making a total commitment will be more and more attractive. when you’re not trying to act like you’re married already, it’s so much easier to have open conversations about the future you want together, and easier to know when it’s time right now to take steps to get there. and that’s exciting! it’s fun to have stuff to look forward to, it’s fun to make plans together!

it’s not a better way because there’s less collateral damage, because you’re hedging your bets playing it safe just in case something goes wrong. it’s a better way because it’s all about letting love develop in its own time, according to its own internal laws. I’m not gonna say “guard your heart”, as if your significant other was an enemy at the gates. instead, “guard your relationship”, because it’s worth protecting, worth giving every chance to be as happy as it can be.

all of which is to say I think that songs like Would’ve Could’ve Should’ve and The Manuscript and illicit affairs do a lot to demonstrate what we mean by “xyz is wrong”. not “this thing you’re chasing is fun, and that makes it inherently evil and therefore forbidden” and not “this thing you’re chasing is beautiful, but if you pull it out of its proper context you’ll be punished for it in some abstract future eternity”, but “this thing you’re chasing is beautiful, but if you pull it out of its proper context it, itself, will be completely destroyed and transformed into something ugly, and that will tear you up inside, right here and right now, and it will not be worth it.”

nothing is forbidden that’s good for you. nothing is wrong that will make you happy. if there’s a very specific set of circumstances under which something is allowed, then those are the only circumstances where it can survive.

it’s interesting to me how close songs like “Would’ve Could’ve Should’ve” or “The Manuscript” get to a robust ethics of love versus use. beyond simply the assertion that leaving is a betrayal of love which ought to be forever, these songs contain a pretty strong rejection, specifically of sex where it did not belong and had no business appearing. she can say, not just you leaving was cowardly, you ruined something real, but I regret you all the time—I wouldn’t do it all over again, any of it. not just you hurt me within the bounds of our love story, but this wasn’t above board at all. it wasn’t love. you took advantage. another way to say this: “Would’ve Could’ve Should’ve” and “The Manuscript” recognize that sometimes sex is a sin. not leaving afterwards, but sex itself. for the first time, we’re presented with a love story that couldn’t have been saved by an eleventh hour confession of love, by “don’t go” or “I want you for worse or for better” or “the worst thing that I ever did was what I did to you”. the whole thing is rejected as poisoned.

but these songs can only make such a strong statement because there’s the age gap to point to. to the modern mind, it’s easier to recognize use when there’s a clear power imbalance, but I think we’re getting the causation wrong, or at least oversimplifying it. the reason there shouldn’t be sexual relationships between people of drastically different ages isn’t that older people and younger people exist as such in relationships of imbalanced power. a healthy relationship between a mentor and a mentee or a teacher and a student is about guidance and education and protection and respect. these things aren’t “good” exercises of power or restrained power, they are not exercises of power at all.

power enters into the equation when one party decides to use the other. this choice transforms every difference in the relationship into an inequality, every imbalance into a threat. this wasn’t always secretly there under the relationship, it’s a totally transformed new kind of relationship now that use has entered into it. the more differences and asymmetries there are to start with, the more dramatically unequal the new relationship is—not because the relationship was bad inevitably and to begin with! but because these relationships are more vulnerable and so bringing use into them is a greater corruption, which magnifies the damage that is always there. even a perfectly “equal” relationship becomes a power struggle when use enters into it.

but the further step which is invisible to modern eyes is that sex, outside of marriage, does this all on its own. somebody who sleeps with you without marrying you is using you, full stop. and as much as I think this revelation is between the lines of Tortured Poets (and I do think that, it’s in the parallels between the two men!), she can’t face it head-on. there is no she thought about how he said since they loved each other, everything had been above board…she wasn’t sure. because modernity is so convinced that that has to be above board. so the closest thing we get to a song that speaks to that creeping feeling that she was used again is the mashup of Sweet Nothing and Hoax, and her derisive conclusion: all that you ever wanted from me was sweet nothing.

feeling very The Archer on this Tuesday night, would appreciate prayers

the ideal Without a Recipe cast for a single episode would be Kwesi, Ryan, Jared, and Joyce

the last few seasons of Without a Recipe have been tragically hit or miss, but the Girl Scout Cookies episode is fantastic.

when I scrolled back on my dashboard there was like an hour or something where Mags and Maria were both just reblogging themselves and 1) it was very charming, and 2) I must say, I wish I had that kind of self-assurance

I decided to do three loads of laundry while making three batches of muffins and this was stupid because every time I need to switch laundry I have to go downstairs, lock the apartment behind me, unlock the basement, go down those stairs, and then I have to reverse that process, and then I repeat the whole thing again (one trip to grab my clothes that need to be hang-dried and bring them upstairs to hang on the line, and one trip to add another load of laundry) and for every batch of muffins I needed to do 7 minutes at one temperature and then 15 minutes at another temperature, so for the last like FOUR HOURS I’ve had a phone alarm going off what feels like every six minutes which either requires me to do something in the oven or run up and down two flights of stairs