Friends With Benefits

I sincerely doubt this is what Reverend Rob was thinking of when he asked for diversity of opinion on his blogroll or about stories of mentoring moments but here it is. Remember, when you ask for an opinion, you just might get one.

I had a mentoring moment with The Girl just the other day. She asked me what I thought of friends with benefits. I told her that it rarely works out, unfortunately, and hardly ever when you are young. Why? Because we've all been fed the Cinderella story of True Love and Happily Ever After and Sex=Love=Marriage is part of that fairy tale. It takes some actual experience with the world to really understand just how much that is total bullshit.

Sex is the act of mating with another of one's own species for pleasure. That is sex in God's Creation(tm) the animal kingdom over.

Love is an emotional bond between two people engendering feelings of intimacy.

Marriage is a social convention invented to control the population's access to the first two things in a power grab of monumental proportions. It is no mistake that religions the world over seem preoccupied with what consenting adults do in their own bedrooms with their own genitals.

And for too many young people, the indoctrination has been strong. Many are unable to separate the three despite how damaging it is to their lives until they get much older.

Moving on, equating people like Konagod and Txrad or my sister and her partner to polygamy (many times, the women are less than fully consenting in those relationships but are instead sold into it by their fathers) or bestiality, while certainly not original, is still incredibly offensive and narrow. It's been scientifically proven that there is a genetic component to homosexuality. It was written into our DNA and therefore was in God's Plan. There have always been homosexuals and there always will be across cultures, continents and countries in all of human development. There is homosexuality in much of the animal kingdom from swans to bonobos to people. It was in God's Plan, if you believe in such things. So, God created homosexuals why? If you listen to religion, it was so they could live their lives alone, in perpetual loneliness, as a testament to God's Love or to live a lie and involve at least one other human being in their lie. That is one cruel god you got there.

The undertone by way of the rant about divorced people is concerning and quite frankly dangerous to those in abusive relationships. Physical abuse is easy to point to but I'm thinking of all forms of abuse including emotional and verbal. Those kinds of abuse kill too and sometimes, being alone is better than being in that particular relationship.

Tangentially, I can't believe we're still promoting this 'for life' idea when life has gone from being 40 yrs to being almost 100 yrs. When this whole idea was generated, people married for life might be married for 20 years and that was a long time. Now, we're looking at being married for 80 years and that's just ridiculous. People change. People grow. People who were compatible at 20 may not still be compatible at all when they are 50 or 60. So, then what? Stay married despite misery? Is that God's plan, for His children to be miserable for most of their adult lives, chained to a person whom s/he no longer even likes, let alone loves? I guess God's cruelty isn't reserved simply for homosexuals. He doesn't seem to like heterosexuals much either.

So, back to Friends with Benefits. Rev. Rob says:

It keeps on giving disease.

It keeps on giving lonely feelings.

It keeps on giving jealousy, sadness, rejection, anger and depression.

Yep, it’s the gift that never stops giving…until you’re dead.

Oh, that’s the final gift—when you wake up at the end of your life and have to search high and low for any real meaning to your existence.

Because there were no STDs prior to the inception of MTV. No one who is married is ever plagued with loneliness, even those in horrible marriages. Repeat for jealousy, sadness, rejection, anger and depression (the last of which, btw, is a chemical imbalance in the brain and a medical condition, not a side effect of either marriage or singleness. That's like saying that Type II diabetes is a side effect of being married since most people who develop it are married.) And finally, if being married is what gives "real meaning to your existence", you've put an awful burden on your partner and one s/he cannot possibly fulfill. No one other person should be saddled with the responsibility of giving your life meaning. You give your life meaning by what you do in this world. You share that journey with another person if you choose to do so as s/he share his/hers with you. I also am married and prior to that had 'friends with benefits' relationships and so I too am "smokin' what I'm sellin".

BTW, that brings me to another point: When you get someone else a gift, it's supposed to be for the other person, what s/he likes, not for yourself and what you like. That's what a "gift" is. Just saying.