Thread:Comments:Church of England to allow celibate gay bishops/Confusion strikes again: What is a couple?

This story interests me because it presents another "symptom" of what I see as a cultural confusion about what a couple is. It is the same confusion that I see in current discussions of "same sex marriage". I post these ideas to invite respectful intelligent discussion, and suggest that we focus on listening to each other rather than on convincing each other of anything.

In every mammal, the reproductive function is central to life. In the individual, every subsystem is interconnected, and the reproductive subsystem is connected to every other subsystem. Individual mammals reproduce by coupling, male to female. By "coupling" I do not mean "copulation". Copulation is a momentary, periodic act. Coupling is a permanent or semipermanent change of being, a change of what "self" identifies. In important senses, the two individuals fuse into a single entity, the couple, and lose their individual identities. I am speaking poetically, not precisely, so that you can grok my idea.

The openness with which we discuss sexuality with strangers these days beckons us into two traps. One is the trap of prurience, and the other is the trap of confusing coupling with copulation. These traps are related, because when we become ensnared in prurience, we become obsessed with sexuality and so become inclined to focus on copulation.

The article about the Bishops is about copulation, not coupling. Peel away the piousness and the nice words and the inuendos about progress and civil rights, and what you'll find is prurience. It is prurience that leads a male into a bonding relationship with another male, a relationship that bears some resemblance to the emotional bonds within a couple. But do not be deceived by the similarities at the surface. When two males are in a "love relationship", even if there is no physical intimacy, it is not a couple, and it is not a marriage. I would argue (in another conversation) that it is a perversion, a behavior that is harmful both to the individuals involved and to the community of which they are a part. The inclusion of physical intimacy in such a relationship does not make it perverted; it just makes it MORE perverted.