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The metaphysics of the one-night stand

By Peter Sellick - posted Tuesday, 25 January 2005


A one-night stand is a sexual encounter between strangers who know they will never see each other again.

These encounters often happen in hotel rooms in cities far from home and spouse and family. Their geographical and social dislocation means that they are the safest way to have sex with a person other than your partner, and they usually happen during conferences, or business trips. The etiquette of the one-night stand is quite different from that of courtship because both participants know that the relationship, such as it is, begins and ends within a few hours. Consequently, there is no talk of the age and progress of children, no endearments, no journey into the other’s life, no reconnaissance of family or prospects. The object of the exchange is sex with no strings attached. The phrase “I love you” is banned because it projects a future. Indeed, conversation is limited to the immediate, as though the world is about to end.

I began to think about one-night stands while reading John Updike’s latest novel Villages in which he describes one such encounter during which the female partner talks nonstop about abuses perpetrated by a colleague. Her anger takes centre stage leaving sex as a bodily function, which is played out in the background. They may as well have played a round of golf together as go to bed.

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These sentences of Updike struck me as significant:

But it was too late, the Association of Electronic Industries was striking its tent tomorrow, and they would be winging their way back to lives for which this interlude was no lasting solution…Neither had enough to say, but as they fumbled sheepishly and sleepily for words they were acknowledging that, though they would not meet again, they had made a start, a stab at significance. There was a flavor to this, a taste, amid those of coffee and sugary fried dough, of sluggish animal ease and of mutually achieved knowledge - a swallowed mournfulness which lovers with a future avoid knowing.

I am sure the one-night stand is not a modern phenomenon. Brief encounters between men and women have existed in all of human history. But its significance for our time appears different from other times because with the fading of faith, moral imperatives have also faded. The revolution in reliable contraception has made these encounters “safe” and liberalism has told us that it is OK as long as no one gets hurt.

While these encounters appear to be as slightly significant as a handshake, the players know that something is out of joint. Something inside them knows sex that is not allowed to form a future is strange to how the grain of life runs. Indeed, they have to discipline themselves to avoid feelings of love, hopefulness and tenderness. If these were to creep in from the soul in the few absolutely private hours together, then they would enter a land in which damage was the major quality. There is the danger that the other will take up residence in the mind and haunt us while we lay beside our sleeping spouse. Our unity of purpose would be weakened, our marital lovemaking would contain another body distracting us from our passion. Perhaps that is why Updike had the female of the encounter so distracted, to protect herself from an intimacy that she could ill afford.

Their words betray that they are not at ease with what they had done. As though excusing themselves they say “they had made a start, a stab at significance”. But that is a lie. The whole episode is predicated on not making a start to anything. What is not a lie is the “swallowed mournfulness”. Such behaviour as theirs jars against a nature that the modern world has refused to recognise: sex cannot be dissociated from a hopeful future anymore than it can be dissociated from love. The players sense that what they had done was a truncation of their deepest natures. They swallow mournfulness along with their coffee and danish because they have behaved as though they were creatures that were not embedded in time, hence the reference to a “sluggish animal ease”.

In the absence of a transcendent story that gives life direction and purpose, life is understood to be a series of disconnected experiences. We book holidays on the quality of the experience. We remember a one-night stand as an experience. We say of the unusual “at least it was an experience!” A life that consists of inchoate experience must lead to madness, because we cannot grasp hold of it. Or rather, if life consists of experiences that do not fit together into some kind of story, then the person lives a shattered life.

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This is how the one-night stand is significant for us, because it points to the “storylessness” of our lives, the fractured nature that pursues more and more experiences, the next having to be more dangerous or stimulating or outrageous than the last. The story of one's life becomes a series of boastful anecdotes that do not relate to each other. The one-night stand is a signifier of the quality of the times.

We do not expect that life should be unified by a story: that it is aimed at something. The secular view is that life consists of a limited time that we may spend as we see fit. This may be glossed with moralisms about helping others and such, but there is no unified telos. To ask what life is for is to invite derision or more sentimental thoughts about being kind to others. This leaves a vacuum of purpose at the centre of life that we can fill with experiences. Women want children because they want to experience motherhood. Men strive to make money because they want to experience being rich. Couples have one-night stands that consist of awkward and unsatisfactory sex because they want to experience another body.

The things we do should mean something. That is why Updike places in his character’s mouths the words, “though they would not meet again, they had made a start, a stab at significance”. The things we do should be a part of a whole, a journey towards a destination. But liberalism has erased this and given us permission to have fun in any way we see fit. It has erased the idea that life has a purpose, which is why people do things that are purposeless. The one-night stand makes no difference to the problems faced at home.

The view that human life has no purpose is told with wit by Terry Eagleton in his book After Theory:

The point about human nature is that it does not have a goal. In this, it is no different from any other animal nature. There is no point to being a badger. Being a giraffe does not get you anywhere … Because, however, human beings are by nature historical creatures, we look as though we are going somewhere - so that it is easy to misread this movement in teleological terms and forget that it is all for its own sake.

This statement is disappointing in a book that claims to be critical of the stripping of meaning that has taken place in cultural theory. The fatal mistake here can only be spotted by someone steeped in the scriptures, namely, that humans are created in the image of God and animals are not. An identification with animals would justify the one-night stand on the grounds that it is man’s nature to take any sexual opportunity that comes along, a line that is common in the texts of the evolutionists. But as Eagleton notes, we are historical creatures and we need to thread the beads of experience onto a single strand. His conclusion that this strand only looks like a journey towards a telos is true for anyone who is not a part of a transcendent story, a story that overshadows and makes sense of chronological time.

Chronological time may only make sense in the light of the eternal, that which does not pass away. Another name for chronological time is the secular, this time of our lives that passes away. While the secular is our legitimate realm and should not be used as a pejorative, secularism denies the reality of the eternal. Another word for the eternal is “spirit” which is not an aspect of the secular that can be denied by scientists but which refers to the unseen truths of our existence. Thus “spirituality” cannot be just another aspect of personality. Rather, it is the Spirit that impinges on us and clothes the secular in meaning.

That meaning, in the biblical mentality, consists, in large part, of a particular view of time that proceeds from creation to fulfillment. In the gospels the time of fulfillment is called the kingdom of God or heaven that is present in the person of the one true man, Jesus. This is the scheme that gives secular time a goal and hence fills life with purpose. That purpose is beatitude, the vision of God that even now illuminates our life although not in its fullest expression. As Paul says in 1 Corinthians 12:13, “For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known". The idea that life is a journey towards heaven is true. Our problem with it is that that eternity has been secularised. This is what Luther objected to: heaven, hell and purgatory became a part of this world and hence potentially under our control by the buying of indulgences. The modern rejection of life as a journey towards heaven is based on this misunderstanding.

If we now look at Updike’s couple on their business trip we see that sin is an attempt, indeed an impossible attempt, to live life in a purely secular way. It is their conceit that they think that they made “a stab at significance”. In the absence of the eternal this is all that is left for them. Perhaps this is the character of our age, that we must resort to providing our own significance. How else can we explain the whirlpool of popular culture? The stark contrast to this occurs in the Eucharist, “The body/blood of Christ keep you in eternal life”.

The loss of the direction and purpose of human time in the eternal means that time becomes “time on our hands”, time that we may spend any which way without regard for its fulfillment. This timelessness is a hallmark of modernity that holds sway in the wake of an abandoned church. What does this leave us with? The popular view is that it leaves us with freedom, that fundamental human calling. But this freedom from unitary life purpose opens up the gates of a human hell, “Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose”. How many works of art, especially film, have probed this void, the characters depicted pushed and pulled by desire at its most changeable and vapid. Contemplation of this void has taken on a religious caste, as if we have been finally shown the unembroidered truth. However, this truth is only the truth of how lost we are, not the truth that will lead to our true flourishing.

It is obvious that the Christian telos denotes an ethos, an ethic. In this ethic the one-night stand may be compared with marital love as actions out of time and within time respectively, of an act that denies a future and one which forges a future. This is an ethic that overarches the vows we make and practical reason and the law of the land, that includes the whole of life since it is based on an understanding of the goal of all human life. We must confess that this has been used by the church as a crude form of blackmail, the reward or punishment being an objectified heaven and hell projected beyond death. The resultant incredible moral scheme has been a major reason for the present day abandonment of the church as well as the origin of a great many jokes set in front of St Peter at the pearly gates. It has also made it difficult to reclaim the central Christian premise that life is a journey towards God.

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About the Author

Peter Sellick an Anglican deacon working in Perth with a background in the biological sciences.

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