MARRIAGE

'Families and marriages fail too often because they are trying to answer too many human needs. A spouse is required to be a lover, a friend, a mother, a father, a soulmate, a co-worker, and so on. Few people can be all these things for one person. And when demands are set too high, disappointment can only follow. If husbands and wives have deeper and stronger friendships outside the marital unit, the marriage has more space to breathe and fewer burdens to bear.'

Andrew Sullivan, Love Undetectable, p.234.

FRIENDSHIP

'...the trajectory of a homosexual life often places, in a way unique to itself, a focus on friendship that many heterosexuals, to their great loss, never quite attain. In fact, I think the primary distinction between homosexuals and heterosexuals in our society is not that they are attracted to different genders, and certainly not that their sexual lives and needs are radically different from each other. It is that homosexuals, by default as much as anything else, have managed to sustain a society of friendship that is, for the most part, unequalled by almost any other part of society. Heterosexual women have long sustained it, of course, when their familial responsibilities have not overwhelmed them. But heterosexual men, to their great spiritual and emotional impoverishment, have for far too long let it pass them by.'

Andrew Sullivam, Love Undetectable, p.230.

FRIENDSHIP

'What do we tell our friends? We tell them everything. And we are not afraid of embarrassing ourselves or boring each other.'

Andrew Sullivan, Love Undetectable, p.216.

FRIENDSHIP

'...friendship delivers what love promises but fails to provide. The contrasts between the two are, in fact, many, and largely damning to love's reputation. Where love is swift, for example, friendship is slow. Love comes quickly, as the song has it, but friendship ripens with time. If love is at its most perfect in its infancy, friendship is more treasured as the years go by.'

Andrew Sullivan, Love Undetectable, p.202.

THE CHURCH & RELATIONSHIPS

'The Christian churches, which once widely taught the primacy of caritas to eros, and held out the virtue of friendship as equal to the benefit of conjugal love, are our culture's primary and obsessive propagandist's for the marital unit and its capacity to resolve all human ills and satisfy all human needs. Far from seeing divorce and abortion and sexual disease as reasons to question our society's apotheosis of eros, these churches see them merely as opportunities to intensify the idolatry of eros properly conducted and achieved.'

Andrew Sulivan, Love Undetectable, p.199.  

FRIENDSHIP

'...of all our relationships, friendship is the most common and the most natural. In its universality, it even trumps family. Many of us fail to marry, and many more have no children; others never know their mother or father, and plenty have no siblings. But any human being who has ever lived for any time has had a friend. It is a relatiuonship available to and availed by all of us. It is at once the most particular and most universal relationship there is. 

And yet we hardlyt talk about it. What we know most intimately in practice, we flee from in the abstract.'  

Andrew Sullivan, Love Undetectable, p.176.

HOMOSEXUALITY

'...the complexity of the roots of homosexuality, the fact that it may be a condition both imposed upon and created by homosexuals themselves, means that it cannot simply be debated like the color of a person's hair. Gay people would doubtless like the hair analogy to be accurate, because it would enable them to avoid the wrenching and often painful self-analysis they would otherwise have to embark upon. But alas it isn't. And pain is, still, an ineluctable part of the examined homosexual life.' 

Andrew Sullivan, Love Undetected, p.164.

HOMOSEXUALITY

'Homosexuality is not, in the usual sense of the word, normal. But nor is is, from a pyschoanalytic context, necessarily abnormal. It is different. Because, in all likelihood, of a genetic disposition and a unique set of early environmental influences, some boys and girls grow up to become emotionally attracted to people of their own gender. It doesn't happen very often, and when it does, it is subject to a unique confluence of emotional, psychological circumstances that make very homosexual child as different from his peers as every heterosexual child. Although a war has been waged over this somewhat banal conclusion, it is difficult, it seems to come to any other. We don't yet know the precise contours of this journey, but we know roughly where it goes.' 

Andrew Sullivan, Love Undetectable, p.164.

HOMOSEXUALITY & THE CHURCH

'When you begin to see homosexuality not as some bizarre and willful attempt to practice a specific sexual act, but as a deep and complex part of a human person, a person who needs as much love and as much divine love as any other human person, then it becomes clear how it is, in fact, impossible to hate the "sin" and love the "sinner." Or how the very formulation is, in fact, a way of denigrating homosexual people, denying their humanity, erasing their integrity. It is as if we were to say that we loved Jews, so long as they never went to a synagogue; or that we welcomed immigrants, so long as they never tried to learn English. It is a rejection masquerading as an acceptance, and it perpetuates, in the guise of alleviating, the very ethical conflict from which homosexuals are doggedly trying to escape.'

Andrew Sullivan, Love Undetectable, p.50.

HOMOSEXUALITY & THE CHURCH

'With regard to homosexuality, I inherited no moral and religious teaching that could guide me to success or failure. In my adolescence and young adulthood, the teaching of the Church was merely a silence, an increasingly hollow denial even of the existence of homosexuals, let alone a credible ethical guide to how they should lead their lives. It is still true that in over thirty years of weekly churchgoing, I have never heard a homily that attempted to explain how a gay man should live, or how his sexuality should be expressed. I have heard nothing but a vast and endless and embarrassed silence, an awkward unexpressed desire for the simple nonexistence of such people, for their absence from the moral and physical universe, for a word or a phrase, like "objective disorder," that could simply abolish the problem they represented and the diverse humanity they symbolized. The teaching I inherited was a teaching that, in the best of all possible worlds, I simply would not exist. And it was hard to disobey this; since it was not an order, it was merely a wish.'

Andrew Sullivan, Love Undetectable, p.42.

THE GOSPELS

'"Martha, Martha," I don't think Jesus ever speaks to anyone else in the Gospels that way. "Martha, Martha." He repeats her name twice, exasperated but loving, admonitory but intimate. It's one of those many details that convince me so much of the Gospels is true, the kind of intimate, intensely personal way of speaking, a detail that would never have been invented by someone trying to bludgeon the reader into some didactic lesson, the kind of address that a real person once used for a real person he loved, as much as for her faults as in spite of them. "Martha, Martha." "Andrew, Andrew." It is not the tone simply of love; it is the tone of friendship, an unmistakable tone, a tone that I did not only recognize but suddenly, breathtakingly, knew.'

Andrew Sullivan, Love Undetectable: reflections on friendship, sex and survival, p.31.