I got a funny feeling of deja vu when I stumbled across the image above. I couldn’t think why, exactly, considering that I was fairly sure I’d never seen that particular illustration featuring two women enthusiastically renewing “their old friendship.”

The mystery nagged at me until bedtime. But when I woke up the next day, the answer to the puzzle was in my head, as sometimes happens. In my youth, when I was too much the callow virgin to understand just how dirty-old-man weird the whole thing was, I greatly enjoyed a science-fiction reflection on immortality called Time Enough For Love by Robert Heinlein. One of the pithy observations of that book’s central character, Lazarus Long, is the following:

“Sex should be friendly. Otherwise stick to mechanical toys; it’s more sanitary.”

Don’t let yourself be unduly distracted by the germ-phobic misogyny encoded in that claim. (Even in his far-future literary context, the immortal Lazarus Long was supposed to be an unreconstructed throwback fossil of a man from Earth’s dark ages, aka our times.) The idea of sex as a friendly thing, as a thing friends do, is one of many themes explored in Time Enough For Love. And at the time I first read the book, it was a more controversial, or at least novel, notion than it is today.

In my adolescent imagination, as reinforced by the culture around me, sex was a matter of passion, lust, urgency … but of friendship? Not so much! The notions of “friends with benefits” and the practice of casual hooking up surely existed, but they weren’t culturally visible in the way that the internet has made them today. Dating services existed, but they were for finding a wife, or at the very least a potential long term relationship; nobody would have dreamed of naming one Adult Friend Finder. Other services existed, too, for satisfying more instant urges; but although a phone call to one of them might produce many wonderful things, friendship most definitely was not on the list of services provided!

It’s now been mumble-umph decades since I first saw the “sex should be friendly” exhortation in Time Enough For Love. That’s nothing! Certainly it’s not the couple of millennia of experience claimed by the notional narrator who notionally exhorted. It’s not even enough to catch me up — not by a decade or two yet! — with the age Heinlein must have been when he first wrote the friendly-sex notion down on paper. But it’s long enough to have seen some things, and to have done some things, and to have consumed untold millions of words of commentary by other folk.

Has anything I’ve seen or done changed my mind about the essential wisdom of keeping your sexual encounters friendly? Nope, nope, and nope! That’s not to say that they can’t also be filthy and perverted or whatever-the-hell you like, but it’s been my observation that for most of us, sex is first and foremost a difficult thing: an enterprise with high transaction costs, a transaction not lightly negotiated. If you’re going to go to all that fucking effort, you might as well spend the time in camaraderie with your partner-in-lust!

Art in this post is by Erich von Götha.