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Is Pulp Fiction as much of a touchstone for everybody else who got their drivers license in the 90s as it is for me?

But anyway, just about the time that movie came out, I was friends -- good, platonic, our-parents-trust-us-alone-together friends -- with a kid whose major interest in life was Christianity. My take on religion, all religion, at the time was informed a lot more by George Orwell's 1984 and punk rock lyrics than by the Bible.

One time when we were both in college he was over at my parents' place super late, probably keeping me company while I finished a paper for an incomplete. We ended up making out a little and then went for a drive. So much for our parents' trust.

I can't really say he took our little session more seriously than I did but he was wayyy more conflicted about it than I was and when we have talked in the intervening years, he has brought it up more than once.

My guess at why this continues to rankle in him is that for him, love between a man and a woman is consummated by marriage, not by slobbering on each other on the floor of a home office. And I think he was puzzled by how I could be attracted to him, the consummate Christian, and still be pretty hostile to Christianity.

I think that must have been at least part of what was alluring to him about me. And since bringing people into the fold was super important to him, I would have been a big win.

Honestly, what is more fraught than religion -- no matter what sphere of life you're talking about. Not that there aren't plenty of instances where it's no big thing. I have a handful of friends very happy in the relationships that started within their faith community. I have others who lived as happy atheists while they were dating, but since marrying go to church regularly and like it.

But when it does produce a conflict, its a big one. I mean, how about waking up on Sunday morning looking forward to lounging in bed and eating a big, greasy breakfast when your partner calls from the bathroom "Are you coming to church?"

Is religion a gap that can be bridged or is it one of the basic things that has to line up first?