Negronis, Swingers, and the Label Test
A hotel-bar conversation about labels and staying human
Sunday night in Fort Lauderdale, I slipped down to the hotel bar for what I told myself would be a quick drink—twenty minutes, maybe thirty—then back upstairs to wind down.
The place was almost empty. Dim lighting, dark wood, that low, loungy hush that makes you talk like you’re in a library. On one side, glass looking out toward a pool glowing electric blue against the night. Behind the bar: the soft clink of ice, a rag wiping down glassware, the faint scent of citrus.
I took a seat in the middle—far enough from the couple at the end so I wouldn’t crowd them—and ordered a Negroni. The bartender looked like a man who’d been sprinting for eight hours and just found out the marathon wasn’t over. He told me it had been slammed until about fifteen minutes ago, and I’d basically arrived after the tide went out.
Then a couple slid onto the stools next to me.
I guessed they were older—upper forties, early fifties. I didn’t think much of it. I wasn’t even sure I wanted to talk, which is unusual for me. I make friends everywhere. But I also wanted to keep my time in check. “One drink” has a way of becoming “how is it midnight already?” if you’re not careful.
The couple clearly knew the bartender. They had that easy rhythm—inside jokes, familiar questions, the tone of people who’ve been in this exact spot before. The bartender asked what they’d been up to. They mentioned they’d gone to someone’s house—someone they both knew.
I wasn’t paying close attention until I heard a phrase that will absolutely pull your ear out of your head in any public setting:
Turns out… it was a party of swingers.
The husband said something like, “No judgment at all—just not our vibe.” The bartender nodded like he’d suspected it. The whole exchange was weirdly casual, like they were discussing a new restaurant that had an overly ambitious menu.
I couldn’t help myself. I turned slightly and said, “Swingers, eh? That’s… a little unexpected.”
He chuckled. We exchanged the kind of small talk you exchange with strangers when you’re both trying to be normal about something that isn’t normal. I figured that would be the end of it.
But a minute later, he turned back and asked where I was from.
“Atlanta,” I said.
“Minnesota,” he said. Minneapolis.
I did what I always do. I tried to connect. “Oh cool—Minneapolis. I’ve been there once.”
And he said, with no warning and a kind of practiced disgust: “It’s terrible. It’s all burning down.”
To be clear: my brain did what brains do. It grabbed a narrative. I assumed I knew what he meant.
I was wrong.
I asked, “What do you mean?”
He didn’t give me stats or facts—just the genre: strong certainty, sweeping claims, a sense that the place had been handed over to the wrong people and the wrong incentives. In a few sentences, I could feel the fork in the road.
I could end the conversation politely. I could turn it into a debate. I could get a little sharp.
And I’ll be honest: when I was younger, I would’ve jumped into that debate the way a dog jumps on a piece of raw meat on the ground. Immediate. Instinctive. Like, Oh? We’re doing this? Great. Let’s go.
But something in me—maybe age, maybe fatigue, maybe actual growth—wanted to try a different move.
Curiosity.
Not the fake kind that’s just a trap with a question mark at the end. Real curiosity. The kind that tries to understand what good someone thinks they’re protecting.
So I stayed.
The demand underneath the conversation
Politics showed up like an uninvited guest who thinks they own the place. Then religion showed up too, because apparently we cannot just have a drink anymore—we need to sort each other into categories before we can decide how much respect to offer.
Somewhere in the conversation, the husband told me he was deeply Roman Catholic. Not “I went to Catholic school” Catholic. More like “the Church is the Church and everyone else is playing dress-up” Catholic.
Then he asked, “What are you?”
“I’m a Christian,” I said.
He frowned like I’d answered “I’m a mammal.”
“No, no,” he said. “Tell me what you are. Nobody is just a Christian.”
And there it was: not really a question, but a demand disguised as curiosity. Place yourself so I can place you.
He did the political version too. “How would you describe yourself politically?”
I said, honestly, that it’s hard.
He kept pushing. “Yeah, but you’ve got to tell me what you stand for.”
I could feel his irritation rising each time I refused to give him the clean label he wanted. Because what he wanted wasn’t nuance. He wanted a category. A tribe. A shortcut.
And somewhere along the way, I’ve gotten more interested in staying human with someone than scoring points off them.
He said something like, “I know who you are.” Not me specifically—more like my “type.” He had decided I was one of those left-of-center metropolitan people, and he seemed genuinely unsettled that I didn’t behave like the character in his head.
At one point, he started asking questions the way someone quizzes you when they assume you don’t know the material—church fathers, thinkers, big names tossed out like credentials. There was a faint “I’ll educate you now” tone to it.
Sometimes I answered with a name he didn’t expect I’d know, and I watched his face change. A surprised “Oh… you know that?” kind of moment.
Not because I’m brilliant. Just because I’ve lived long enough to have read things, known people, and done work that makes me hard to stereotype.
Eventually he shifted into retreat mode—how the best thing you can do is bunker down somewhere far away, away from decline, away from the city, away from the “burning.” The world is falling apart, so build walls.
And here’s the part I don’t want to hide: part of me did judge some of his framing. But I also found myself liking him. He wasn’t cruel. He wasn’t snarling. He was intense, yes—but also animated, engaged, and (in his own way) trying to make sense of a world that felt unstable.
So I kept asking myself: What fear is underneath this? What does he love that he thinks is being threatened?
Because persuasion begins with recognition, not argument.
Why we keep demanding labels
Here’s my theory, offered gently: we demand labels when we’re trying to regain a sense of control.
If I can name you, I can predict you.
If I can predict you, I can manage you.
If I can manage you, I don’t have to feel as vulnerable.
Labels can be useful shorthand. But we’ve started using them as sorting mechanisms—like bouncers use wristbands.
Oh, you’re one of those?
Cool. You’re in—or you’re out.
That’s why “I’m a Christian” wasn’t enough for him. That’s why “I don’t fit neatly in either party” felt irritating. Complexity isn’t confusing—it’s just inconvenient if what you really want is control.
And I get it. In anxious times, control feels like oxygen. Order is a good. So is fairness. So is moral clarity. So is spiritual seriousness. I can see the goods he thought he was protecting.
But when those goods get fused to fear, they harden. They become brittle. And brittle goods don’t make people more human—they make people more suspicious.
That’s where curiosity becomes a kind of civic resistance—not because curiosity solves everything, but because curiosity refuses to treat a human being like a category.
Curiosity says: You are more than my label for you.
The small courage of staying human
I didn’t walk away from that bar thinking, “Nailed it.” I’m not writing this to brag about my patience. I’m writing it because I recognized something in myself too.
As soon as he started talking, I felt the temptation to place him: Trump guy. Culture-war guy. Catholic purist guy. Bunker guy.
Maybe some of that was accurate.
But if I had let that be the end of the story, I would’ve lost the more important truth: when I reduce someone to a label, I get to stop loving them as a person. I get to stop listening. Stop being curious. Stop seeing the good they’re trying to protect—even if they’re protecting it in misguided ways.
And if the Gospel has taught me anything worth keeping, it’s this: people are not problems to solve. They are souls to honor.
So I tried—imperfectly—to keep the conversation human. I asked questions. I listened for the fear beneath the certainty. I looked for common ground where it was real, not forced. I resisted the urge to “win.”
Not because truth doesn’t matter. But because relationship matters more than theory.
And because I’m increasingly convinced that our national crisis is not just about policies or parties. It’s about our shrinking ability to stay in the presence of someone we can’t easily categorize.
And then I left—on genuinely good terms
Eventually I glanced at the time and realized I needed to go.
I turned to Zeb and said something I meant: “I really enjoyed this. If I didn’t have to head out, I could probably sit here and talk with you for hours.”
He smiled and said he felt the same. No edge. No awkwardness. Just two men who—despite disagreeing on plenty—had actually shared a real conversation. Friendly. Human. The kind of exchange that doesn’t show up on cable news.
I walked out of the bar thinking: That’s the thing I don’t want us to lose.
Not agreement. Not ideological victory.
Just the ability to leave a conversation with warmth intact.
A practice for the next time someone asks “What are you?”
Most of us aren’t going to have this exact conversation at a hotel bar in Fort Lauderdale.
But all of us will face the same underlying moment.
Someone will try to place you.
Or you’ll try to place them.
So here’s a practice I’m trying to adopt—simple, concrete, and hard.
1) Refuse the label trap without being evasive.
Try something like:
“I have views that cut across categories. I care about a few things deeply—do you want to talk about those?”
2) Name the good you’re protecting.
Because this is the part that changes the temperature.
“I’m trying to protect something fragile: trust between people who disagree.”
3) Ask a question that honors their humanity.
Not “gotcha” curiosity—real curiosity.
“What’s the fear underneath that for you?”
or
“What do you think we’re losing?”
or
“When did you start feeling this way?”
I’m not promising these questions will create harmony. Some people don’t want a conversation—they want a verdict.
But I am convinced of this:
Every time we refuse to turn a person into a label, we push back—just a little—against the culture of control.
Every time we choose curiosity over contempt, we keep something human alive.
And in a time when everyone is demanding, “Tell me what you are,” I want to keep insisting on something older, something sturdier, something more Christian:
I’m not a category. I’m a person.
And so are you.