#WTF: Kevin's Kephalonomancy is Kontagious

<editorsnote> Nerds, meet Kevin. I found him on craigslist, kinda like how I found that half eaten bag of pretzels, and last Friday's booty call. Casual encounters, FTW! He's hilarious, and smart ... and little elves dance in his footprints as he walks. For the record, I've made two of those facts up. </editorsnote>

#TalkNerdyToMeLover's Kevin Herman

The Social Network (Is Usually Right)

A few weeks ago I was performing my morning routine of scouring the latest on Cracked.com while drinking coffee and joylessly scanning terabytes of streaming porn in the hopes that something might actually pique my progressively deviant and macabre cravings (there are never enough animals) when one of the columnists (on Cracked, not on FarmFrenzyXXX.com) dropped this pithy little nugget: “A bad relationship is like a really good night’s sleep --- you can’t appreciate it until you wake up.”

I laughed, as I am wont to do at regular intervals while anywhere on that website, but this time it was more of a knowing chuckle - the kind that would seem really patronizing and annoying had anyone else been around to hear it. A hearty dad chuckle, if you will.

I did so because shit, it’s depressingly true and reminded me of two major studies around the turn of the millennium and a slew of subsequent studies plus meta-analyses expanding on their findings - studies that basically compared couples’ ratings of their happiness and predictions about how long they’d keep trucking with the happiness ratings/longevity predictions of their relationship by their social network - namely their friends and family.

The members of the couple were always staggeringly more optimistic about how durable a fortress of blissful romance they were compared to what their friends/family thought, which was odd because the latter’s assessment and predictions regarding their relationships were way, way more accurate. Family was consistently more pessimistic and cynical than friends were - but only by a negligible amount compared to how delusionally far off in the other direction the couples were. The ironic thing is that the couples were by far the most confident in their ratings and predictions because “hey, we would know, right?” while the friends and family were much lower in their confidence, presumably because they weren’t around the couples every waking hour and conceded a substantial margin of error as a result.

So the accuracy deal does seem counter-intuitive, seeing as how the couples do in fact have a fucking wealth of data to draw their conclusions from and should know better than anyone, but oh sheeeeeit - yeah, it makes perfect sense.

Getting romantically involved is effectively entering into a binding contract to indefinitely forfeit your ability to be rational and objective in matters pertaining to your significant other. One of the studies even kicks off with a quote from A Midsummer Night’s Dream: “Truth, reason, and love keep little company together.” Sadly, from a cognitive perspective, when in a relationship, the terms “being happy” and “not being unhappy” can often become interchangeable. For any couple in dire-ish straits, the two processes can seem like the same thing.

People have what almost qualifies as a biological imperative to protect their self-esteem. As such, barring the ability to in good conscience actively say “I am happy and in a great/good relationship,” their defense mechanisms will kick in, kind of haze over most of the bad shit, and allow them to at least believe that they’re not voluntarily participating in their own draining emotional rape - aka “not unhappy”. People foster positive illusions in relationships - they emphasize the shit out of the good, and normally this is actually fine and great, but if there’s not really any good to emphasize, the mind will settle for straight up repressing the really bad. This is why the epiphany about how terrible things objectively were never hits until after you’ve terminated the aforementioned contract. Or “woken up” from the aforementioned good sleep, if you will.

So really, really long story short - if you’re in a relationship, it doesn’t matter how much interaction data you’ve got at your disposal, because your mind’s not on the clock and ‘a balanced assessment’ is strictly 9-5 shit. But that still doesn’t explain how the parents, who have had a total of maybe 4 or 5 dinners and a collective 8 or 9 hours with the couple could have read the romantic climate that much better.

Except that it does. That’s really all the sample an observer who knows at least one member of the party well would need. Humans are decent at fooling company and putting on a good face when they’re a solo act, but with duets the relationship dynamic tends to bleed through unexpectedly, whether the couple notices or not.

But while the entire concept is great and all, it’s so much more bizarre to see in practice. In my experience, telling a friend their relationship is kind of shit usually yields two reactions: unbridled anger and irritation, or totally hollow, empty acknowledgement (“...yeaaaah...I gueeesss...”). The third, the one you wanted originally - the big “I FUCKING TOLD YOU SO” payoff - comes only after the relationship has painfully gone down in flames and the smoke has cleared, when the friend is suddenly granted unrestricted access to the full gamut of their memories, turns to you, and with this look of total amazement goes “Wow, that was fucking awful, huh?”

It makes you want to scream. It was so goddamn obvious you can’t fathom how they couldn’t see it even when you pointed it out to them.

And it’s a true testament to the power of the phenomenon, not to mention exponentially more ironic, when you were tut-tutting their relationship and scolding their blindness while obliviously seated in your own fetid romantic bog swamp of tears and anxiety.

In another finding from the aforementioned studies that should surprise absolutely no one, the women’s female friends were the best at gauging both the relationship’s state of well being and its approximate lifespan. Go figure.

There’s really no take home message or advice; we’re wired to put our bad memories in a Gimp suit and keep them in the basement, and it’s just not guaranteed that even well-founded prodding from our friends - even though they’re apparently right a lot of the time - will make us see things any differently. It’s not something we’re good at spotting, even if we consciously try to be as objective as possible --- and really, would you even want to be?

What fun is a relationship in which you’ve dedicated yourself to locating the bad, in the name of objectivity or otherwise? Unless your friends are convinced you’re dating Cthulu incarnate, and if you do actually think you’re happy - not just “not miserable” - then hey, fuck it.

Actually I guess there is a bit of advice in all this: Don’t actively search for problems, but when in doubt, just ask. Your friends (assuming they’re not just trying to make a play for your sweetie) are often right, and you can trust their judgment. More than your own, anyway :). 

#nerdsunite

For more of Kevin’s politically incorrect verbal incontinence, follow him on Twitter or check out his like, completely legitimate astrological operation at Fiehard.