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some recent trends: part one
I've been talking to people about their relationships quite alot, which is how I usually spend the majority of my time. I'm endlessly fascinated by how people get together with friends and boyfriends and girlfriends. Perhaps the ten divorces in my immediate family have something to do with it - until my twenties I had never witnessed a healthy marriage up close. I'm like Jane Goodall to the functional relationship Great Apes of the world.
At any rate, I've been blah blah blahing with people lately about this finding commonalities and getting together, and during the course of these conversations I find myself invariably interjecting some new theory in an attempt to explain it all. "Well," I'll say, "I've been thinking all guys in this geographic location do this." Or "All girls under the age of whatever do that." Or some such load of easily-argued-against bullshit culled from anecdotal experience. I take my theories with a grain of salt, knowing that people aren't so easy to pinpoint or box in. But it's true that I am seriously considering things, trying to look for patterns and behaviors and habits that affect the outcomes of my friends' relationships.
Last night I got into two of these discussions, and as I rehashed them on the walk home I realized I need to stop doing this. Because when I start discussing these things, all serious and contemplative and full of revelations from the last few years, trying to make sense of whatever situation we're discussing, I sound like I know what I'm talking about. People ask me questions and listen to me like there might be answers. And all I can think is, if there were answers, why would the single girl have them?
The only answer I ever have for myself is: Stop fucking stuff up.
It's the only one that always applies.