Handy! |
Follow me for a moment here. There are three things that you can talk to absolutely anyone over puberty with, right? With the possible exception of your parents, you can sit down with a complete stranger from anywhere and soon be happily chatting about sex, money, or relationships.
They are the three subjects that constantly affect everyone's life. They are the three things that everyone has experience with and passionate opinions about. Depending on age differences between the two of you, you may substitute a watered down love discussion for sex, but as son as you know them at all, things will, I guarantee you, turn to sex. Love would be like a half step stopping point between relationships and sex. But you always get to sex.
Relationships are huge. You spend your whole life questioning the relationships you have had, the ones you re in, the ones you are thinking about moving into. Why did she work out? What was wrong with him? Why did I say that to her? He makes me so mad when… You don't even have to think about it for a whole flood of relationship stories to come pouring out.
And the best part about relationships is that we are all complete and utter relationship losers until that one final relationship comes along where hopefully you live happily ever after. So, if you're sitting down with someone single, you know right away that you are on perfectly even footing with them. You're both batting 0.000.
They can't pretend to be all high and mighty about it, or that they know all this more stuff than you do, because if they did, why aren't they with the person of their dreams living happily ever after? And they know the same about you. You can't go putting on any airs, either. Our shared failure puts us in a world of perfect equality, and all we can do is share our experiences and thoughts. It's gratifying. Where else do you find such egalitarianism in life?
And then there's money. There's never quite enough money, we're always wondering and planning what to do with what we have, and looking for validation or to tell our precarious story. What are you doing with your money, how do you think about your money? What's important to you that you need your money to help achieve? What do you do for money, what do you do regardless of money? What do you pay in rent or mortgage? Do you have a savings account buffer?
No, I don't have a savings account buffer. I have lines of credit. If I go into debt, I'll start borrowing from myself against hypothetical future earnings. In the meantime, I put every leftover penny that might otherwise go into a savings account against other debt I have (mortgage, these days). I mean, what is a mortgage except a half-million dollar borrowing against future earnings? What sense does it make to leave those dollars sitting in a savings account, earning a meager 3% when they could be out there partying with my mortgage, saving me from having to pay 7%? If I did that, I would be losing 4% a year on every dollar I saved!
That seems so clear to me. Why it is that I have not been able to convert a single soul to my religion is completely beyond me. You have a savings account for year after year that you're losing 4% from every year. I have nothing, but that's still 0% next to your -4%. If I get unemployed and start borrowing against myself, sure, I'm going down at 8.5% per year, but only for the time that I'm unemployed. If I can be unemployed for half the time or less that you spent saving (which seems easy to do, my three months of unemployment versus your three years of savings), then I'm a huge winner in the interest game. Why oh why is my cult so underpopulated?
Anyway, I hadn't even intended to go off on any sex, relationship, or money diatribes. But you just can't help it. The power of the universal three pulls you in no matter what you do. It is so helpful to know that. You can get along and have a good chat with anyone on the planet on one or more of the big three subjects.
There is also a whole secondary set of near-universal topics such as politics, religion, and bunnies. It takes work to get a secondary topic started. Not just everyone is willing to jump into it. Because while they are topics of interest, they do not directly impact everyone's life the way SM&R do. I got nothing against bunnies, don't get me wrong. They're just not a universal.
After the secondary topics, you get into specialized stuff. Homeowners are always happy to talk about the travails of their house. Parents love to talk about kids. Fencers love to talk about the glory of the touch. Renters will talk about location and price and perks of their place. Dog owners will talk about dogs forever. Good stuff, but you have to have the shared bond for it to be interesting.
Specialized topics are the opposite of the secondary topic. Secondary topics are known to us all, but have less of a direct personal impact that you just want to talk about all the time. Specialized topics have enormous direct personal impact, but are nowhere near universal, so you spend your time in quest of someone who shares your passion and will be willing to engage in conversation on it with you.
But the big three are the universals that satisfy both requirements, and I've found a problem recently. I discovered that I suddenly wasn't in the mood to talk about relationships! One of the big three! Cut off cold! There you are, hanging out with a friend, and so she naturally asks a relationship topic question, and then instead of soul-searching hilarity ensuing, I don't answer it and don't want to discuss it. A brick wall across that whole road of conversation.
I can completely understand how it would hurt to be the friend jogging down the relationship road and hit the brick wall. And it's not a very friend-like thing to do, keeping all these thoughts silent, withdrawing. But there it is, regardless.
I had the same experience when I had a friend who didn't want to talk about money (I have subsequently come to understand that money is the weakest of the three universals. There are a lot of social restrictions around money. How much do you make? What's your mortgage?
And there's a lot of stigma if a bad thing like credit problems has happened to you. I had imagined that those people would have the best money stories of anyone, but it turns out that more often than not, they won't want to talk about it at all. Living shame is confusing to me, but there it is, too). So yeah, I had this friend, Boring J~, who I just innocently fell into a money conversation with, and she froze up. Withdrew, got upset and a touch hostile, and was definitely not happy that we were talking about this. It took me a long while to figure out that she was upset, because it was so unheard of, someone not wanting to talk about their money and their plans for it. By the time I realized I should shut up, she was seriously unhappy.
To my surprise, I now find myself in a similar position. I'm not getting upset when asked relationship questions, I'm just not answering. It's a resistance spot. Not terribly examined yet. But I'm sure that I have some really good reasons for why I'm not talking that when I find out what they are will be very informative. In the meanwhile, apologies to all affected.
Oh, here's a gratuitous relationship tidbit, which I can tell because it's about me and makes me look pathetic: last night was a high probability night for my ex-gf to call. She was out drinking, and anything can happen after that third or fourth beer. We've been good, haven't talked in over a month, and probably for two months before that. Definitely on the final fade (three years later). Notwithstanding, I made sure I had a phone by the bed as I dropped off. I even brought an extra battery downstairs, just in case. Deeply, deeply pathetic. (She didn't call. Kudos to her.)
And you wonder why I'm not talking about relationships. Who wants to hear loser stories like that?
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