What Goes Around

One of the places people tend to go wrong is a failure to recognize patterns in life. On the other end of the spectrum, compulsively detecting patterns where there are none is a symptom of mental illness.

Examples.

If a person gets drunk and has sex with someone, wakes up and finds this someone less interesting than they’d thought while drinking, then decides to ditch this person in favor of getting drunk and meeting someone else – failure to see the pattern.

If a person finds a tails-up nickel, taps it three times against a lamppost, kisses it, buries it under a rose bush, then goes out and has a sexual encounter they believe to be the direct result of the business with the nickel – crazy.

With that in mind, consider this: Every relationship Person A has been in has fallen apart. Then Person A meets Person H. They hit it off, but Person A stays distant and keeps looking for the end, because with Persons B-G there was an end.

The question is, is Person A doing the smart thing, recognizing the pattern and protecting themselves by not getting too attached? Or are they imagining a pattern that, due to the infinite variables of individual personalities, can’t possibly be real? Or is this construction of barriers a pattern in itself, making the whole thing a self-fulfilling prophecy? Will this all be irrelevant if Person A can just hang in there until they meet Person I or J and find themselves sucker-punched by happiness? In the mean time, will these issues be passed on to Person H, who’ll pass them to Person K, and so on, until we’re all connected by an arbitrary alphabet of broken relationships? Should that make us feel better, knowing we’re never alone in our aloneness?

How about the thought that every relationship you'll be in will fail, until one doesn’t?

It’s after 5 in the morning. Did any of that make the least bit of sense?

Okay. Bed.