Relationships are a waste of time.

I begin this post with an ancedotal preface.

Mesmerising eyes, voluptuous curves, lips that took the classic Cupid's bow shape. She was perfection personified, or so the logic runs. It was not long until the house of cards came tumbling down. I could not bring myself to skim her texts with impunity. She mentioned surrounding the bath tub with scented candles. A path of red rose petals was to reach our king-sized canopied bed. I read the sentence in one mental breath. This was not a romantic conceit. Now who but a cheater would think of this? "Archaising does not mean that thou art a master of the quill," my girlfriend continues, "speak to me not as your superior, but as your lover." I was not hitherto aware that she was a critically lauded writer. We might point to her response being an illegitimate non-answer. I re-directed the conversation to its proper position. "He was just a friend, leave me alone." she murmured. Her story was unable to carry the argumentative weight assigned to it. She was aggrieved over words but maintained a veneer of pure apathy towards the actions those words described. She was slimier than a toad covered in pond scum.

This ancedote carries more meaning than one would intuit. It is a microcosm of where relationships currently sit in society. In truth, relationships are forever doomed to fail. "My grandmother is living evidence to the contrary.", one might say in haste. "Trivially true," I reply, "your grandmother is the exception, not the rule." All of this is in the service of humouring useless nitpicking, so we need not pick nits further. Every failed relationship lends credence to my argument. Fulfilling, life-long relationships are statistical anomalies. They are half-truths, lies by omission, and outright lies. They are but long-term mindgames foolishly seen as adjuncts to wholesome lives. They are surreptitious foolery, fairy tales that appease the weakest of souls. They do not serve us well enough to justify exemption from a sweeping disregard for unsubstantiated nonsense. Never be fooled by spurious profundity like so: "Relationships help one grow." This view risks obscuring rather than unveiling the underlying issues that prepare relationships for their impending doom. Let relationships shift out of this imaginary position and move towards a more realistic standing where the whys and wherefores of their terrors come into question. We must drill down through the layers to tease out their presence. Platitutes are post-hoc rationalisations masquerading as wisdom. Heed my warning lest the chilling hand of fate grabs and throws you mercilessly to the land of heartbreak.

We fight tooth and nail to cast a seemingly impenetrable fog across the analysis. Our insatiable appetite for social interaction is chiefly to blame. We still envisage love as "breathlessness... [as] the promulgation of promises of eternal passion..." We must abandon this line of thinking if our aim of salvaging relationships is ever to materialise. Still, negativity bias and the sunk cost fallacy compound matters. The weight of the evidence suggests that relationships will remain an affront to a basic and widely held commitment to the social desires of human beings. We are left with something of a challenge and the ambiguity should prompt unease in us all.

I hereby certify that Redditors have been, for longer than I care to articulate, hopelessly inured to pro-relationship myths. Here, I anticipate two objections. First, one might dismiss this as a "troll piece". I need only invoke Poe's Law to reject this farcical manoeuvre. The burden of proof lies upon the party that asserts the affirmative of a claim. Second, one might take issue with my style of writing. I care that my argument is coherent and survives critical scrutiny, but I shall dignify this non-answer with a response. The crowning of minimalism disempowers language. We need reduce feelings to sentences so understated as to be vacuous. Artistic expression is not necessarily stilted or meretricious. It can be evocative, compelling and meticulous.

Relationships are ticking time bombs. They are fragile, but put on their game face. They are brave, but require at least two naive actors. They can work, but they stop working. They require humans as passionate as "frogs on a branch", but as vulnerable as "doves driven headlong down by a murky tempest."

Submitted March 01, 2019 at 07:45PM by two_red_pills https://ift.tt/2GU9VFm