Life Is Like a Box of...

Meredith Broussard, editor of the inconsistently wonderful and occasionally amazing Encyclopedia of Exes, says she shouldn’t have been surprised that when she asked a bunch of men to write about love, they wrote about sex. I wonder how true that is. Did she ask them to write about love? Or, as the subtitle says, was it a history of failed relationships?

When I think of my exes, sex looms large. Sifting through those memories is like sifting through a litter box. You scoop and you get the nuggets, everything else falls through for use the next time around.

Maybe that’s cynical. At least it’s disgusting.

How many people do you meet who mean very little to you? They come and they go but rarely do they touch you. To delve into failures with people who actually meant something to us is to confront our own shortcomings. This can be a tough undertaking, but necessary if we hope to better next time.

But in the meantime, before the next time, you’re just wallowing. It’s a lot easier (and fun) to concentrate on the fucking.

Scrutinizing a past relationship - not one that just devastated you, that you had to spend weeks or months deconstructing in order to move on - but a relationship long past, do people actually think about what a relationship meant in the larger fabric of their life?

Maybe it happens like Rob in High Fidelity. You realize nothing ever works right so you analyze everything all at once.

I don’t know. I just wrote this for the litter metaphor.