Purification Wrap-Up

My favorite unemployed professional basketball player has a couple new articles up at ESPN.com since the last time I mentioned him, including this one from yesterday. The topic is very interesting...at least to me it is...and considering that it is coming from someone whose peers have claimed their $7 million dollar contract isn't enough to feed their family or that they should be provided with a stipend by the NBA to fulfill the NBA Dress Code of "slacks and a collared shirt", it is particularly thoughtful. The topic is race, or rather, how political correctness in this country precludes open discussions about topics (such as race) that are openly discussed in Europe or elsewhere in the world. John Stuart Mills must be rolling over in his grave somewhere. At least if he read this overblown bit regarding seemingly innocuous comments by Air Force Academy Coach Fisher DeBerry.

It got me thinking, however, about other times in life when you feel like you can't say exactly what you feel or what you're thinking. I'm speaking of course, about the following encounter, somewhat ubiquitous in male-female relationships:

"Honey, do I look fat in these jeans?"

"......................um." (staring straight ahead and trying to become invisible)

As far as I see it, there are several possible responses to this question, ".....um" not being one of them.

1. You're married to Angie Harmon (Implicit in this is that you're not Jason Sehorn, because obviously you would have killed yourself by now for being a tremendous douchepacker). So, it's Angie Harmon, so OF COURSE she looks good in those jeans. In which case the appropriate response is: "You're Angie Harmon. OF COURSE you look good in those jeans. I demand sex immediately." Excuse me, I have to go watch Law & Order Season 1 on DVD...

2. She looks anything other than absolutely fabulous in jeans. In this case, there are a million possibilities, but I believe there is only one correct one. "You look great, babe." You can, of course, insert your own cutesy term for your significant other in place of babe...hon, honey, dude, woman, muffin, sweety, vulva. In other words, you lie.

Now, obviously there are degrees of lying, and in the grad scheme of things, this kind of lie is like a 2 on a scale of 1 to 10 (where 1 is a little white lie and 10 is Fox News). But this is the kind of issue that eventually led to the end of my last relationship, and the subsequent beginning of the Purification, which I hope to wrap up here in this series of posts.

I was in a great relationship where we could talk about all kinds of things that are normally taboo. I thought it was really unique. We wanted to have a "totally open and honest" relationship, where we could talk through anything, and in fact always did. I (and she felt the same way) was always very proud of the way that we could talk through difficult periods, which are plentiful when you go more than two years living several thousand miles apart. But I still always felt, along the lines of the above example, that there are times in a relationship when you are forced to lie....that there are things that your significant other is probably just better off not hearing about.

Dangerous thinking...and my fib-arometer was obviously way off....