Love By Counterexample

Enjoyable moments in a relationship don't instruct, they only encourage more enlightened investment. The real education comes in bad relationships, when the repetition of a particular disappointment begins to tap into memory, and eventually jack-hammer into resolve, your most vivid wants. The first learning is by counterexample.

This backwards learning happens in other spheres. Bosses have no idea who they want to hire. Job descriptions are nothing but a display-case of talismans against the ghosts of bad employees, past and present. Likewise, prospective employees at an interview, to the extent they have any functioning proactive neurons at all, are on the lookout for what they were trained to hate.

This phenomenon happens every time you hear someone say "I want a (gender) who (blah)." While the left brain is saying these words, no matter how positive or romantic they may sound, in the right brain is an image of a former so-and-so wearing a big red "X".