TOD 09.24.07

I find it fascinating just how many ways there are for people make themselves look bad unintentionally. For instance, I’ve always found it amazing that people go around complaining about their spouses to others. My question for them is always the same. “Wow, what idiot chose to marry a worthless person like that? I mean, geez, if a person’s a mess, that’s just who they are. But for someone else to actually choose to marry someone who’s such a mess. That’s really bad.” I get punched a lot less often than you might expect.

But isn’t that the point? Complaining about your spouse is really just another way of telling people you’re a fool, since you picked that person. But there’s another, less obvious way we do it, too. Many of us feel the need to win all our domestic arguments. But if you do win them all, that means you married someone so low in intelligence that they offer nothing to your marriage, which makes you look that much more foolish.

On the other hand, if you want to boast, brag about how many arguments you lose to the brilliant person you selected to marry. Just another one of those cases where losing can actually make your judgment look really good.