Blink

Owl Pin

I read the book Blink by Malcolm Gladwell last night. It must have been good because I stayed up until 2am reading it--something I usually only do with fiction books.

Blink is all about thinking without thinking. Like how you might make a snap judgement of someone--and how you might be right about it. I was really, really interesting.  And it made me reflect a lot on my previous-to-this-one relationship.

It wasn't a wonderful relationship, but it wasn't horrible, either. It was just filled with scenes that could comprise a list of 'you know your relationship is dull and not going to last when...' anecdotes.  One of these was that we didn't fight--except over flowers.  Specifically, over proper flower identification.  Even more specifically than that, over the fact that I could point to one very prevalent roadside wildflower and identify it going past at 65 mph, and he never believed me.

I cannot do this with everything, but for a while I would practice my plant-identifying skills every day, and this particular flower (birdsfoot trefoil, although I did have the name wrong at once point) has a very distinctive color and growing pattern. I can identify ginkgo trees from the road, too, and I think I can tell oaks from maples (although it's harder to double check). To my ex this was inconceivable.

According to Blink all I was doing was looking at something and taking a 'thin-slice' view of what I saw and subconsciously coming to a conclusion of what the flower was. I've always called it 'pattern recognition,' and trusting my gut in cases like that (or when figuring out book plots ahead of time, among other things) is a large part of how I'm intelligent, so when my ex would question that I knew what the flower was, he was doubting a huge chunk of my intelligence, which was why I was unwilling to back down on it.

Then he claimed I wouldn't back down because I always had to be right, but I think it had far more to do with the fact that he couldn't handle being wrong, since I'm not always right (although I could be wrong about that) and when I'm not, I admit it.

Blink also had a section about couples, and that one of the best predictors of whether a marriage will work out is the presence of contempt in a relationship. I didn't mean to hold my ex in contempt, but after he doubted my flower-identifying skills (among other things) it just sort of happened. I'm much happier now; good riddance to bad relationships.