Suddenly everybody has become a historian.
A minute and a half — or a year and a half — after you declared the relationship serious and committed and exclusive, a routine daily conflict arrives, and then the arrows of the past are drawn with fanfare.
What do I mean? That one of the most poisonous habits during confrontations with a partner is to produce embarrassing or humiliating anecdotes from their past in order to justify your claims.
I think it is a bad habit. I think it is a stupid habit. I think it should be uprooted.
Look, I am not naive. It is obvious to me that it matters to you to trust your partner, and obvious that like any reasonable person you are trying to use the past to predict the future.
And precisely here, the logical aspiration to security may drag you into the least secure and most damaging position available — a shaky relationship followed by loneliness.
Let me explain. When you hurl a partner's past failures at them, two lethal processes occur, which I am sure you did not intend.
One. Since the past is past, the partner is pushed into a corner.
No physicist has yet produced a machine that will change your shared history. The events that happened have happened. Your partner cannot alter them. Ostensibly you have trapped him in the perfect position — he is supposed to absorb the blows and has nothing to do about it.
But a person with nothing to do about an accusation does not become contrite. He becomes defensive, and then he becomes distant, because the only available move is to stop supplying you with material.
Two. You have converted a solvable disagreement into a referendum on his character.
The argument you were actually having was about tonight, or the money, or the tone of voice — and it had a resolution. The argument you are now having is about who he fundamentally is, and it does not.
Which is why the short memory is an asset. Not because the past does not matter, but because almost nothing in it can be used without changing what the fight is about.