Our Mistake: Protest not a boycott

DEAR MISS LONELYHEARTS: I am lonely to the bone. My girlfriend has been away working for the summer, and I promised I wouldn’t cheat on her. But now I have heard through the grapevine she’s seeing a guy who works at her kids’ camp.

I think the source can be trusted, because she’s a friend who cares about me, almost like a sister. Actually I think she kind of wants me herself, but never seems to cross that line. Should I believe her “inside information” when she might be wanting to go out with me herself?

My girlfriend won’t be back until the very end of August and the messages and phone calls back and forth have been less and less frequent. Maybe she’s just busy or getting rested up to see me — or maybe she’s seeing someone else. I’m feeling jealous and I hate it! Maybe I should see somebody else too. Please advise ASAP.

— Lonely and Suspicious, Transcona

If you spend any amount of time having deep conversations on sensitive subject matters, you will undoubtedly encounter patterns of thought and speech peppered into the discourse as if certain people were helpless but to utter them.

Perhaps you are trying to get to the heart of a complicated matter and the disagreement with your conversational partner starts to get a little heated. Often somebody will dust off the old diplomatic gem of “let’s agree to disagree” to extinguish further argument.

Or perhaps you are trying to console a grief-stricken person who has gone through a traumatic event. People in such a state will often rail against the state of the universe with powerful philosophical sentiments, demanding to know how such injustice could be permitted. You would not be the first person to misguidedly try to soothe them with something like “everything happens for a reason.” Or, less secularly, “God works in mysterious ways.”

These are known as thought-terminating clichés. Pithy little sayings that sound like folksy wisdom but serve mostly to sever a train of thinking, often because it is either uncomfortable or more complicated than the person is willing to engage. Admittedly, they often come from a good-natured place of keeping the peace, though it could easily be argued that they mostly serve to preserve to comfort or indulge the intellectual laziness of those who speak them.

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