Parking in my neighborhood is a tricky thing, because like most cities there are more cars than spots to hold them. As such I try to avoid using my car after 8PM like nobody’s business. If I can’t scam a ride off someone, my attendance is questionable. Seriously, it’s just kind of the way it is. I think most people I know have grown to accept this, and if there are those out there who at all troubled by the fact that I am essentially choosing an eight foot section of gravel over their company, they hide it fabulously.
Sometimes, though, circumstances of life demand that I fire up the ole Mariner after the sun has set and take her for a spin. The other night was one of those nights, and I must say it was well worth it.
A friend needed a ride home from the airport after arriving from what was supposed to have been one big out of town booty call of a weekend. A few days prior I had left him at the terminal in full supply of optimism and prophylactics, and now I was picking him up ready to hear all the sordid details. Unfortunately, though, the weekend did not go exactly according to plan, and what got into my car that evening was one unopened box of family planning aids and one frustrated hot mess of a grouch.
Oooo, snap.
What happened?? It had seemed like a slam dunk!
Turns out the weekend had been ripe with weather delays, hangovers, a car accident, you name it, it happened. However, these were not the things that stopped our hero. No, no, these were mere details that certainly poured salt in the wound, but fender benders alone would not have proven a strong enough deterrent. What did? Well, as my weary traveler explained, it had been several years since he’d last seen this girl in person, and, well, the Facebook photos in retrospect had clearly been strategically chosen. In short, she was not nearly as asthetically pleasing as he recalled her being. Not even close. As a matter of fact, kind of the opposite. To make matters worse apparently there was quite a bit of baby talking to the four, count 'em, four cats going on. And all that with a three-pack-a-day voice.
Verdict? No bueno. No bueno, indeed. He couldn’t bring himself to lay a finger on her.
When I asked our protagonist if he couldn’t have pressed forward, if he couldn’t have just closed his eyes, strapped on some beer goggles, made a wish and gone for it, he responded, with deep regret, no. No, he could not. He’d thought about it quite a bit, and the conclusion he’d come to was that if circumstances were different, if he’d been able to do the 3AM dash, he could have powered through. But being that he was a two night houseguest with hockey games, museum visits and all kinds of other activities planned for the cold, harsh light of day, there was just no way.
To hear him relay the tale with all the details was hilarious, but I must admit, I was a little depressed for him. After all, the whole thing seemed like such a waste - of time, of energy, of money and anticipation. He’d traveled all that way for nothing. It must have really been, how shall I put this, a nightmare of a bad scene. (Ok, programming note: You know what? I’ve tried desperately hard to not use the word ugly or any synonym thereof for fear of karmic retribution. But, quite frankly I just cannot muster the energy to word-smith this anymore. You get the jist – according to my friend, our girl was ugly. There. I’ve said it.) But it begged a question – much like Barney Stinson’s famed “Hot/Crazy Scale”, wherein a girl must be at least as hot as she is crazy in order to be a viable prospect, is there an Ugly/Distance Scale? As in, “I’ve traveled X far, I don’t care that she’s Y ugly, I’m gonna hit this”? There’s a term for this in psychology called Escalation of Commitment, which is defined as “increased investment in a decision, based on the cumulative prior investment, despite new evidence suggesting that the decision was probably wrong.” It’s sometimes what’s going on when a long term couple persists in staying together, despite obvious incompatibilities. They aren’t ready to admit that the time invested may have been a mistake, and as more time passes, they become more determined to prove themselves correct. Clearly in this case, the distance traveled was not far enough warrant, ah-hem, increased investment, but suppose my friend had hopped on a plane and flown to Chicago? Denver? L.A.? At what point might he have said, “Aw hell. I might as well get my airfare’s worth….”
I posed this question to a neighbor who without even thinking debunked my theory by denying such a scale would exist. “Under no set of circumstances,” he firmly stated, “would I allow that to happen. I’d leave, find some other girl, then get on the plane to come home.”
Fair enough.
Desperately hoping I’m on the right side of both scales,
khop
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