I’ve been doing some abstract organizing of general classes of documents into groups today, which is something that could be interesting to a few people but won’t be to most. I thought about going into it here, but, well, I’m going to pass.

But that got me thinking about storytelling and boring stories, and the long-term health of relationships. We’re social creatures—we like to talk, we like to tell stories, we like to convey the thoughts we have so others can hear them and respond or applaud or sympathize. But when you’re with someone for any amount of time, you hear all of their old stories (maybe more than once), and so all you two are left with for novelty are the new stories. And if you spend much of your free time together, you’re often both there when the new stories happen.

And how many other new stories does the average person collect on a given day? What sort of adventures do we go through on a Tuesday? Get up, go to work, have some lunch, talk around the metaphorical water cooler, come home. And yet we want to tell stories. We want to talk about our day. We want to convey just why, and how, some little teacup tempest pissed us off, even if it doesn’t seem like a big deal to the listener.

And so part of a relationship is, in a sense, figuring out a system for listening to stories that trend toward boring. I suppose there’s a lot of different ways to handle it—for our part, Angela and I are fairly transparent if a story is just plain boring, and we often invoke a “no talking about work” rule some evenings to pre-empt the duller or more emotionally frustrating tales. But I wonder if the ability to come up with a mutually-satisfying boring-story-management system—whatever it may be—isn’t basically essential to a long-term relationship.