Gaps make me uncomfortable; silence doesn’t. There’s this sense that whenever I’m with a group of people and we aren’t talking, I’m not fulfilling my duty to facilitate conversation. This, of course, stems from both a sense of egoism and a feeling of self-importance, but that’s beside the point. Within the spectrum of conversational gimmicks and icebreakers, my go-to is always relationships. Well, either that or coping mechanisms in the face of existential crises, but generally more people stick around for conversations centered around relationships. More specifically, I start asking the right questions to get people talking, all built around the idea of “make it or break it.”
It’s really quite simple. To begin, you frame the scenario by asking people in the group to imagine the absolute perfect significant other. I’m talking sky-opened-up-and-your-soulmate-emerged-from-the-clouds sort of significant other. I’m talking Chris Pratt/Natalie Dormer-level perfect. Once everyone has this idea in their head, you give the love interest one fatal flaw. Flaw is actually an odd term here, it could also just be a particular circumstance. Herein lie the variables, and the possibilities are endless.
Here are few examples:
Perfect in every way, but have permanent and incurable halitosis.
Perfect in every way, but plays the Oboe every morning at 6 a.m., without fail.
Perfect in every way, but the only movie they’ll ever watch is Castaway.
From here, the scenarios can get progressively sillier or more profound. My personal favorite is the classic “once a month at random they sincerely believe they are a gorilla for three minutes” scenario. I’m always alarmed with how many people are okay with this, considering no family gathering, wedding ceremony, or funeral is exempt from your spouse potentially acting like a gorilla. I couldn’t live with that kind of uncertainty.
The meat of the conversation really lies within the reasons why people might choose to break it rather than make it. One of my favorite scenarios lies in the occupational options of the significant other. If they are perfect in every way, but their primary income derives from scheming large corporations out of money, donating half to the poor and pocketing the other half, could you still make it work? As somewhat of a closeted socialist I always answer yes (albeit tongue in cheek), but the ethical dilemma therein turns the majority of those I ask away. The reasons given vary. Mainly people are worried about being legally tied to this hypothetical spouse in the event that they were hypothetically arrested for their crimes—which is fascinating, considering the issue lies more in getting caught than thieving from billionaires. Still, a modern day Robin Hood that looked like Chris Pratt/Natalie Dormer would be hard to turn down. Maybe that’s just me.
Sometimes the table will turn and someone in the group will ask me a completely unprecedented, new scenario. One involved a binding legal contract and the actor Tom Hanks. Another involved a scenario where one day out of the year, they turned into a Thumb Thumb from Spy Kids. I said no to the latter, obviously. Can anyone live with that kind of uncertainty?
