All week, the UCLA campus has been preparing for the Los Angeles
Times Festival of Books. Various white tents and booths have been
set up, tickets for panels have been distributed at the CTO, and
you may have already made plans to attend.
I encourage you to go and check out the festival. Walk around a
bit and look in the booths, listen to a panel or two, and try to
get a book signed by a real, live author.
But after the tents go down and the crowds dissolve, I implore
you to take this literary energy and apply the narrative form to
your dating life. Each person’s dating history is like a
writer’s collection of books.
Granted, you are probably not writing down your history and
having it published ““ and for this, your exes are
unconsciously thanking you ““ but it still exists in narrative
form. There is a beginning, middle and end to most relationships,
plenty of dead-end plot details, major and minor characters,
portions you’d like to rewrite, and often there are
storylines where the personal memoir blends with fiction.
Just as most readers consult a book’s cover before
deciding to read it, most daters don’t jump into a
relationship without first doing some research. Being introduced to
someone by a mutual friend is similar to reading the promotional
blurbs on a book jacket. And if you divulge your dating history,
you will avoid the possibility of partners judging you by your book
covers ““ the unfortunate result of keeping the past a
secret.
In any book you open, you’re usually hoping to become
engrossed in the text and not want to put it down. (I’m
refraining from using the word engaged here to avoid a problematic
double meaning that cannot be applied to all relationships.)
And just as some books are page turners and others are dull,
relationships unfold in a similar manner. Although it is much
easier to discard and ignore an uninteresting book than it is a
poorly written relationship, both can be hard to get through.
But when you begin to pen a new manuscript, it’s important
to give main characters a summary of your life’s work so they
know what kind of canon they are jumping into. For as you create
your own dating history, you have a responsibility to leave it open
for new partners to read and analyze. What a novel idea.
Of course, you can and should be selective in how you narrate
your story. Current partners can only stomach so much of the past,
and overtelling often screams of emotional baggage and unresolved
feelings.
Don’t retell every anecdote ““ this will bore and
scare your listener with an obsessive tone. You need not mirror the
explicit nature of a trashy romance novel or hide so much detail
that your past is a mystery.
Not only do you have to monitor how much you tell and how you
tell it, timing is important as well. Unsolicited trips down memory
lane aren’t always as fun for parties that weren’t
present for the memory-making in the first place.
To all those English majors in the audience, myself included,
resist the urge to over-analyze your partners’ pasts. While
the symbols, themes and writing style present in one person’s
first volume of their dating history tell a lot, there is also the
possibility of maturity and a refined style that comes with age.
And just as writers are always revising, daters are always learning
from past mistakes, adapting to the changing lexicon, and looking
for more material. So keep reading, writing and revising, and for a
change of pace, try scoping out potential sweethearts at a library
or bookstore, rather than a bar.
Bonos is the 2003-2004 copy chief.
E-mail her at lbonos@media.ucla.edu if you’re
experiencing writer’s block.