I know NOTHING

  

"We have to recognize the various tribes we belong to and begin extricating ourselves from the unexamined assumptions each of them mistakes for THE TRUTH." 

--From the book Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jetha

This is a quote from my new favorite book - and I am only 31 pages into it....

This book is such genius it's all I can do to go to sleep at night and get my kids to school in the morning. All I want to do is sit and read it cover to cover. 

It's all about how we basically have it all wrong about sex and love and monogamy and pretty much everything in between and for some reason I am really digging being told that everything I think is wrong. 

I think part of it has to do with the movie I saw last night. 

"Blue Valentine" is a quiet out-of-love story about a young couple who meet, fall madly in love and get married in a complete cloud of hope and optimism that few of us are fortunate enough to experience in our lives. 

Fast forward five or six years, however, and the wheels are coming completely off this bus. 

The thing I love about this movie is that nothing "happened" to make this happen, except LIFE. 

No one cheated, no one hit anyone, no one committed a heinous or illegal act. The couple has just grown weary of each other and of their lives. Who hasn't felt that way about their life or a relationship at some point in time?

The movie ends on an ambiguous note and you do not know what is going to happen with this couple as the credits roll in bursts of fireworks interspersed with their happier moments. 

I left the theater feeling sad and hopeless, but in the best possible way. 

It was as if someone had turned the world inside out and shown me that I know nothing. That we all know nothing. That none of us knows anything. At that moment, I found this strangely comforting. 

Watching this young couple fall in love through the flashbacks I would have bet money on them to go the distance, but I would have been wrong (or at least partly wrong). 

You just never know what is going to happen to you or anyone else and there is something so liberating about knowing that you just don't know. It frees you from having to know and that feels like true freedom to me. 

It's almost as good as being told that everything I thought I knew about sex is wrong....