See no evil, hear no evil

I went and met three of my old friends from high school the other night. We basically just sat around and talked for hours and behaved impeccably, in large part because we’re all too old now to misbehave without pulling a muscle.

The next day my wife asked me a number of questions about my friends – you know, is this one still married, is that one dating anybody, is this one going to have any more kids, where does that one work now, etc. etc.

I gave her an honest answer: “I don’t know.”

How in the world, she wanted to know, did you spend five hours with these people and not find anything out?

“Well,” I said, “It just didn’t come up.”

She wanted to know, in that case, what we did talk about. I said, you know, important things, like how the Bulldogs are going to do this year, and how goofy some of our old classmates look in their Facebook pictures, and the time somebody’s hair caught on fire when we were riding around in a Volkswagen bus, and how I work with a woman who got married and hyphenated her last name, so her name is now Jones-Jones. You know, stuff like that.

I hated to disappoint her by not knowing all of the details of their personal lives, but men aren’t like that. Unlike what you see in movies, men don’t sit around with each other and say stuff like, “You know, Carol and I are growing apart, and we’re having a lot of problems in our relationship. We just don’t communicate on the same level we used to, and I fear we may be headed for divorce.”

What’s more likely to happen is one day you run into him, and he’s not with Carol, he’s now with Brandy, and you just assume that he and Carol got divorced, or she’s dead, or she’s out of town and he’s just feeling really brave. In any case, you don’t ask, you just say hi to Brandy and move on.

My wife, on the other hand, will come home and say, “Did I tell you about Jenny? Well, she and her husband have been trying to conceive, and they’re having some trust issues because she found another woman’s underwear in his suitcase, but they got past that, but now they’re having trouble because his sperm count is low, and she’s considering in-vitro fertilization, but she’s not sure she should even get pregnant because she has a sister who is bi-polar and once attacked her mother with a pickaxe, and she’s afraid it might run in the family…”

And I’ll say, “Who is Jenny?” And she’ll say, “Oh, I just met her.”

I don’t know that it’s so much that we don’t care about our friends’ personal lives, we just don’t want to be involved, and we don’t want to have to answer questions. For example, let’s say your friend confides in you that he’s getting a divorce because he realized he made a mistake marrying his wife, and he doesn’t love her, and you relay this information to your wife. Here’s how that’s going to go:

Wife: “So, that’s it. He’s just going to dump her for some hot young thing? What a pig.”
You: “No, that’s not it. He just realized he shouldn’t have married her.”
Wife: “Oh, really? And is that what you’re going to do? Realize you made a mistake marrying me?”
You: “What? No. Of course not. But he doesn’t love her.”
Wife: “So I guess one day you’re just going to walk in and tell me you don’t love me and leave me here to raise the kids by myself while you go flitting across the country with some trashy Hooters waitress. Is that what you’re telling me?”

At this point, you spend about 12 straight hours trying to convince her that you are nothing like your friend, or you pretend you’re late for a meeting and rush out the door, or you double over in pain and fake appendicitis. Either way, it’s going to cost you some jewelry.

So I say, when it comes to the personal lives of your friends, follow the Sgt. Schultz model from Hogan’s Heroes – I see nothing. I know nothing. Trust me, it’s the best way.