Sweet love story or tale of a sucker? Your bias creates narrative for you

By David McElroy · October 19, 2012

Earlier this week, a friend of mine told a little story that I love. He’s a professional photographer, and he had just done engagement photos for a very happy couple. He got to know them well enough to learn their background. Here’s how he told the story:

A nerdy guy fell in love with a beautiful, beautiful girl in high school. He wrote her love letters. He told her he would do anything for her. She wasn’t having any of it and dated not-nerdy guys all through high school. Then she dated hot guys in college. Her life got vapid as guy after guy used her then ditched her. She had a kid. She kept dating hot but awful guys. Then, one day, she decided that she should call the nerdy guy who fell in love with her from high school, because these other guys were bad people and the nerdy guy was the best person she could ever remember meeting. Now she’s going to marry the nerdy guy and they’re happy and madly in love.

I thought it was a great story about the triumph of love and about how people can grow and change, finally realizing what’s most important in life. It seemed like a pretty clear-cut happy ending to me, so I posted this feel-good story on Facebook for my friends. I quickly found out that other people viewed the story through very different lenses.

“Yeah, now that’s she’s used up,” one friend commented, and he followed it up by expanding on his thought. “This woman has a bad track record and she’s defaulting to her last best option; but, people rarely change, and I wouldn’t be surprised if she didn’t have an affair or leave him for the next hot guy. Good luck, nerd, I sincerely hope it works out well for you, but keep your eyes open.”

Another woman told the story of her own bitter experience of having rejected a nerd in high school, focusing on the hard lessons she learned from her own behavior.

“In high school, there was this frumpy fat nerd that I laughed at when he asked me to the prom,” she said. “Two kids and a divorce later, I meet the perfect man for me. Good looks, great body, excellent job. I never even remembered fat and frumpy from school, until he told me that he could never even consider being in a serious relationship with me, because in high school, I was such a cold hearted bi^#*. That is the one time in my life that I can actually say my heart was broken. I hope I made up for it by raising my son and daughter to be friends with the nerds, and to take up for the kids that got bullied, because they were probably going to marry one of them some day!”

Some men were much more cynical than I’d imagined them being. Here’s an example.

“In the immortal words of Mr. T., ‘I pity the fool,'” this man said in his comment. “He should stay where she left him, on the friend ladder. Now he will have the obligation of supporting her while raising some other guy’s kid, dealing with the ex and get wiped out in the coming divorce. (It will come and she will file for it!) All for the pleasure of being reminded every day of his life that he was once again the last nerd picked to play this game also.”

The thread currently has 56 comments — most of which I don’t have room to try to quote here — and many of them are very negative and judgmental toward the woman in the story. Conversely, one woman commenting in the thread somehow believed the story is biased in favor of nerds, implying that they don’t play the field, too.

I still think the story is just a sweet narrative about someone coming to her senses after learning hard lessons in life and a story about a good guy finally getting what he had wanted years ago. But the conflicting interpretations remind me of something.

There is no single, objective, correct interpretation for any story. Everybody in that thread — including me — interpreted the story through the lens of his own experiences and beliefs. I have a belief — possibly irrational — in the power of love to triumph. I have a belief that people can change and can overcome past mistakes (including with each other). I don’t necessarily think about those beliefs consciously a lot, but if you look at my reaction to the story, you see my unconscious beliefs reflected in how I interpret the story.

Other people — such as a number of the commenters on my Facebook page — don’t believe that people can change. Maybe they’ve been burned by certain types of people enough that they assume change isn’t going to happen. So they see the woman in the story as someone who hasn’t really changed and who will only end up hurting the nice nerd again. Various other people will interpret the story in still different ways, all because they have different beliefs, things they might not even be consciously aware of.

It’s really difficult for us to interpret any narrative without putting it through the lens of our own experience, even if our own experience is irrelevant to that particular story. It’s hard to escape that “self bias,” and it really reduces the possibility of us understanding each other. The truth of that story seems to be that the couple are happy, but nobody is willing to let go of his existing belief and say, “Well, maybe this is different from what I’ve experienced.”

Communication seems so simple, but sometimes clear communication is actually almost impossible.

Unfortunately, this tendency plays itself out in various areas of life, not just in the ways we interpret love stories. It means that we see political events and ideas differently. We see stories about religion, culture, crime, race and a million other things through biases that we might not even realize are there.

This is why intelligent, well-meaning people can look at identical sets of facts and come to very different conclusions. It’s not necessarily the case that the other person is stupid or naive or has bad intentions, as we’re so prone to believe. It frequently just means that we have different assumptions about the world — and we can’t help bringing those assumptions to bear on our judgement.

The next time you realize that you’re interpreting a story in a radically different way from someone else, ask yourself why. Realize that the other person probably has good intentions and is being just as honest as you are. It doesn’t do any good to get angry and call the person names. Instead, try to understand why the person believes what he believes.

You’ll probably still disagree with him, but maybe it can keep your blood pressure down. And maybe it can be a reminder that we’re never all going to see the world the same way, because we all have different beliefs and experiences — which shape what we see.

I still think the story about the couple is wonderful. Despite all evidence to the contrary, I believe that people can overcome their mistakes and that love can triumph. Maybe it’s just what I need to believe, but it unconsciously colors the way I see the world. Your assumptions likewise color your world.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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