But she’s right. Righter than I realized. I know because I just got done nerdily analyzing it. Here are the stats:
What I find most interesting about this is the gradual but dramatic increase in frequency in the months after breaking up with my ex-girlfriend, who in our nearly 3.5 years together I caught using maybe 3 naughty words, max. For context, this is the type of girl who will run and hide in embarrassment if you catch her mid-fart. (She probably just ran and hid in embarrassment after reading that last sentence.) It’s not that she is morally opposed to crude language, I don’t think, it’s just not her jam.
The reason why I was interested in looking at these data was that I thought it might make a good, informal test of a hypothesis I wrote about in a post called “Why it’s important to like (not just love) your partner”:
When you like someone -- that is, when you want to be emotionally close to them -- you stake out complementary roles unconsciously. You literally change your preferences to accommodate the other person.
Drum roll for the results, please:
In the months we were together, I used about one naughty word for every 100 posts. In the months since, I’ve been using them at a rate twenty-fucking-one times that! (I used that last one just for ironic dramatic effect.)
Unfortunately, I can’t show you my cursing frequency before we started dating because I wasn’t blogging then. But I assure you, in my college days, I cursed with the regularity of a wounded pirate. So I wouldn’t say my recent bout of cursing is “unusual” as much as my 3.5 year lapse of it was.
The shift has been almost completely unconscious. I vaguely remember cursing less when I was with her, but not because I got chewed out or because I felt morally obligated to be unoffensive. I think I just naturally and painlessly adapted to her preferred communication style.
Given these results, plus the observations of what happened with my sleeping routine post-break up, I feel comfortable declaring this hypothesis confirmed.
This has important implications for the silly little algorithms that online dating sites try to match us with, because there’s something kind of screwy about trying to match people based on tastes and preferences if tastes and preferences are a function of who you like and who you surround yourself with.
But I’ll save that rant for another post.
