A few years ago, for example, Wegner set up a memory test with 59 couples, all of whom had been dating for at least three months. Half of the couples were allowed to stay together, and half were split up, and given a new partner whom they didn't know. Weger then asked all the pairs to read 64 sentences, each with an underlined word, like "Midori is a Japanese melon liqueur." Five minutes after looking at all the statements, the pair were asked to write down as many as they could remember. Sure enough, the pairs who knew each other remembered substantially more items than those who didn't know each other. Wegner argues that when people know each other well, they create an implicit joint memory system - a transactive memory system - which is based on an understanding about who is best suited to remember what kinds of things. "Relationship development is often understood as a process of mutual self-disclosure," he writes. "Although it is probably more romantic to cast this process as one of interpersonal revelation and acceptance, it can also be appreciated as a necessary precursor to transactive memory." Transactive memory is part of what intimacy means. In fact, Wegner argues, it is the loss of this kind of joint memory that helps to make divorce so painful. "Divorced people who suffer depression and complain of cognitive dysfunction may be expressing the loss of their external memory systems," he writes. "They were once able to discuss their experiences to reach a shared understanding...They once could count on access to a wide range of storage in their partner, and this, too, is gone...The loss of transactive memory feels like losing a part of one's own mind."
Wouldn't it be sad/funny if the only reason why people got married was so they could have someone around to remember where the car keys were? Speaking of which, there's a funny little line in an excellent article in this month's GQ about this group of voluntary virgins, "who've formed an online chat group called 'I'm Going to Have Crazy Sex Once I'm Married'".
Boy, are THOSE guys in for a surprise. Here's how the article ends:
So do Jake and Silas and the Corps. Their awkward orgies of mutual confession, their comical maskings of naughty magazine covers, and their demoralizing lapses into porn viewing and self-abuse suggest that they're truly struggling, truly fighting, and that they've actually seen the enemy's face - in the bathroom mirror, possibly. It's impossible not to wish such scrappers well. They deserve to succeed. They deserve to get their Mistys and all the postponed great orgasms she can give them.
But for the Chads of the movement, the airy theorists and humorless purists, I don't know what I wish. Humbling come-uppances, perhaps, when they finally climb into their idealized marriage beds and discover the world is made of flesh, not words, and that their partners are human women, not quasi Eves. "Take me, it's time," their virgin brides will urge them, and after the grooms have consumated the act, maybe their ladies will also say something like this to them: "You mean that's all? That's it? That thirty seconds? That's what we've been waiting all our lives for?"
That's when the serious battle will begin.
A-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-men.
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