Unless I Told You

It’s amazing the way we can trick ourselves in to caring about dumb stuff that we’d never care about organically.

Here’s an example: my son doesn’t like tuna. Unless I don’t tell him it’s tuna. If I fry up a whole tuna steak and serve it to him but never say the word “tuna,” he eats the whole thing and tells me he loves it. If I make a tuna casserole but tell him it’s just “casserole,” he asks for thirds. But if ask him if he wants to try a bite of tuna, he makes a face!

(I haven’t actually tried, but I wonder what he would say if I made him chicken but told him it WAS tuna!)

I remember when I was a kid, there was this pervasive joke on pretty much every TV show that broccoli was gross. I’ve got news for you, broccoli is delicious. Every kid I knew that didn’t like it had never actually tried it, but they sure watched TV.

But this applies in tons of areas. I knew a guy who was about 5′ 10″, and was convinced that girls wouldn’t be into him because he wasn’t six feet tall. His reasoning was that on dating apps, he’d seen girls whose profiles explicitly said they only wanted to date guys who were six feet and over.

Now I could comment on why that’s a silly thing to put in your profile to begin with, but that’s not the point of this post. The point here is that if you organically meet someone and flirt with them or whatever, they have no idea how tall you are. Nobody sees someone and feels an organic thrill of attraction but then says, “Wait, before I allow myself to be interested in this handsome, charming stranger, I’d better make sure they’re not 5′ 11″ tall!”

The takeaway is this: Just enjoy stuff and don’t worry if it’s a thing you don’t want to believe you can enjoy, and don’t spend time in spaces that require arbitrary trivia about yourself as an entrance fee if you don’t want to. Eat the tuna, date the not-tall guy, live a fun life. You wouldn’t know anyway unless I told you.