Shania Twain's "You're Still the One."

It’s fairly often that a song makes me drift into a whole train of philosophical thought, and maybe that’s the true genius of good song-writing. It can lead into a complete thought pattern, so you can even draw a conclusion about life in general.

I was on a bit of a road-trip recently and Shania Twain’s ‘You’re Still the One’ was playing on the radio. For those who don’t know, it’s a song about a couple who is still together after a number of years, even though people didn’t think it would never last. And the love is still very strong. A classic circumstance. Who in their own lives has ever heard of a couple getting married, or have even attended the wedding itself, thinking ‘Good God, this will NEVER last’?

(‘but let’s keep dancing—let’s bring out the booze—and have—a ball—if that’s all—there is.’)

Pardon me, I digress into an old Peggy Lee song. A very good one, by the way.

But it strikes me that this tendency to pre-assess the success of any relationship is a waste of time and bald expression of ego, because we can never fully know the people involved, nor what makes the relationship tick, nor the circumstances that will conspire in the future to keep them together or break them apart. Essentially, it’s an exercise in futility—a blowing of hot air—a frittering of thought-energy. We can never possibly know the future, we are only playing likely odds, and even then odds that we know so little about. What I’m saying is, there’s not enough data. So why are we compelled to do it?

We do it because we like to feel we can control things. So much of human existence turns on random events. And this, the most intimate of relationships—one that touches us so near our hearts every single day of our lives--by rights should be both knowable and controllable. Throughout the history of mankind, humans have struggled to control these relationships, even to the point of making the basis of them economic. Now, economics and finances, we know something about. It has a beginning point and an end point, and we’re pretty clear on what finances and economics do in-between. And though this has worked to some extent throughout history, there have always been outliers—relationships that don’t follow the imposed rules. History is replete with examples. Songs are written about it, artistic works memorialize it. We struggle to make sense of relationships, but they have mysterious unwritten rules of their own.

To get back to my point:

I am one of those couples of which Shania Twain sings. People in fact did say it wouldn’t last—it lasted anyway. The people who said it now feel silly. And we feel strangely vindicated, though we do still occasionally feel like sending out raspberries to some people.It just shows the drawbacks of prejudging people. We’re so often on the losing side.