BY Lux Alptraum
May 17, 2007
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The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle is one of those scientific principles that’s so seemingly poetic that it practically begs to be taken out of context and made into metaphor.

The following piece does exactly that.

When you’ve been in a relationship for a certain period of time, there usually comes a point where one or both parties feels the need to discuss things, to have a talk about where things stand, where the relationship is going, whether or not the involved parties are on the same page about things.

I hate that point.

Even in the best of relationships, there seems to be something dangerous about talking too much about what’s going on — as if observing, even observing something good, fundamentally alters the course of the relationship, fundamentally changes the nature of that tenuous connection between you and the person you’re involved with.

I was dating someone a year ago. Things were going great: they were very casual, very nice, and I was enjoying myself. I was pretty sure that we were monogamous, but I wanted to confirm, so I decided to have a talk with my gentleman friend.

Somehow, my very casual “I like you this is great are you fucking anyone else?” conversation turned into a tortured, emotional discussion of how he was convinced that I wasn’t going to be able to put up with his rock star schedule, how I was eventually going to feel needy and unfulfilled by him, how — even though I was perfectly happy with things as they were — he was convinced I wanted, needed, more.

The next time I saw him was also the last time I saw him.

After that, I decided to stop having “talks” with people I was dating.

There’s a part of me that wants to say that it’s the relationship, not the talk, that’s the issue — that the talk I had with said boy didn’t screw things up so much as reveal our fundamental flaws; that if you’re in the right relationship, a stable, healthy relationship, a talk poses no danger because there are no hidden triggers waiting to be pulled.

There’s a part of me that wants to say that, but there’s an equal (and sometimes much stronger) part of me that’s afraid that any talk — even one that is seemingly benign — threatens to disturb the balance, to fuck things up: that the act of observing fundamentally changes things, fundamentally alters the course of even the healthiest of relationships.

Call it the Heisenberg Relationship Principle: you can’t be in a relationship and make observations about it at the same time. Once you start observing, once you start having “talks,” you’ve come to the beginning of the end.