Deal Breakers

Many years ago when I was an undergraduate at BYU, I took Music 101, which was basically a survey of western music. I loved the class, and the professor was great. In fact, one of the reasons I took the class was because I had heard from friends what a great teacher he was.

He was also a music snob. I got this impression throughout the semester, but the clincher was when he told us about the recording he and his wife used to screen potential friends. The piece was a duet, late romantic or something, with two female singers. I can't remember what it was or who composed it, just that it wasn't my favorite piece (vocal pieces rarely are when it comes to classical music, quite honestly). But to him and his wife it was sublime. And so when they met another couple who they thought they might become friends with, they would invite them over to their house, have dinner, and play this recording. If the couple just smiled and nodded and clearly couldn't appreciate the piece fully, then he and his wife knew the friendship was not worth cultivating.

This struck me as a pretty extreme case of music snobbery. It seemed rather unfair to judge a potential friendship based on someone's ability to immediately appreciate a piece of not-particularly-accessible music.

But I've remembered this story for years, and I have to concede that, even though it still rubs me a little wrong, I can kind of understand. I would never dismiss a potential friendship based on not being able to immediately make one particular connection. I have had too many good friendships with people I originally thought I had little to nothing in common with. But when it comes to really important friendships and, dare I say it, eternal marriage, there are some seemingly trivial things that just might be deal breakers. It's not that you can't get along with people who don't relate to the song or movie or painting or board game the way you do, just that if they don't you probably will never bond on a very deep level, and you can know this right away.

There aren't many things I would place in this category. I could be perfectly content marrying someone who didn't care for Boggle or Prokofiev or books by Bill Bryson. I think I might be able to cultivate a meaningful relationship with someone who didn't like Lost. Um, maybe. If someone was baffled about why the 20th Century was my favorite section of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I could forgive them for that - I can't say I really understand it myself. 

But Waking Ned Devine just might be a deal breaker. 

If you have not seen this movie, you should. Preferably with me. I love watching this movie with people who have never seen it. I have been showing it to groups of friends, large and small, for almost a decade since my family first introduced me to the movie. But I never know how people are going to react, and that's half the fun of it. It seems that you either love the movie, or you're a bit bewildered by it. One of my friends thought it was something like the greatest movie she'd ever seen, went home, rented it with her family, and was told for years afterwards that she was no longer allowed to pick out movies, and while I have never quite understood their open hostility towards this movie, I can sort of understand why some people don't care for it.

But the truth is that if you don't get the movie, at least on some level (and people who don't get it are the exception more than the rule), there is probably some fundamental aspect of your sense of humor that is not going to meld with mine. On the one hand, if you can tell me (with the appropriate Irish brogue of course) that you've been using some fruity soaps, I will probably love you forever. But if it doesn't do it for you, especially if you don't get a kick out of the motorcycle scene or the telephone booth scene or the chicken dinner intestines, we may become friends, maybe even good friends, but we will probably never become best friends. Sorry, that's just how it is.