Beliefs and memories

I was writing earlier today about the effort it takes to maintain a belief when we don't have direct evidence of it. In other posts I've written about memory and stories and photographs and memories. It's getting to be a recurring theme.

An interesting thing that happened back when I was in grad school. A friend of mine was doing a PhD in Psychology and she was doing research work for a professor that involved interviewing volunteer subjects about their sexual history (an amazing amount of research is done for prurient reasons).

Anyway, the thing that kept hitting her was that the women she was interviewing would in the course of these interviews have these forehead-slapping moments when they suddenly remembered a sexual partner they had forgotten about.

To get a full appreciation of how surprising this was, my friend told me, you had to realize that most of these women had had between two and five partners in their entire lives and sexual experience that only stretched back two to six years (the volunteer subjects were mostly undergraduate students).

She went home feeling very superior about it. And then, watching television and thinking about the subject idly, she suddenly remembered a guy she'd forgotten. She got a piece of paper out and went through her life chronologically trying to tick off every guy she had so much as kissed. In the end, she came up with three guys she'd had sex with and then completely forgotten. "And that is with a lifetime total that was still less than ten after adding them," she told me.

Try it yourself. I did and yes, I'd forgotten people and no my numbers are not high enough to explain it either.

Every time I've had sex, I am certain I  really believed it an important thing. It seemed to me in my single days to be the most significant way I could connect with another person. If someone had suggested I'd forget them, I would have told them they were crazy. I believed these relationships mattered to me. And yet I completely forgot about people I'd related to in sex. Not only did I fail to sustain the belief that this connection mattered, I forgot the person I wanted to believe it about.

Back in those days I would think, "If she will agree to do this thing it will mean so much to me." I don't think—I hope anyway—that I was ever so debased as to actually ask for it that way but I really did think it and thoughts have a way of showing. And I was wrong. At some point, if you keep doing things like that, you aren't so much incorrect as you are deceiving people.

And that has something to do with conscience and virtue. By "that" I mean the growing awareness ("sense" even) that something that you believed not to be morally wrong is morally wrong.