The File System

Day 11

My mentor and first post-college boss once shared this theory, which had been passed down by her very wise husband...

The File System

Every man has a file system. Every woman that he dates gets a folder. When he's done dating the woman, he puts her folder into the back of the filing cabinet. Periodically, for a multitude of reasons, he goes through the filing cabinet, pulls out a random folder and calls the woman. He never gets rids of the folders, just keeps refiling them.

This explains so much.

This explains why ex-boyfriends have popped up after years and years of (as it should be) no contact, why a friend of mine got a call from her senior prom date ten years after the events, and why I have never dated a guy that didn't in same way, at some time, try to come back into my life.

This explains why I knew a guy who called after we hadn't talked for a few years, saying that he was getting married soon and wanted to see if I wanted to get together one more time for a drink or something. He must have been emptying out the filing cabinet before the big day!

I, as well as girl friends of mine, have explained this theory to guys. They always swear they won't do it, they don't have a filing system and they would never stoop so low as to pull a folder back out once it's been filed away, but every single one of them did do just that.

Women don't do this. For the most part, when we end a relationship, or decide that one or two dates was more than enough, we don't put the folder into a filing cabinet. We burn the folder. We hold it out, light it on fire and watch it burn. Occasionally, down the road, we might catch the scent of a camp fire, or the flick of burning ash and wonder, for a moment, was burning that folder the right call? But we always realize that, yes, in fact, it was. We stopped dating for a reason; no point in shuffling through old files when there are brand new ones to be made.