“Do you think I’ll have problems if I just don’t get married?” she asked me. “I look at my parents, and sometimes my mother even says, ‘your father and I caused each other nothing but suffering.’ And I think maybe I’m better off not getting married at all.” “You’ll have problems if you don’t get married,” I told her. “It’ll be the same amount of suffering as if you do get married, just in a different shape.” “You think so?” she said. “I feel that if I was alone, I might be lonely, but I’d be able to face loneliness more easily than whatever unknown variables another person might bring into my life. Who knows what problems the other person might introduce?” “That might be true,” I said. “But I believe you’ll be given the same amount of suffering in your life regardless of the choices you make, just in a different shape.” “Where’d you get that idea from?” she said. “Nowhere,” I said. “It just occurred to me now. It’s probably not very original. It’s probably a really old idea that appears in a bunch of different places. It feels simple to me, but profound.” “I don’t like that,” she said, frowning. “It’s as if you’re saying the decisions I make in my life don’t matter. Of course you would think that.” “No, no, that’s not what I mean,” I said. “I just mean that the universe has likely already doled out a certain amount of suffering for you. The decisions you make may change the shape of that suffering, and maybe the color, but the overall mass of the suffering won’t change. You know what I mean?” “I understand what you’re saying,” she said, still frowning. “That’s just the law of conservation of mass, applied to the idea of suffering in your life. That’s all that is.”

We finished our walk, but I felt a whole lot less clever after she said that.