We Need to Talk

It's time to get back to my area of expertise: Love and Relationships.

...ok, I'll wait until the laughter dies down...

...No? Not done yet? Maybe I'll go get a soda...

...Alright seriously, just stop laughing now it's not that funny...

Anyway. Recently I've been dating a new girl. Let's call her Lucy Liu.

Side note - is it racist that I'm dating an asian girl and used an asian celebrity as her nom de plume? Should I call her Helen Mirren instead?

So Lucy and I send a lot of text messages to each other throughout the day. After about 3 dates I sent her the message "I'll call you on my way home from work - I need to talk to you about something"

Well, this worried her. She said I sounded very ominous. In the end, I just needed to clear up a miscommunication we'd had. It wasn't a big deal. I didn't want to have "The Talk" (or any of the big talks, for that matter).

And this brings us to the point of my blog. How do you tell someone that you need to talk about something important without them thinking that you're going to break up with them? There has to be some middle ground between "hey hold on a sec I have a question" and "I think it's time we had a talk".

But what is it? How can one express the need to have an important conversation (that is perhaps on the negative side) without making the other person think they are going to be eating TV dinners alone tomorrow?

I propose we start using the word CupCake. Yes, cupcake.

If you tell someone that you need to have a "cupcake conversation" then it means you need to talk about something kind of important but not necessarily relationship-threatening.

Think about it. Just picture 2 people sitting at a table eating cupcakes. It's a pleasant thought, isn't it? They might be talking about the war in Iraq, or just which Backstreet Boy is the dreamiest (I vote Nick... that's one of them right?).

And I encourage you to include an actual cupcake when you have a cupcake conversation. If you're going to talk about something semi-important then you might as well "bring an offering"

You know, I had intended this to be a serious blog post about this topic... but then I looked over at a box of cupcakes Lucy gave my yesterday... and I just got derailed. So please look past the fluff and see that there is a serious relationship issue that plagues americans every day.

This has been a public service announcement by Trip Thomas.