Easy Rewriter

At a dinner, a woman asked how my husband and I met. He says he spotted me in the campus dining hall, deliberately bumped me and spilled my drink on my tray, and used getting me a refill to ask me out. This never happened. (We met in class, and he asked me out.) What does it mean that he has such faulty recall about the entire origin of our marriage?

--Disturbed

There is such a thing as "total recall," and it's what automakers rush to do after they sell a car that is not only self-driving but self-destructing: dropping parts like breadcrumbs as it tools down the highway. What total recall is not is a feature of the human mind -- despite the widely believed myth that memory is a form of mental videotape: faithfully preserving our experiences for playback. Ideal as this would be for spouses with prosecutorial tendencies, our minds are, in fact, hotbeds of fragmented, distorted, partial recall. We create this mess ourselves, simply by remembering -- and remembering again. "Using one's memory shapes one's memory," explains psychologist Robert Bjork. Basically, the more we tell a story, the more we believe it -- along with all the embellishments (aka big fat lies) we added to funny it up and otherwise impress (so social situations feel less like reenactments of being picked last for dodgeball). And when I say "we," I mean me. When I lived in Manhattan, I'd brag about my response to a street-corner flasher: "Looks like a penis -- only smaller." I'm now pretty sure this never happened. I did see an escaped trouser snake or, uh, five on the subway. (New Yorkers think of this as "Tuesday.") That was probably my sourdough starter for the cleverbrag I trotted out endlessly at parties -- till I was snidely informed that my "original" circa mid-'90s line appeared in the 1978 movie "Bloodbrothers." Consider that your husband's memory might not be the only one that's been, um, redecorated. Also consider (see my cleverbrag above) that we tend to "remember" events in self-serving ways. Any guy can ask a girl out after class, but in your husband's version, he goes on a mini-quest to get a date with you. Not exactly the stuff Sir Lancelot was made of, but modern men must make do with the heroics available to them: "I won her love -- after a bloody battle with a cafeteria tray and a glass of 2% milk." ... For pages and pages of "science-help" from me, buy my latest book, "Unf*ckology: A Field Guide to Living with Guts and Confidence." It lays out the PROCESS of transforming to live w/confidence.