On Second Thought (Kokology #46)

It’s not easy to make up a story, it’s a chore to make up the bed in the guestroom, and it takes patience and forgiveness to make up after a fight, but sometimes the hardest thing to make up is your mind. Get ready to be decisive, because in this next scenario we’re going to ask you to do just that.

You’re seated in a quiet diner. You flip open the menu and are pondering your selection when the waitress arrives and asks if you’re ready to order. Without thinking, you order a sandwich and a cup of coffee. But after she leaves, it comes to you— you’re in the mood for hot chocolate, not coffee! What do you do next?

1. Keep looking through the menu and thinking about how good some hot cocoa would taste.

2. Look around to see if the waitress is going to come back.

3. Get up and find the waitress so you can change your order.

4. Give up and just wait for the coffee.

Answer Key

Granted, making a mistake when you order is not the end of the world. You’ll probably have forgotten the whole thing a half hour from now. But the way you handled your mistake with the cocoa tells us something deeper about you personality. Your course of action (or inaction) shows how you would react to a relationship ending. Specifically it shows how long you carry a torch for a love gone wrong.

1. Keep looking through the menu and thing about how good some hot cocoa would taste.

You’re the type that doesn’t know when to call it quits. You keep dwelling on the good times and fantasizing that someday things will get back to the way they were. Odds are they won’t. The fat lady sang, and the curtain is already down. It’s time to wake up and smell the coffee.

2. Look around to see if the waitress is going to come back.

You’re not all that thrilled about the breakup, but you definitely don’t want to make a scene. In a nutshell, you worry too much about what other people think. You’re more concerned that people might be whispering about your getting dumped than you are about the actual breakup. Come to think of it, that pride of yours might have been the reason you got dumped in the first place.

3. Get up and find the waitress so you can change your order.

You’re not the sort who gets mired down in romantic mourning and a sense of loss after a romance ends— mainly because it’s completely inconceivable that that kind of thing could have happened to you. Your reaction is more a state of shock than mourning, and you’ll do anything to try to make the memory go away. Maybe you should take up a hobby to take your mind off things.

4. Give up and just wait for the coffee.

Is that “Que Sera, Sera” playing on the jukebox? It might as well be, because that’s your theme song. It generally takes you one night’s sleep to get over a breakup. A power nap would probably do in a pinch. The question is whether that makes you thick-skinned, insensitive, or the most unshakable optimist in the world.