Thin Skinned

I used to like the romance genre more, but once the typical cliched plot becomes ubiquitous, I've been leaning towards murder mysteries. 

Romance plot: 

(1) Two people meet. 

(2) They get along swimmingly. 

(3) One half of this excellent couple screws up in either a major or minor fashion. 

(4) The other half is so angry that the two go their separate ways. 

(5) The one half initially accepts defeat, then decides to fight for the other, abjectly apologizing while a crowd of onlookers gawk. 

(6) Couple reunites and prance into the sunset. 

After the first 500 iterations, it gets kind of old. 

Olivia Dade's Spoiler Alert is no different. But a scenario in the story that took place made me think. I'll try not to give anything away: 

Character A makes a comment. A comment he believes to be innocuous. 

Character B, however, has experienced this comment beforehand, but not in an innocuous fashion. Therefore, she assumes A's motivations to be nefarious, and marches off. 

Character A has no flipping idea what happened. 

It made me wonder. Was I like that when I was single? Did people make comments that they really thought were innocuous but due to my previous experiences, I thought they were issued with malice? 

Well, the lady who said as soon as she met me "Don't be picky," I stand by my freak out. Otherwise, I can't remember every interaction I had (once I had Ben it was like a memory wipe took place; sleep deprivation destroys recall), but many upset me. Was I misunderstanding others' intentions? Was my skin too thin? 

But then, why was my skin too thin? Because I had been bombarded with ego-destroying comments once I was 23 (seriously, that is ridiculous), when everyone began earnestly listing to me how just being me was getting in the way of my marrying (here's my spoiler alert: if I have to pretend to be someone else in order to con some shmo into putting a ring on it, I'd rather fulfill my dream of getting a horse).

Are single people sensitive? Yes, for good reason. Same as everyone out there is sensitive regarding some unknown issue. We all have something that triggers us, makes us freak, and sadly, telepathy isn't an option. 

So here comes my suggestion again that we all just wave at people and say nothing. 

Oh, and Spoiler Alert was incredibly UA, for mature audiences only, heck, I had to skip a few explicit pages.