Christensen: Gossip not just for high school students

As with most things, there are two sides to the gossip coin. One is the warm feeling you get… As with most things, there are two sides to the gossip coin. One is the warm feeling you get when talking about a mutual acquaintance with a friend — good gossip, sharing news. The other is the stomach-flip you get when you realize that someone is sticking his or her nose where it shouldn’t go. Hey, stay outta there.

Remember high school? Me neither. I was one of those girls who did her own thing, kept to a close circle of friends and spent four years virtually unnoticed — in my humble opinion, the best way to spend the ages of 14 to 18. But I wasn’t so invisible that I didn’t hear the rumors about pregnancy, expulsions, so-and-so in the football locker room. I’m not gonna lie, I got pleasure out of it too — that’s why we read celebrity magazines, right? We like to hear about people at the top of the pedestal messing up somehow. Who wasn’t interested in Tiger Woods’ lady harem and the golf club through his windshield? I know I was.

Anyway, by the time I got to college, I thought that everyone would have relaxed with this stuff a little bit. False. Once you move past freshman oblivion and start to see people in the same circles, the gossip continues — a little more pointed and a little more uncomfortable. After all, in Pittsburgh there are usually only two degrees of separation.

Here’s what I’m wondering: Why doesn’t it stop? And why do we continue to care about others’ personal lives — lives that, at times, have very little to do with our own?

Well, first of all, people are social animals. Gossip helped forge our identity in early times, when we all lived in small communities. “Did you hear who slept on Urg’s hide pallet last night?” was probably one of the first interrogatives ever uttered. Kidding. Still, according to research in evolutionary psychology — cited by PsychologyToday.com — gossip helped early man navigate the complexities of a clan and figure out the relationships that laid therein.

Our brains are also wired to interpret signs in verbal and body language to detect one another’s motives and emotions, and evaluate how to use them to our advantage — some scientists call it Machiavellian intelligence. Gossip helps forge alliances that we can use at a later time to help with our own social promotion. It makes your friends feel closer, because you’ve told them a secret, you’ve confided in them.

As much as I hesitate, gossip, it seems, might be good for us. As Oscar Wilde said, “There’s only one thing worse than being gossiped about, and that is not being gossiped about.” If people don’t talk about others, it can signify a kind of social alienation. The Caitlyn of the past — the version of me who spent her weekends watching “Sex and the City” alone and writing in her feelings journal — hears that. Invisibility sucks.

Rarely is gossip malicious — that takes a kind of Machiavellianism that requires the gossip-spreader to think he or she is above the other person or event. On that note, though, even malicious celebrity gossip — I’m thinking again, here, of my old friend Tiger — serves society by making our humdrum problems seem a lot more manageable. Gossiping also serves to humanize other individuals, celebrities or not, in high social positions. I mean, everybody messes up. Everybody bleeds.

All of this reasoning, however, doesn’t necessarily soothe you when you realize people at your job, student organization or social group are watching you. One day you walk in and feel like everybody’s staring at what you didn’t want to be exposed. You know, I put on pants today for a reason. Some things are much better left to the imagination.

So give the people something to hold on to. If they care that much, let their minds wander. You know what, your life is a lot more goddamn entertaining than you ever imagined. Let them have it. It’s true that dirt can turn into a mudslide, but it’s possible to put up reinforcements.

Because people are storytellers naturally, it’s silly to be surprised to find that we haven’t given up our old ways. In terms of the evolution of the earth, we haven’t really been around that long — not long enough to grow out of it, anyway.

Just watch what you say and watch where you pry. Exposed nerves can be raw. Spread someone’s confidence around, and the gossip queen who delved too far will find herself very lonely indeed, holding only someone else’s can of worms for company.