The Arithmetic Of Common Ground

IF VIEWED AS the overlap between two individual areas of experience, common ground can be seen as the darkened area of the Venn diagram in which all similarities are included and all differences are excluded. A couple first meets. Born within six months of one another, within the same medium-sized city, and of comparable socio-economic class, they automatically overlap somewhere between 33 to 35 percent.

- Scott Randall

Make the city Calgary and make them both only children who — as a consequence of their solitudes — have both grown up some what unsociable and somewhat bookish. If both dutifully attended music lessons in guitar and piano to complement their school work, their common ground might go as high as 40 to 55 percent.

The 60 to 45 points of difference in their nature or nurture might place them in separate post-secondary programs — her excess empathy and caring predisposing her to the liberal arts and a career in education and his pedantic obsessive nature predisposing him to the physical sciences and a career in mechanical engineering — but their extracurricular interest in music persists. He forms a band with some other overachieving schoolmates, and she shows up at one of their under attended shows. With such common ground, the two have a fair chance of falling into conversation at the mostly empty tavern performance space after the show. She nurses her one-beer limit beer, and he orders his alcohol-is a-slippery-slope coffee, and later, when they fall together and become a couple, they will likely use the money they save with a city-hall wedding for a detached home within walking distance of a school and with three bedrooms: one bedroom for them, one for a child, and one for a home office. Later still, when that one child is born as tangible, living proof of their common ground and is named Benjamin, the parents will, for a short while, overlap more than they ever have or ever will again.