What We Can Learn About Relationship From a Cup of Coffee

By Saffer

“What indeed?” you say. Lets start by defining a few words.

Entropy: pronounced [en-truh-pee]- it’s a noun.

The definition I will use here comes to us from cosmology as “a hypothetical tendency for the universe to attain a state of maximum homogeneity.” Think of it like this, in life, things move from a state of low entropy to a state of high entropy before going back to a state of low entropy. One way to think of it is to understand that life depends on high entropy. So, to our cup of coffee.

If you pour coffee into a glass so you can see what’s happening, you will see the coffee and its state is such that all the molecules are more or less similar with each other. In other words, a small amount of coffee looks like all the coffee. That is a state of low entropy for the coffee.

If you float a spoon of milk on top of the coffee, then the milk molecules are more or less the same as all of the rest of the milk. The milk is at low entropy.

If you put a spoon in the coffee and give one stir, you will see how the milk and the coffee look as they work out how to mix together and it is during that moment of mixing, that the coffee and milk are both at high entropy. It is characterized by any molecule in the cup being dissimilar form other molecules and also from the whole. Soon after that, as the coffee mixes, then we are back to a low entropy status where all the molecules are similar.

So that describes the architecture of typical relationships. Before you meet, there is low entropy between you. Then you start to date and court and perhaps choose to get engaged and married. During that stage of your relationship, there is high entropy between you. Then, once you are married and get into a rhythm, gradually the entropy leaves your relationship, and you return to s state of low entropy.

Therein lies the lesson. We want our relationships to be like the bit between when the milk moves from floating on top of the coffee, to when it is stirred to mix. That moment, when the chaos of the state of the coffee was visible, that is where a healthy relationship lives.

How does one increase the entropy in relationship? That is really up to you. What we do is this. We have a party every single day. We make love, make and enjoy a great cocktail, make and share a gourmet dinner. Every day is different. Every week we have to plan for the week, shop for the week and so on. Then make love always exploring our seuxality fully. On a day to day basis, sex is different each day anyway, and we also take the point of view that this moment has never occurred before, so we are present in the moment to fully enjoy each other sexually. We employ the same idea in the manner we approach mixology. we make every effort to perfect the cocktail to our taste, and we hold hands and speak to each other about life while we enjoy our drink together. We go to the kitchen and work together to build a fantastic meal that we make from fresh ingredients for our culinary delight. Naturally, because it’s always delicious, we enjoy the creation.

That is an example of us keeping entropy high in our relationship. That’s what we can learn about relationship from a cup of coffee.