Is This Closure, or Are You Trying to Reopen the Case? The Quiz

Closure has acquired a strangely judicial reputation. We imagine one final conversation where the facts are entered into evidence, every confusing sentence is clarified, everyone suddenly becomes eloquent, and the emotional court issues a clean ruling before adjourning forever. Sometimes a final conversation really can help. A missing fact gets supplied. A misunderstanding gets corrected. An apology lands. A person finally says the sentence the other person needed in order to stop inventing explanations.

But closure can also become a very respectable reason to keep returning to a door that has already given its answer. One more text. One more coffee. One more chance to explain what you meant. One more opportunity for them to understand what they did. One more version of the argument, now with better lighting and several weeks of preparation.

The difficult distinction is whether the conversation is trying to create new information or obtain a different verdict. Closure asks, 'What do I still need to understand so I can move forward?' Reopening asks, 'What can I say differently so the ending stops being the ending?' The first may require contact. The second often turns contact into an appeals process.

That does not make wanting another conversation pathetic, manipulative, or irrational. Endings create unanswered questions because human beings are terrible at providing clean documentation before leaving a situation. The problem starts when the answer you need depends on another person becoming wiser, kinder, more honest, more remorseful, or more interested than the available evidence suggests they are prepared to become.

So let us once again deploy the ProbleMattic instrument of modern philosophy: a twelve-question glossy-magazine quiz designed to determine whether you are closing the file or quietly preparing opening statements for another trial.

The Quiz