2013-02-25
Explanation
This comic presents a series of diagrams that a person (apparently a woman in a relationship) has drawn up, mapping out the timeline of her partner's life and their relationship against "modern human history." The first diagrams show the relationship as a subset of his life, and his life as a tiny sliver of modern human history. Then comes a color-coded chart showing when it is "OK for me to screw someone else," "probably OK for me to screw someone else," and "not OK" -- with the vast majority of human history colored green (OK) and only the tiny sliver of the current relationship marked red (not OK). In the final panel, the man sensibly suggests they hold off on deciding these rules until after she has figured out how to build a time machine, to which she insists "But I need to know NOW!"
The joke satirizes the way people in relationships can construct elaborate logical or pseudo-logical arguments to justify infidelity or negotiate relationship boundaries. By zooming out to the scale of all human history, the woman has technically created a framework in which she is "allowed" to sleep with other people for 99.99% of the timeline -- a completely absurd framing since she can only exist in the present. The man's deadpan response about the time machine punctures the whole exercise by pointing out the obvious: none of those other time periods are accessible, making the entire chart meaningless. It parodies over-analytical approaches to relationship negotiations and the human tendency to use data and charts to rationalize what we want.