The Stranger by Albert Camus is a dark book about the dark side of human nature. When the protagonist, Meursault, has to occupy himself in prison, he finds a scrap of newspaper with a story just as sinister as his own:
A man had left a Czech village to seek his fortune. Twenty-five years later, and now rich, he had returned with a wife and a child. His mother was running a hotel with his sister in the village where he’d been born. In order to surprise them, he had left his wife and child at another hotel and gone to see his mother, who didn’t recognize him when he walked in. As a joke he’d had the idea of taking a room. He had shown off his money. During the night his mother and his sister had beaten him to death with a hammer in order to rob him and had thrown his body in the river. The next morning the wife had come to the hotel and, without knowing it, gave away the traveler’s identity. The mother hanged herself. The sister threw herself down a well.
What struck me even more than the story itself was Meursault’s commentary on it:
I must have read that story a thousand times. On the one hand it wasn’t very likely. On the other, it was perfectly natural. Anyway, I thought the traveler pretty much deserved what he got and that you should never play games.
I love surprises, perhaps making them even more than receiving them. But I, too, have felt the recoil of a well-intended revelation gone wrong. My girlfriend usually knows what she wants, and she doesn’t like not having an idea of what to expect. So with time, I’ve learned to be more picky with my surprises. To leave the element of shock for the less consequential moments and communicate bigger plans up front. Does it make our relationship less spectacular? Perhaps, but it also makes it frictionless.
Thankfully, a bad prank nowadays rarely gets you a hammer to the head, but remember: There’s a time for surprises and a time to communicate. Know which is which, and may you never end up a stranger to those you love.