GIRLFRIENDS often have an interest in some form of spirituality, which is confusing to boyfriends blinded by rationalism. Here are some of their typical belief systems.

Buddhism with a bit of tarot

Buddhism doesn’t have a deity and is about the practitioner reaching a higher state of consciousness. And tarot is medieval fortune-telling bollocks with strong overtones of the occult. Your girlfriend happily dabbles in both, which makes as much sense as your GP finding out what’s causing your neck pain by sacrificing the practice nurse to Odin.

Horoscopes

The logical arguments against horoscopes are well-rehearsed, but from a boyfriend’s perspective it’s worrying that your partner takes it seriously. It’s clear her friends think she could do a lot better, but you really don’t want to get dumped on the advice of a planet.

Visiting a psychic

Psychics always impress girlfriends by telling them things ‘they couldn’t have known’. This usually turns out to be some incredibly obvious bit of cold-reading, eg. ‘Was your gran very old before she died?’ But the main problem is that your true love really hasn’t thought about the implications. Which are: YOU ARE TALKING TO THE DEAD! ALL SCIENCE AS WE KNOW IT IS WRONG! YOU JUST PAID 140 QUID TO FIND OUT NANA HAD A FAVOURITE VASE!

Crystals

Crystals interact with your body’s energy field, and can alleviate difficult-to-quantify conditions like ‘stress’. It’s also been claimed they can relieve pain, but strangely your girlfriend begs you to buy her Resolve and Ibuprofen when she’s got a hangover, rather than letting you tenderly place a lump of quartz on her head.

‘There’s got to be something out there’

Your girlfriend is sure there’s a guiding intelligence in the universe, meaning there’s some purpose to existence beyond working in an office and feeding the cat. You’d like that to be true too, but when you demand evidence of this intriguing cosmic consciousness, it turns out you’re a closed-minded Dawkins-style grump whose only joy in life is thinking about protons.

Occasional brief meditation

Buddhist monks spend a lifetime training their minds to block out earthly trivia and not emotionally ‘attach’ to transient feelings and experiences. Your girlfriend distractedly does it for 20 minutes when she remembers every couple of months. You’re not going to mention it because you’re not a bastard, but it’s hard to imagine what deep spiritual insights she’s heading for. Also, you’re pretty sure Buddhist monks don’t have a glass of wine while doing it.

Spiritualist churches 

These are surprisingly common in modern Britain, despite it basically boiling down to: ‘I meet up with demented people and we chat to corpses as if we’re discussing the prices in Asda.’ That’s not normal, hun.

Not-really-Satanism

Heaven help you if your goth girlfriend is into this. The risk from modern Satanists isn’t getting a sacrificial dagger in your chest or Lucifer snaffling your soul, it’s being bored to death as they tediously explain they don’t actually worship Satan – and people are ignorant and prejudiced to assume a ‘Satanist’ would do that. Sigh.