I recently heard this on a TV Drama where one character, who had been left at the altar by her fiance, finally spoke to him again years after the incident.
I thought that the phrase:
"You were the best thing that never happened to me"
could be interpreted in two ways:
- The "best thing" refers to their successful relationship before he left her at the altar, and the "never happened" refers to how their marriage never happened.
- The sentence means that of all the things that "never happened" (i.e them getting married) it was the "best thing" for her and she is glad things turned out that way.
Essentially if this were to have been said to someone, do you think it would be taken as a compliment reminiscing on what they once had, or an insult in saying that they are glad that something further never happened?
If you would like to take an alternative approach to the question, is the opposite of this phrase:
- You were the worst thing that ever happened to me
- You were the best thing that ever happened to me
Cheers!
Best Answer
I agree that this line of dialog is ambiguous, and I don’t think we can really remove the ambiguity; context might do more to resolve it than a close reading of the single sentence could. However if we are construing these words alone, it seems to me more natural to take them in a flattering sense.
In the first place it’s a less forced reading of the words. “You were the best thing -- you’re really great -- that never happened to me -- you never married me.”
If you try to reverse that meaning then the “best thing” is not “You” but something more complicated: “Your not-happening-to-me is the best thing that ever didn’t happen to me.”
In the second place, the favorable sense seems plausible, the sort of thing that everyone thinks. I’ve led a pretty fortunate life, and so have all the people I know. If you asked me to list the best things that have ever happened to me, my personal relationships would fill many of the top slots.
On the other hand, if you asked me to list some of the worst things that ever could have happened to me, nothing that ever did happen to me would be on the list at all. Almost all of us privileged people know of people in the world today facing such enormous tragedy and suffering that it would just be silly to say that a marriage you believed in, to the point of actually waiting at the altar, would have been the worst thing that ever could have happened to you. So the pejorative construction of the sentence is fairly mind-boggling
Of course the character in the soap may mean the pejorative sense as an exaggeration. Or she may be talking with Charles Manson and mean the expression in a plain sense. But all else being plausible, I would bet on the favorable sense.