I wonder how many people will read this, or will want to read this, based on the title. If many people could see this title, I bet you a lot of people would read the entry. Why? Because for some reason, other people's problems interest us. Especially if they are social.
I think this partially has to do with the fact that we like to feel good about ourselves: if we know someone is having problems, and we arent, we feel good that we are better off than someone else. In the worst case, we can feel that we aren't the only person with problems in the world.
But mostly, I think it's just because we want to read about an interesting story that often has something to do with sex, courting, or drama, and want to be able say, "Ha! My life is only as bad as or perhaps even better than yours!" For some reason, that makes us feel good.
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I think the title can cause people to either become very interseted, or very disinterested. Some people (I fall into this category), find social interactions (not even just problems) very interesting, be they romantic or otherwise, and so will take any opportunity possible to feed that data set. Others absolutely hate drama and gossip, and will therefore do their best to avoid it; these people, interestingly enough, tend to be ones who have had lots of drama in their life, and quite possibly still do.
You mentioned the "feel good" aspect. While I think this plays a role, I think it's more of a general information aspect. Not only do we learn others status, making us either happy or at least resigned, we also learn why they are happy, what they have done to become so, or perhaps what they did to screw things up so bad. At some level, I believe that people tend to feel that they can use this information to have a positive impact on any relationship they might have, thereby increasing their general well-being. So more than a "feel-good" tool, at some level I really think learning about others relationships is a survival tool, in a sense.
And yes, there is the "wow, that's really interesting", or "wow, that really sucks" aspect, as well. Just a friendly perspective of wanting to know what's going on in someone's life. It interests people. I don't know quite enough about how they work to know for sure, but I think it has something to do with the reflexive (reflective?) neurons, those that cause us to internalize a model that we see being depicted around us; these little buggers are why we flinch when someone else stubs their toe. In a similar manner, I believe that these are one of the main reasons people get so sucked into books, movies, TV shows, what have you. They cause us to internalize the story and feel it from our own perspective, to really "get into it". This is what we do when we read others drama. So in a sense, reading someone's LJ where they talk about their romantic issues can be just as captivating as reading a good novel, because of how we internalize it.
All that being said, I was really disappointed when I got to the end and realize you weren't actually going to talk about any relationship problems of your own.
Haha! Yes, the entry was meant to be dissapointing :P Sorry about that :P
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