BACK WHEN MY eldest was a tiny human, I spent hours trawling through a parenting website.

I was even a member. Had my own username and everything. I dipped in and out of the section that was dedicated to the year of my baby’s birth.

Very helpful at times and teeming over with detailed accounts about how everyone else’s baby was meeting their milestones. But all very much par for the course.

I spent more time on the pages where rapid-fire banter and clever commentary hammered home how individual and first-class the Irish sense of humour is. But the discussions that drew me in like a helpless moth to a flame were the ones that bled out in the family relationships category.

I inhaled the carnage and returned several times a day to get my fix. The ick. The rage. The awful sadness. The drama! A bit like if Dallas and Succession had a baby.

You see, I love a problem. Not one of my own, to be clear. One that belongs to someone else.

It’s a funny one because in real life, I am allergic to theatrics. Confrontation can make me feel very unsafe; my thoughts scatter, and my nervous system goes haywire. But when it’s on paper and doesn’t directly involve me, well, hook me up to all of it. Neighbour using your green bin to dispose of their rubbish? Office workers parking in front of your home? Someone from work dipping into petty cash or worse still, helping themselves to your diabetic chocolate from the fridge? A light-fingered bestie shoplifting for the thrill? Narcissistic in-laws?

Top-tier first-world drama at my fingertips with the added bonus of me being firmly on the anonymous sidelines. No one is asking for my opinion or god forbid, a solution to their quandary. The best bit of all? Dare I even say it? I can be as judgy as I like.

The ultimate curtain twitcher, I am a little bit curious and a lot nosey with a dash of smug because none of the above affects me, and I can walk away unscathed.

Learning from others

These days, I have a favourite problem page in the newspaper. It covers everything from serious issues to the banal. It makes for informative reading because the advice offered to the contributors is akin to what one might expect to hear from an excellent therapist: empathetic, intelligent and straightforward. I sometimes read it twice. I am of the belief that there are many life lessons to be gleaned from other people’s dramas – an honours class in how to learn from the mistakes of others.

Not only that, but I tell myself it’s all in the name of research as I mentally reserve how situations were handled, storing all information in my memory bank for the day I might need to pull it out and use it myself.

The fact that my memory is impersonating a sieve at the moment and there isn’t a chance I will remember any of it is irrelevant.

The case of American Belle Burden has captured my attention recently. A lawyer, she allowed a call from an unrecognised number to go to voicemail, and when she played it, the male caller informed her that her husband was having an affair with his, the caller’s, wife.

Cue massive upending of Burden’s world. Her now ex-husband, a New York-based hedge fund executive, went on to request a divorce, telling his wife he wanted nothing from their marriage, including anything to do with their three children (then aged 12, 15 and 17).

Unsurprisingly, Burden’s book, Strangers: A memoir of Marriage, has been on the New York Times bestseller list since its publication in January, with a dramatised adaptation being made by Netflix. I will be tuning in to both!

Closer to home, I recently thoroughly enjoyed RTÉ’s third season of The Dry. A glorious, fly-on-the-wall depiction of a dysfunctional Irish family, replete with laugh-out-loud moments to dilute the seriousness.

I wasn’t enticed by reality TV; the likes of Big Brother and Keeping up with the Kardashians were never on my radar. But this one scratched all of my basic itches and offered emotional stimulation without real-life fallout.

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I am willing to wager I am not alone in this harmless compulsion. If we were all to take a moment and look deep into our darkest hearts, we would realise none of us is averse to a little bit of drama.

Catastrophes and gossip are perfect water cooler components, turning small talk into light entertainment, giving us something to react to. We can bond over the relief that it’s happening to someone else.

Finding ourselves drawn to drama doesn’t make someone a bad person or a drama queen. Conflict can be relatable and even engaging. Broken down, it is simply another form of narrative or entertainment.

The tipping point is how that interest is handled – there is a very fine line between talking in a light conversational way and actively spreading rumours or deliberately fuelling a fire.

It isn’t about endorsing drama or the misfortune of others. Put simply, it’s a natural curiosity about how people can mess up and the ways in which they extricate themselves from their troubles.

I don’t know anyone who isn’t averse to some excitement in the interest of breaking up the quiet hubris of their workaday lives.

Everything eventually becomes tomorrow’s fish wrapping.

Gwen Loughman is the gatekeeper of four boys, one husband and a watcher over two dogs.