The Nile vs. Denial

A while ago I heard this, I guess on TV, I wrote it down and completely forgot about it, until yesterday; while cleaning up my notebook, I found it.

The Nile is not just a river in Egypt.
It's a freaking ocean.
So how do you keep from drowning in it?

At first it didn't make sense, until I realized that the pronunciation for "The Nile" and "Denial" is the same: /dI'naIl/ (it's lacking a character, the schwa, or inverted 'e', but you get the idea). Then it did make sense. Denial is an ocean, and it happens that sometimes in our lives we are happily swimming in it without being aware that it's not a tiny pond, or a swimming pool. It is an ocean.
We refuse to believe what is right in front of our eyes, because maybe we are so attached to an idea, a concept, a person, that we cannot see the obvious: the idea is wrong, the concept does not make sense, the person couldn't care less about us.
Has it ever happened to you? Normally it happens with people we like, let's be honest with each other. We try and save a relationship even if it's hanging by a breaking thread over a deep gorge. We give the benefit of the doubt to the other person as if it's going out of style. We come up with every sort of excuse to justify a disrespectful behavior. The relationship is over, but still, we hang on to it as if there's no tomorrow. And the funniest thing is, OUR friends tell us, they try and make us realize how stupid we are, but we just don't listen. Or, when OUR friends are in that same denial situation, WE get mad at THEM for not seeing the obvious, while we are utterly incapable of seeing the same pattern in our own lives. "Oh, but no, he's actually a nice person"; "He actually cares about me, it's just that he's tired from work and doesn't feel like talking"; "Oh, he works so much, he stays out late to finish his work for the next day"; "He must have forgotten to call me"; "He must be very busy"; "Oh, it must be the phone call of a friend of his, of course it's not the phone number of another girl". Yeah, right.
I've been there, You've been there, at some point or another. I'm not saying that only women do this, men are members of the group as well, but probably they are less likely to admit it.
There's no way to avoid falling into the ocean of denial, at some point or another in our lives. Let's just hope we have friends around us who are willing to throw a life-jacket, and that we're good at swimming.