Figuring Out He’s/She’s/They’re Just Not That Into You and What To Do About It

Sometimes, I look at the searches that bring people to this site and I want to put my arm around the internet and give it as many cookies as it takes to make things all better.  I’m equal parts natural born fixer and adamant eschewer of drama. It’s an odd combination to be sure.

A friend recently admitted that they were having difficulty with the whole cutting the cord concept I had preached in a previous post, which made me realize that not everyone is ready to go from 0 to scorched earth all at once. Some of us are all about the incremental, taking it baby steps at a time.  Before you can eliminate the dead weight from your personal life, you have to be able to recognize it as such,  ya know? You have to be able to identify the patterns and situations that need redress before you can fix them. So, let’s start at square one, shall we?

Photo by nickmilleruk

The first step is to stop making excuses for the people in your life. You know the ones I’m talking about.  The ones who don’t call when they say they will, “forget”  to return your emails or texts,  who sap your energy with their overblown crisis du jour (energy vampires as advice columnist Dave Eddie refers to them),  who treat you poorly because they themselves are “broken” or have “ issues” (or so you tell yourself), the ones for whom your company always seems to be a last resort or afterthought.  I could go on and on, but you get the point. We aren’t talking one-off incidents here, but clear patterns of disregard and self absorption.  Stop accepting their lame excuses and stop extending the benefit of the doubt. It’s benefiting them, but it sure as hell isn’t benefiting you, is it?

The reason he doesn’t call or hedges about making plans isn’t that his parents divorced when he was six after Mom discovered Dad was having an affair with Miss Kimberly the kindergarten teacher. No, it’s because he doesn’t attach significant value to you or to the relationship and because you’re enabling him to indulge in this behavior sans consequence.  A big work deadline doesn’t result in digital paralysis and render your buddy unable to drop you a 40-character text message  instead of bailing on your  gym plans without a word. Unless  she’s a neo Kate Gosselin and exponentially outnumbered by her newborn offspring,  giving birth isn’t a valid reason for your former college roommate to go incommunicado for six months. And on and on and on. These are excuses we make for the people who treat us like crap because A) we refuse to take off the Pollyanna blinders B) we don’t want to seem judgmental or uncharitable C) we take their lack of caring personally and view recapturing their interest as a victory for our own sense of self-worth and a validation of the redeeming power of our friendship/love (must not roll eyes)  D) All of the the above. Sadly.

There is no condition (save for maybe being pronounced clinically dead or a diagnosed sociopath*) that plausibly prevents someone from treating you and your feelings with the minimum of human decency.  Their job stress?  Their crappy childhood spent being raised by wolves? Their family woes?  Their health issues? The emotional scars left by a cheating high school boyfriend from a decade ago?  The fight you just had about the rhetoric of “death panels”?  THESE DO NOT ENTER INTO THE EQUATION. Everyone has their dents and bruised spots, but these don’t give us a free pass from following the Golden Rule, the logic of which a small child can grasp. Are you seriously going to tell me a job-holding, tax-paying, non-velcro shoe wearing  adult can’t handle what the Dora the Explorer set have down pat?  Please.  Listen to yourself. Don’t make me stage an intervention.

Not only does your elaborate emotional hoop jumping on their behalf give people emotional leeway they don’t deserve, it does them a disservice by presuming that they’re too messed up, broken or inept to rise above their circumstances and act like a functional, considerate adult.  That’s pretty damn presumptuous and condescending when you think about it.

Stop waiting around for the douchebags in your life to have the relationship equivalent of a Come to Jesus moment; it ain’t gonna happen.

The truth is that no matter how busy, traumatic or mind-boggling their lives become,  people who genuinely care about you will make an effort to keep in touch or at least let you know that they’re still alive and that while they’re indisposed right now, they have every intention of picking up the friendship again once they’ve wrapped up their uncle’s estate, negotiated their girlfriend’s release from Taliban captors, recovered from their gender reassignment surgery, etc. They will not just leave you twisting in the wind or treat you as nothing more than their personal wailing wall/emotional booty call.

Bottom line:  When you care about someone, you don’t treat them shabbily. And if you do hurt them, you make amends.  If someone hurts you and seems unaffected by your pain, Occam’s Razor would say that the mofo never cared about you in the first place. Dig? And if you recognize that you’ve treated someone else like this (and we’ve all been there at one time or another)? Forget what OneRepublic tells you, because it’s never too late to apologize. Possibly too late to be granted open-armed forgiveness, but good karma is its own reward, right?

Now to the more important question: chocolate chip or molasses ginger?

* N.B. Applying the wisdom of this  article to a heroin addict or a paranoid schizophrenic is also an obvious  no-go.