Tag: relationships

Left on Read

~ Advice ~ Leave a comment

Do you know those people who constantly demand a reply right away? Those suffocating folks who throw a fit if you take more than 5 minutes to respond? Or somebody who might not get outwardly angry at you for a few minutes of delay, but they send subtle (or not so subtle) hints about you being slow, creating constant pressure. We all know somebody like that, and most of us fear becoming one of them, for obvious reasons. Nobody wants to be seen as extremely clingy or needy. We try to be understanding and reasonable with our expectations of others.

However, like everything taken to extremes, being too accepting of others’ attitudes can become detrimental to ourselves. What do I mean by that? Being too forgiving about when people reply to you could be keeping people in who should be out. That our “playing it cool” or pretending to be “blasé” could just be acceptance of disrespect.

People always have excuses.

“Oh, you know I get distracted.”
“I read it, but I forgot to reply.”
“Ah, I got busy yesterday, sorry.”
Or even:
“I was too tired to answer.” (This one usually happens when the reply needed is a matter of 5 words or less.)

Apparently, answering “Nope, sorry” costs a lot of energy for some people. Yet, you see them online. You see them posting on Instagram. You see them using their phones all day, every day. Obviously, I am not talking about people who usually respond in a timely manner and let something slip once a year. I’m talking about people who constantly do that. And for some reason, we are starting to think this is okay—that not getting a response from people who should be your friends is not a big deal, that it means nothing. Or that taking a whole day to answer one sentence is reasonable. All of this is tragically ironic, considering that “I am worthy” is almost like a mantra these days.

Maybe we should create some red flags for friendships, mantra style? I don’t know. But the reality is, if someone constantly “forgets” to answer you, they just don’t think you are that important to begin with. Also, they don’t care about how you are going to feel being left on read. No, this is not their ADD/ADHD/Depression. No, this person doesn’t forget to reply to everybody in their lives all the time. If they have a crush on somebody, I can promise you that they will not “just forget” to reply. Even better: try offering them a large sum of money, as a test. See how fast they answer. Suddenly, they are very willing to quickly respond. Life is about priorities. You give attention to what is important to you. It just happens that you are not a priority to them.

This article that you are reading right now is a little bit more than a “He’s just not that into you, friendship/everybody version.” It doesn’t end here. We have to understand that, if we don’t respect our time and effort, we let people into our lives who won’t respect them either. Time is the most valuable resource that we have in life. It’s the only one that you can’t make back; you only lose. When you set the bar too low, you waste it on people who don’t even bother thinking that they are being disrespectful towards you. When somebody is constantly not answering you in a reasonable time (or not responding at all), they either don’t want to respond because it’s a burden to them to talk to you, or they have completely forgotten about your existence after seeing your message. Neither of those possibilities is worth your time. People who only remember you or respond when it’s convenient for them cannot be called friends.

We all have our own different sets of reasons to cling to friendships that are bad for us. No matter what they are, the results are always the same. It’s just not worth it. Even if you are extremely lonely, it’s not worth it. It’s not just about receiving a message every now and then instead of receiving none—it’s about respect, and showing that you deserve to be treated well. Let the words of the mantra of the 2020s become reality. You are worth receiving a reply. You are worth being remembered. You are worth being seen as a priority, and definitely way more than a disposable person. You are worth having real friends.

He is certainly a good man… But is he a good match for you?

~ Advice ~ Leave a comment



So, sometimes we find people that are nice. Somewhat of a rare occurrence nowadays, especially if you are in the dating scene. You finally come across one, start talking to him, and soon a date happens. You notice how this person treats you well, and you try to focus on that instead of focusing on how you guys are tremendously different from the get-go. Let’s give it a chance, it might work, right?

Let’s say that you are a homebody, and you’d rather interact with only one friend at a time. Not only that, but you also need a considerable gap between those social events. They drain you, and you don’t really like leaving your house on top of that. The guy you’re talking to, on the other hand, is a person who likes to go camping every weekend and never misses a party. You like artsy movies, something he certainly does not like, and his concept of a good movie is a good amount of explosions and cars. You don’t like drinking, while he loves to drink with his buddies. You like cats, and really dislike dogs, while he is the opposite of that.

Even though his invitations are a little bit different from what you’d have picked for a fun time, you enjoy having this nice person around. After all, he is so nice to you, and treats you with so much respect! Eventually, you guys take the next step and move from occasional dates to a real relationship.

You try to make things work. You try to go camping with him, even though you absolutely hate it. He stays in with you, but you see that within a couple of hours, he gets agitated like a child who ate a whole bowl of candy. You try to pretend that you enjoy spending time with his friends while you really don’t. He says that the movies that you like ‘are okay’, and he ‘can’ watch them with you. These compromises seem to make none of you happy. How can you enjoy the movie you want to watch with him if, even though he is smiling, you feel like he is dying on the inside?

It’s either both of you making a lot of effort to make this work and not getting good results, or spending a lot of time separately, maybe even more time apart than the first weeks back when you two were still just dating and barely knew each other. You feel like it’s either misery and a lot of effort or growing apart.

You go to therapy, and you also talk to people about this. You tell them “I just want him to spend more time with me”. You want a solution for this…

But there’s no solution. Well, there’s one solution, but you really don’t want to even consider it.

After all, this guy does treat you well. He does things for you. He wants you around too (despite the fact that there’s never a moment when both of you are completely happy together). How can you break up with a person who treats you well?! There are so many women out there complaining about all the douchebags they’ve met, and you’ve met quite a few too! How could you let this guy go? Wouldn’t love be enough to fix this situation?

But is it really love? Or is it fear of not finding anybody better?

The truth is, you are holding onto this guy not because you love him, but because you believe that nobody else will treat you well. The scarcity of “good candidates” is making you stay with this man, not love. You don’t love him, you love the idea of the person he could become if he changed most of his characteristics. You might even like some attributes that he has, but you don’t like him as a whole, as who he really is. You are feeling miserable either because you are trying to become more like him or trying to turn him a bit more like you when the reality is that you two are like water and oil. Two completely different universes. If you had somebody already and met him, you’d probably just say that he is a nice person, but you wouldn’t even become his friend.

I am not saying that there are not a lot of nasty people out there, and I’m also not saying that finding a good person is easy. But him being a good person is not enough. You need to love this person for what he is. The sooner you let go of this “ghost” or idea of him, the better. If you want to turn him into somebody else, or you want to turn yourself into somebody else to spend more quality time with him, that is a very good indication that he is not the man for you.

Many women complain about getting older and things getting more and more difficult when it comes to romance, but they end up spending a lot of unnecessary time holding onto men who are not a good fit for them. Two years invested in a person who is not a good match for you is two years wasted that could have been spent looking for that one person, the real one. 

Am I undeniably saying that you will find someone better? No. However, just picking a guy because he treats you well is like ordering food and being extremely happy just because it didn’t come with strands of hair in it. It’s just the basics. Believe it or not, you should expect to be treated well by everyone around you. 

If that did not make you stop and think about your situation, let’s finish with this one: people crave intimacy, not just for the body, but the soul too. If you and your partner are complete strangers, the threat of a future affair or divorce is extremely high. Let alone that, when old age comes and sex drive is not even that important for some, what is left? The friendship, the emotional bond.

For the women out there who have their biological clock ticking: you might say that you just want a good father for your future children… Sure, he will probably be a good father… Well, to be honest, we can’t 100% guarantee that he will be a good father, but let’s just pretend that we are absolutely sure that that is the case. Is this all you need? Really? Your husband ideally should be your best friend. Someone who enjoys doing things with you. And you should also think the same way – that activities with your husband should be, in their great majority, effortless and pleasant. If you are completely different, as I mentioned before but I’m going to repeat myself here, the threat of divorce or affairs is very real. What I mean here is: that he might still be a good father, but he might still divorce you and live somewhere else. He might still cheat. He might still work late, and god knows what he could be doing. You might feel lonely and end up in an affair, ruining this marriage yourself. If you don’t see these possibilities as good outcomes, I’d ask you to reconsider.