How assholes manage to make you believe everything is your fault

I just understood the logic behind something that had been bothering me for years.

What did you say? You want me to explain it to you in a completely unnecessary, yet quite enthralling post? Well, if I must!

The concept -or one of the many, anyway- that has been annoying me for half my life is the following:

How come, when faced with an insensitive asshole, it's actually us who end up feeling stupid and thinking we are being childish?

Uhmmm that couldn't get any more vague. Let me develop it a bit:

Have you ever had a friend, or a boyfriend or girlfriend, that you found amazingly self-centered and that would hurt your feelings on a regular basis, but somehow ended up convinced that it was indeed yourself the one screwing things up all the time?

I get rid of that kind of company quite fast, but a recent situation has led me to going through the above once again.

And thanks to that, I think I have finally figured out how it works.

I'm going to explain further, but before starting, I just need you to realise that if this situation I just described happens to you all the time, with everyone, about everything, then you may be at least a small part of the problem. Oversensitive spirits who get extremely offended by every freaking thing they are told, or not told, or somehow implied or any other variation, seem to be pretty much everywhere these days. So bear in mind that what I am about to explain describes a relationship from the point of view of a person who is not often hurt by their friends. There can be unnerving conversations every now and then and some of my mates may make me feel left out, or the other way round, once in a blue moon. But in general I'm quite happy with the company I keep.

This said,

HOW JERKS MANAGE TO MAKE YOU FEEL LIKE YOU ARE THE ONE BEING A SULKY BRAT

As hinted above, I am going to use a personal experience to explain things. You are going to meet my friend (ish) John, and I'm going to begin by telling you that John is a really nice guy. He is cheerful and interesting, and I am quite sure he is not a bad person at all.

The problem is, just as lively and kind John is, he is also the greatest, most ridiculous narcissist I have met in a very, very long time. This would usually just lead to quite a lot of shallowness and a recurring sensation of annoyance, which is already bad enough but tolerable after all; the problem is that narcissism usually comes, and this case is no exception, with certain actions that include acting like a self-centered prick who is more than willing to smash the fragile little soul of anyone who is not a valid tool in fulfilling whatever plan they are following to satisfy themselves.

Again, the good things I said earlier about John are entirely true. I am actually quite convinced that this guy is not aware of the harm he inflicts on others or, more likely, he is aware but has been lying to himself about it for so long that his brain doesn't register the actual level of pain inflicted anymore. John is not an asshole, John behaves like an asshole. This is key to understand why I've put up with his crap for longer than anybody could humanly expect me to do so. I have a hard time getting angry at people who don't really understand that they are doing things wildly wrong.

Anyway, there are lots of situations I could choose to make you understand the many ways in which this guy wrecks my nerves, but I will stick to the simplest one: the online interaction.

In this contemporary world, subtle and a bit creepily dominated by Mark Zuckerberg's companies, a lot of the communication I have with my friends happens through text messages. I use whatsapp or telegram, mostly, and I do so relatively often because most of my closest friends live in my home country or are scattered around Europe (if you didn't know, I'm Spanish but live in London).

Back to John, he had this lovely habit of getting a text, several hours later reading it -which I am made aware against my will every single time, thanks to that fantastic, extraordinarily intrusive blue tick-, and several hours later replying. Sometimes he wouldn't even reply in the same day he got the original text.

Now, if this happens every now and then, I couldn't care less. I texted my friend Iris three days ago and I am realising this second that she hasn't replied yet. Usually she doesn't ignore me if I try to contact her, or it's actually her sending whatever to see how I'm doing, so if she forgets to reply one day I may not even notice. But John never ever ever replies in a decent time frame.

I would also like to clarify, for the sake of context, that people not reading my messages is something that barely bothers me. The target of my attention may be watching the whole of the Star Wars saga with no intention of getting in touch with the outside world for all I know. But someone knowing I am trying to reach them, yet deciding to ignore me, that's another matter entirely.

You may be thinking, "just don't text him. If if bothers you so much that he takes seven hours to reply to you every time, just don't send him anything". And we will get there. But at the moment of this happening, I was just trying to develop a normal friendship with a normal person, without worrying too much about the little things I didn't like about him. And I found myself being incapable of such development because of this attitude I'm talking about. Now, this may sound like a bit of an exaggeration, but it's really not. Let's see:

Imagine you want to be friends with Laura. You meet her, you hit it off and you start hanging out. Imagine you meet up with her for coffee and have a fascinating conversation about, I don't know, the possibilities of extraterrestrial life in this new solar system they just found. You finish whatever overpriced drink Starbucks is selling this season and part ways. Two days later, you come across a super interesting article that adds some information to that aliens chat you had. The normal thing to do? You send the link to Laura. Because you know she would want to know. If Laura likes talking to you -which you know she does, not only because she has actively told you so, but also because otherwise I doubt she would have spent three hours wondering about the possibilities of finding water somewhere in TRAPPIST-1 with you- she will read it and give you her impression, or tell you she will read it later, or whatever. Something. Anything.

But if Laura replies to your article thing six hours and a half later, with a text that is not only late but also pretty empty and more a politeness requirement than an actual answer -taking forever to text back often comes with shallow content. That is also the case with John, if you were wondering-, then it doesn't really matter what she says, because the conversation is broken. You will be fine with this once, twice, three times. But if you see that every time you try to contact Laura she does every possible activity in her life before getting back to you, and when she does it doesn't really look like she is interested in whatever you are saying, at some point you are just going to realise that once you step out of that café, the conversation is over for good.

Here I'd like to make my first point. Don't be fazed by the fact that I have zero idea about psychology, just believe blindly in the things I find out by analysing the people who annoy me:

If you want somebody to count on you, you need to choose one of these two options:

1. Either you show up on a very regular basis (you get in touch every weekend, you have lunch together every Tuesday, stuff like that), or

2. You are willing to be contacted by means that don't involve being physically in the same room with the other person.

It's one or the other. Ideally both, but you don't need one option too bad if you have the other one.

Of course, this is up to you; you can do whatever the hell you want. I'm just telling you that if you don't comply with at least one of the two options above, your friends will stop calling on you in the long run, and creating new relationships is going to be extremely hard. Your loved ones need to know that if they have had the worst day ever they can tell you and you will listen to them. And that is not a feeling you give by showing up at random times and by taking five hours to reply to every text you get.

Needless to say, face to face interaction beats any other means of communication, but, whether you like it or not, technology is part of our lives now, so you might as well learn to take advantage of that.

Back to the story, you should know I am not that good at hating people in silence, so after the couple of weeks it took me to understand this was not a random attitude but a stable habit, I explained all this stuff to John, trying to get him to understand why I found it offensive when someone only pays attention to their friends if they are sharing the oxygen in the room.

Wanna know what John said?

That he doesn't want to live his life checking his phone every five minutes.

I don't know how the six hours, or seven, or the half day I was talking about turned into five minutes, but it doesn't matter! Because now I understand!

It's not that John doesn't give a flying fuck about my life once I'm out of his sight -literally-, it's that I expect everyone to exist staring at their phones every minute of the day!

Blaming your bullshit on others: The musical.

And here goes my second point:

An egotistic jerk will twist facts as much as needed to get rid of all responsibility and blame the situation on others, including you. This, I must say, is more to fool themselves than to fool you. John actually believes all this crap he is telling me, or at least he tries really hard to believe it. It's way easier to think I expect too much from everyone than to realise he should actually take people's feelings into consideration. Because thinking of people's happiness all the time is freaking exhausting, I must add.

I had a friend in college who was a clear example of this attitude. I remember she could organise a party in your face and invite everyone in the table but you, and then claim you didn't need to do absolutely everything together when you explained that she made you feel a little excluded. So a situation in which you felt bad because you had been deliberately ignored turned out to be actually your fault because you were just too needy.

But blame shifting is a well-known technique. The aim of this post is not to tell you about stuff you already know, but to share why -I believe- that technique actually works.

After thinking a lot about it, I've come to a conclusion that I can't decide whether is the most ridiculous idea ever or whether it's the one an only legit answer to all my questions:

When a person you are close to shows symptoms of not really caring much about you, your feelings get hurt. When your feelings are hurt it's kind of embarrassing to let others know, so most people try to hide it, therefore never letting whatever idiot we're talking about know about the flaw in their acting. If, in spite of it being slightly humiliating, you build up the courage to tell the offending moron, then you will probably find yourself feeling like an immature and clingy teenager at some point while having that conversation. The more you have to explain, the more immature and clingy you will feel. And this is what I'm talking about: I think the reason why you feel like a whiny teenager when defending whatever basic rule of human interaction is that the last time you had to explain these very things to anybody you were actually a teenager.

I am well aware that this sounds absurd, but give it a thought. When I was a kid I would get told off every now and then by a friend because I didn't reply to a letter -yes, I'm old- fast enough. I would tell friends at some point that if they were asking for postcards every time I went on holidays, I would be expecting the same from them when they traveled. Maybe you were yelled at a couple of times because it would always be your friends calling you, while you would rarely pick up the phone to contact them.

It doesn't matter if we are talking about postcards, landline calls, whatsapp messages or homing pigeon letters; the concept is always the same: I am trying to reach out to you; I am interested in your life, and you are not showing any kind of interest back. That is somehow disrespectful and it makes me feel like you don't care about me. If you want ours to be a healthy relationship, stop doing it.

Back in the day, we all had this conversation. We all understood the really basic concept that is to want a friendship to be a two way street. And we moved on.

The problem is, these people never did. Maybe no one ever told them this was a harmful conduct, or, more likely, they convinced themselves that this was an acceptable way to treat people, blaming every related issue they would have on whoever was complaining about them.

And actually, all this psychological stuff I essentially made up -but that you are believing anyway because it makes total sense and you know it- is just an excuse to give you my final conclusion:

If a person clearly came to your mind while reading this, if you painfully understand every detail of this post, then I am so very sorry to tell you this but you have to let that person go.

Like, for real. Right now.

No, seriously.

If you have explained how you feel to your friend/partner/whatever and they keep behaving like this, you need to move on. They are not going to change. It's not going to get better.

And don't think I don't understand how hard this is, because I do. I really do. John is fun and brilliant and I miss him very much. I could have a three-hour discussion with him about how machines will one day dominate the world, or about the anthropological background of monogamy, or I could just spend half an evening watching telly and eating ice cream with him, and it was lovely. But he was messing with my self confidence. He was trying to convince me that the many acts that proved over and over that he was not really my friend (I only mentioned communication here, but there was also hiding information unnecessarily, never being there whenever I needed any kind of help, ignoring me for weeks but then getting upset when it was me not wanting to meet up with him and a long etcetera) were totally normal responses and that they didn't at all mean that he didn't care about me. As a consequence, I was starting to doubt myself. I was starting to think maybe he was right and it was me expecting too much from everyone, being needy. Which is not only untrue but also kind of messed up. This guy was meddling with my self esteem, and the second you allow someone to manipulate your self esteem in any way, that's the time to seriously reconsider things.

The funny part here is that it's not really me at loss. And I don't mean it only because John is missing out on hanging out with me -I am super fabulous, OK? I promise-. He may have ruined his relationship with me but that's not a big deal; not everybody needs to like me, and, as much as he claimed the opposite, John didn't like me that much. The actual problem is that our man here will one day meet a guy who could have become his best friend, or a girl who could have been the love of his life, and he will screw things up so spectacularly that there will be no way for him to fix them. I can only begin to imagine how many amazing people would have been glad to be John's friends but after a while just gave up on trying to make him see that he is not the centre of the universe.

So here we have this guy, who has the potential to be a true asset for whoever crosses his path, who will change your perspective in so many subjects and open your mind if you just listen to him. And you just won't want him to do so, because you will find him so bloody annoying and self-absorbed that you will willingly give up on all the coolness of the relationship only not to have to orbit around his massive ego.

I must say, though, that after telling him he did try to improve some of the things I've mentioned. He doesn't take half a day to reply to a text anymore, for example. But whatever I get is just a tiny amount of superficial information that doesn't help build a relationship in the slightest. And I talk about what I saw a while ago, because, as you can imagine, I don't text him anymore. Actually, I don't really see him anymore.

With John, once you are out of sight you basically stop existing, and whenever he's around it feels like you two being together at that particular moment is more of a cosmic coincidence that him actually wanting to spend time you.

Fortunately, I can do better than that. And so can you.