A change in perspective leads to a more positive inner monologue
New relationships are great; they’re fun and light and make you feel good. But sometimes, this feeling can disappear with just one text—or lack thereof.
You send a text and it goes unanswered. It wasn’t really an important text, so you send another one. You wait. And then you wait some more. You make up an excuse for this behaviour like, “So-and-so is probably just really busy today,” or, “Just bad at texting,” or, “Just under a lot of stress.”
But, for all your excuses, at a certain point, you know that you’ve looked at your phone 100 times to check emails, messages, the time, and a dozen other things. This leaves one possibility: your message has been seen and ignored.
As it gets later in the day, afternoon, evening, night, you are slowly filled with anxiety based on one simple fear: what if the person you’ve been dating doesn’t really like you? What if the person you’ve been dating really dislikes you and just doesn’t know how to tell you?
Your mind races to figure out what you should do. Should you text again? Should you pretend to send an accidental text? Should you send a message ending things? And the list of “shoulds” continues ad infinitum.
In these instances, I have always wondered what I did wrong to cause someone’s behaviour to change and, therefore, put immense pressure on myself to fix the problem.
Taking this approach to things is incredibly stressful; it turbocharges a negative inner monologue that races a mile per minute, leaving your self esteem a tiny dot in the rear-view mirror as you wonder: why doesn’t this person like me?
Knowing that I can’t change others’ behaviour, I’m trying to change how I react to such behaviour. Rather than fall prey to my own negative inner monologue that seeks to criticize my behaviour, I now attempt to hunt down the answer to some important questions.
Am I satisfied with how I am being treated?If the answer to that question is “no” then why does it matter if this person dislikes me in the first place?
In fact, do I even like the person I’m dating?
I then think about how I would want a potential partner to react to conflict when I do something wrong; after all, we’re all human and that’s inevitable. Unsurprisingly, the answer to that question is never, “By giving me the silent treatment with no explanation whatsoever.”
So, the next time a text, email, or call to a potential someone special goes unanswered, the only thing you should do is reevaluate who gets the privilege of being in your world.
Photo by Mariah Bridgeman/The Ontarion.