That reddit forum is so chock-full of juicy gossip, I feel kinda dirty after reading a few. The framing of the premise seems wrong to me somehow. “There is an asshole in this story. If I am it, then party opposing me is off the hook. And vice versa.”(And then theres everyone is an asshole, for those annoyed by both sides equally)
I kind of wish there was a standard, easy way of asking instead, "could this have gone better? And who bears the most responsibility for it going wrong?
That’s just straight up insulting. If you disagree with @Lexicat, that’s all well and good, but there is no reason to be a dick. Knock it off.
I seem to have hit a nerve, and that was not my aim (the regulars around here have all disagreed with one another at some point: I don’t expect everyone to hold with my ideas).
If you are having a bad day, maybe you could use a smile:
Re-reading this the next day, you’re absolutely right. I let frustrations from elsewhere color my response. I apologize for the hostile tone, Lexicat. I was out of line.
OP is the asshole but not for reason he believed.
Little did he know Mr. Flufferbutt had been meticulously planing that escape for weeks. Sure that family was nice enough, on the outside. Truth be told, the kids were a little grabby, the parents a little neglectful, but the food is what really pushed Flufferbutt over the edge. When exchanging some casual mewmow in the back alley with the other neighborhood kitties Flufferbutt heard tales of soft wet food, from a can. Other cats were eating tuna in oil, and all Flufferbutt ever had was generic store brand dry food. In fact, Flufferbutt was on that exact car, at that precise moment, not by chance but because the OP cat had said to Flufferbutt that maybe because their humans were so nice, and generous with the wet food portions, they might adopt Flufferbutt. Instead they sent him right back to the hell he was desperately trying to escape.
Yeah, I read a bunch of them and I thought, “You should stop worrying about whether you are to blame and go apologize to the other person (even though I don’t think you were in the wrong).” I once heard in a family therapy course that when two people are mad at one another usually each is willing to apologize if the other meets them halfway, it has to be 50/50; but the best course is to simply apologize 100% and that will give the other person room to apologize 100% to you when they are ready. Basically, if they treated you badly, assume it’s because they felt badly about the way you treated them.
Of course this was advice for parents dealing with children, it assumes that you love each other, you are stuck with each other and that you ultimately shoulder the responsibility for what happens. It also leaves out the edge case where that the other person is a gaslighting, machiavellian, narcissistic asshole and this tactic will have absolutely zero effect (since we mostly don’t write our kids off as just being born bad). It certainly doesn’t apply to all adult-to-adult interaction, especially not with people who aren’t really part of your life. Still, I think it applies more than people think it does (which I assume, since most people probably haven’t been exposed to the idea, is around 0%).
In my experience, the vast majority of apologies I’ve seen translate to, “I want to stop fighting, so here’s what I think you want to hear so you’ll stop attacking me”. Which is frequently good enough for government work, but it rarely deepens any understanding of the issues involved.
When it’s family or someone else I trust enough to honestly disagree with, my rule of thumb is to not issue an apology until I truly understand what I did wrong. (If its a machivellian narcissist Im apologizing to, then what I did wrong was trust that we could have an honest disagreement)
Its hard to apply these kinds of rules in the larger world.
The same course had a four step process for apologizing:
So basically it depended on: 1) being able to empathize with the person you are apologizing to; 2) being able to say something will be different in the future. I’m fine at (1) but sometimes (2) is a really open question.
Very often I think of a quotation from Michael Cane’s character in The Weatherman:
This shit life… you must chuck some things. You must chuck them in this shit life.
My girlfriend and I have figured out how to pause a difficult conversation when neither of us wants to concede the point, but we’re both too tired to continue. We take turns with,“The topic is _____”. A lot of the time, just noticing the difference in what we think the argument is really about, is enough to feel heard, and not needing to bring it up later.
We have all been there.
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