The Unexpected Ways People Show They Don’t Really Care About You
The Unexpected Ways People Show They Don’t Really Care About You
Something transcendental happened to me yesterday. My friend ruined it in one word.
Ihad a friend who once drove ninety minutes through rain to bring me soup when I had the flu.
She showed up with the good kind, the kind from the place with the handwritten menu. The soup was piping hot, I don’t know how she did that. She stayed for an hour and refilled my water glass twice and told me a story about her sister that made me laugh so hard I coughed.
She apologized for making me cough too. Then she left, and I didn’t hear from her for eleven weeks.
I counted, because that’s the kind of thing you start counting once you notice it. Eleven weeks of nothing. No text, no how are you feeling now, nothing. When I finally reached out, she responded within four minutes, warm as always, full of exclamation points.
We made plans. She cancelled them. She apologized beautifully. We rescheduled. She cancelled again.
I thought the soup meant something. I don’t anymore.
There’s a whole category of behavior that looks like care and isn’t. The subtler ones are what get you — the reason smart people stay in one-sided friendships for years, lonely…