Good isn't good unless there's something bad
On how comparison is the automatic driver of human relationships.
I love the movie Inside Out. "Happiness means nothing without sadness to compare it to." Simple. Honest.
So much of life is this way—not just with emotions. We compare. We compare constantly. Constantly and automatically, deliberately and unconsciously. Just, literally our entire lives are comparing everything to everything:
"This donut isn't as good as the one I had last week."
"Your haircut isn't as good as the one you had last week."
"Why are you getting haircuts every week?"
We compare small stuff like donuts and haircuts and big stuff like marriages and careers.
I think about comparison a lot. Mostly in regards to people.
When you're in someone's presence, you feel a way. That feeling could be anxiety or anger or even boredom. Perhaps, for no detectable reason, you feel a deep sense of "fuck this guy." And yet, we feel something entirely different when we're around another someone.
1 someone + 1 someone = 2 someones.
And now that we have 2, the comparisons can begin.
And don't worry, you don't have to try to compare these two people. Again, your brain will do this automatically. And truthfully, this drive to compare is vital. We need to be able to be in a situation, compare it to the other situation we were in a week ago, and decide which is better for us. It's probably how humans evolved or some shit look I'm not a fucking archeologist.
So naturally, the more experiences you have, the better equipped you'll be to evaluate new experiences.
And the more people you meet, the better equipped you'll be able to evaluate that Dave's friend Paul is an assface and you don't need to waste your time investing in that potential friendship.
All of this actually cascades into a range of actionable takeaways. When you understand that people are constantly comparing everything from weather to sushi to your dumb hat, you realize that people are drawn to what they want to be drawn to.
Sometimes that's you.
And sometimes that's definitely not you.
This happens all the time in dating. You go on a date. Goes really well. And then you promptly never hear from them again. Now wait a second... what happened? Did you say something? Did you do something? Perhaps you should have offered to pay for the whole dinner or gotten better seats at the comedy show or maybe it doesn’t ACTUALLY FUCKING MATTER.
Girl, in the first 10 seconds of sitting down at dinner, you just got compared to every other person that person has ever met in their entire lives. And it’s not about you being objectively better or worse than those people—it’s about you being personally better or worse for this other random nobody you went on a date with. You got ranked on a chart titled, “People That Would Be Great For Me to Spend The Rest of My Life With.” And there's this invisible threshold of making the cut and not making the cut and you didn't make the cut.
But that's actually a gift. It's a gift to not make the cut.
You know what's worse? You barely make the cut, go on four more dates, hook up, become exclusive, and 2.75 years later you split up because neither of you had enough other experiences under your belt to compare this not-so-great but also not-so-horrific date to.
Solution: we need to experience more experience. And people more people. That way, we can compare every new experience against the rest of our lives previous to that, and know where it sits.
One other common example is in friendships—both with friends you’ve had for forever and new people you’re trying to form a friendship with. You know those people who are always unavailable and can never make time? Maybe they really are just "super busy tonight" for the third time this month. Or maybe a "work thing" really did just come up for the third time this month. Or maybe they really did schedule "another haircut" for the third time this month.
These things may all be true. Or maybe they're all lies. Either way the underlying truth is that they are making time—just not for you. And there is a reason. But most of the time we'll never that reason. Sometimes even the person making up those excuses doesn't even know the reason, they just know that they feel a way when they're around you and it's not serving them quite as much as it is to be around other people.
GOOD.
Let them compare. Let me compare. Let us all compare and move through life being in the situations and around the people that all serve us individually the best.
It's weird because sometimes we're pining after one person who's pining after another person who's pining after a third person and, in theory, that third person could be us! But no one's looking back at the person who's looking at them, we're all just looking towards the horizon at options that aren't reciprocating our feelings. I call this the Triangle of Desire and maybe I'll write more about it one day:
I think the ghosting and the indefinite postponement of plans and all this stuff is connected in a symphony of complex human interaction that is often an unsolvable mystery. Think about the person in your life who is the highest maintenance.1 Maybe they’re really negative. Maybe they turn every conversation into an unrelenting .WAV of venting. Whatever the case, you're sitting there at coffee and hating your life because you are comparing this person to every other person in your life and going, "I'd rather hang out with Noah, or Ashley, or Zach, or Kyle, or Mike, or Julia, or…” and the list goes on. This mental app of comparison is so effortless for our brains to run. It's probably like only 14kb or whatever look I'm not a fucking computer scientist.
Now imagine that highest maintenance person watching hidden camera footage of you and the person in your life that you THRIVE around the most. Your highest maintenance person would watch this footage and would be SHOCKED. Like, "wow, I didn't even know people could have that much fun” shocked.
You see why, right? Because they're always with their highest maintenance selves. They can't escape their body, their own personality. They're always them. They have no other self to compare themselves to. But you do because you’re you, and you have other people that you’d feel a better way around.
And quite honestly, so would they. Every time we engage with people who we really don't like to be around, we're obviously hurting ourselves, but we’re also hurting them because we subtly signal that we want to be around them, which isn't completely true, and it takes away time from them that they could be investing in other people that would love to be around them!
Right—this is really important: just because you don’t like the way you feel when you’re around your highest maintenance person doesn’t mean that they can’t be someone else’s THRIVING person. One person's highest maintenance person is another person's confidant, lover, best friend.
So.
When you don't hear back from a date, round down to zero. If they like you they will contact you. How do I know this? Because you like them. And you're thinking of them. And you contacted them. We want to talk to the people we want to talk to.
Embrace the seasonality of friendships. When someone continues to not be available to hang out, just text them some form of, "all good, hit me up when you’re free” and just let them come back to you. Or not. Every moment you're investing in someone who isn't reciprocating is energy you could redirect into someone who is. Bonus: when two people are tending to the same friendship garden it’s a lot more lush.
Make a literal list of the five people who nourish you the most and make it a priority to invest in them. We have a tendency to circle around the same few people and often they aren't always the people we walk away from feeling the most energized by. Now there’s a lot of reasons for that, but the point is to just be aware of the people that fill you up.
For me, the ultimate test of this is when I'm walking back to my car after a dinner with someone and my inner monologue is like, "Damn, I am feeling great. They're great. I'm great. Jokes. All the jokes. Where the fuck did I park? The waiter? Loved us. Obviously. Man, I should do dinner with them again soon was I FUCKING TOWED?"
lol at the fact that when I tried to think about the answer to this question for myself I realized it was myself.