Posts tagged with "misunderstanding"

My Congeniality Is Not Benevolence

I’ll always try to give every­one a fair chance when I first meet them. I assume the “gener­ic”, kind per­son­al­i­ty, which is pri­mar­i­ly used to make the per­son com­fort­able and open, enough to feel them out.

Unfortunately, some peo­ple mis­take this as friend­li­ness, when I real­ly could­n’t give a shit about them. All I’m try­ing to do is find out more about their per­son­al­i­ties and their lives because that’s what I’m always inter­est­ed in. It’s usu­al­ly the peo­ple who are social­ly dis­ad­van­taged who mis­in­ter­pret this, and believe that I’m inter­est­ed in friend­ship.

Usually when I sense some­thing I don’t like about some­one (which hap­pens more often than not) I’ll dis­tance myself from them and turn cold. This gen­er­al­ly means I have no fur­ther inter­est in asso­ci­at­ing with them. I’ll nev­er ini­ti­ate con­ver­sa­tion with them, nev­er state my opin­ion around them, nev­er show emo­tion to them. Most can sense this and step back, pos­si­bly sub­con­scious­ly, and eas­i­ly because most haven’t invest­ed any­thing in the rela­tion­ship.

However, some­times some­one won’t get the idea and cling to the ini­tial mis­in­ter­pre­ta­tion. In these cas­es, I’m left with some­one who thinks I’m his or her friend. They’ll open up, tell me things, put their trust in me, when I don’t care (when I sense some­thing I dis­like, I lose all inter­est).

I’ve always won­dered if it’s just me being an ass­hole by wear­ing a kind per­son­al­i­ty sim­ply to sat­is­fy my curios­i­ty, or whether it’s the fault of oth­ers for mis­in­ter­pret­ing my expres­sions and actions. In the past I’ve always blamed myself and felt bad when some­one finds out that I’m not their friend, but I’m begin­ning to blame oth­ers. I’ve run into a few social­ly retard­ed peo­ple who just don’t under­stand any­thing about the dynam­ic set of social rules sur­round­ing them. I know now in some cas­es that it’s not my fault.

But this fact does­n’t alle­vi­ate the sit­u­a­tions.