Previous installments of The Toast’s advice column from two disparate and imperfect persons can be found here. Last time: Advice on Yappy Coworkers and Being Poorer Than You Want.
I’m currently in the middle of a complicated, messed-up situation in which everyone has hurt at least one other person very badly. As a result, there’s been a lot of talk of “rebuilding trust.” But what does that mean, and how do you do it? Is it just a matter of letting time pass and not screwing up again? Is there anything one can actually do to rebuild trust, or does trust just have to heal on its own, like a wound?
Nicole: Trust! Fascinating. Also, man, this sounds juicy, I wish I had all the gory details. Trust, in my opinion, can be restored, but it’s kind of a bitch. You need to look at the people involved, and decide if it’s worth it. Are you three best friends who’ve secretly murdered a dude and need to keep a united front in front of the police? Then you need to rebuild that trust (via, yeah, letting time pass and not screwing up again, along with–ideally–a conversation involving lots of “when you did X I felt Y” phrases.)
If, however, this is like “a group trip went awry and people did not pay people back and then someone fucked someone else’s girlfriend” scenario, it may just be easier not to be friends any more. Life is short, don’t spend it with people you’re going to be quietly side-eying for the next three years until having kids at different times causes you to invariably drift apart anyway. Which, I guess, means that I support option three: “do not bother trying,” but of “is there anything one can actually do to rebuild trust” and “does trust just have to heal on its own, like a wound,” I’m Team Wound. Like a wound, of course, it doesn’t heal well if it’s still got bits of gravel and broken glass in it, so air the grievances, see if the other parties seem genuine in their wish to resume the relationship, and go from there. Please email me back and tell me what happened. I won’t tell anyone. (Trust me.)
Mallory: Is this a poly thing? It sounds like a poly thing. I wish you had included like, a detail in this question, because it is very hard to answer a question like “how do we make trust together” without knowing what happened! I am tempted to tell you to craft ELABORATELY MANIPULATIVE EMOTIONAL SITUATIONS to test these people without their knowledge and punishing them in a thousand small ways when they inevitably fail to live up to your secret expectations, in retaliation for being so vague.
Sometimes, I think, people use phrases like “rebuilding trust” when what they mean are “let’s feel close again” or “let’s rush back into intimacy without changing any of our behavior.” Not always! But sometimes.
Let’s pretend the problem is that someone ate all of your best food in the common area. I do that. A lot. Let’s say I live with you and I’ve been eating your food, even if you put your name on it, and I don’t give a shit about how it makes you feel, and I lie about it all the time because my heart is made of trash. And you find out, and you call a roommate meeting, and everyone just starts airing a bunch of grudges you didn’t realize they’d been bearing for years, apparently, but they do. Anyhow. Did I apologize? Did I take full responsibility for my actions, or did I say things like “I’m sorry if I made you feel X,” as if my behavior and your feelings had no relation to one another? Because if I just mumbled “sorry” and like, offered to buy you more white bean hummus the next time I went to Trader Joe’s but then I didn’t, you shouldn’t keep trusting me.
Honestly, it’s kind of bullshit you’re making such a big deal out of this. You were out of town for like four days and you didn’t even say anything so I probably kept it from going to waste. (do you see why you shouldn’t trust me)
The key components need to be, I think, an honest conversation about what happened, a sincere and full apology from whoever’s involved, a genuine attempt to reform/amend the hummus-stealing (or whatever), and making restitution. Have, you know, clear and definable goals that come with a time frame of some…scope, I guess. Locate your goals in space and time. That way, if they’re not met at some point, you’ll know, instead of just having to gauge how trust-y you feel at some vague future point. Putting goals on the space-time continuum, that’s the answer to most problems.
IS IT A POLY THING? YOU CAN TELL US, WE’RE VERY BROAD-MINDED.
Background: I have a best friend, Greg, who is more like a life partner/platonic husband/whatever you want to call it. We currently live in different cities but I am planning to move to his city in about a year, and we plan to co-parent our kids one day (his boyfriend is down with this idea, I’m currently single.)
The problem: Currently, Greg and his boyfriend Jim* live together with a mutual friend of ours, Franny*. Franny and Greg have been friends for a long time, like since elementary school, and I’ve been friends with both of them since high school. While I love Franny dearly, there are a number of reasons that I prefer her as a small-doses friend, not a live-in friend–these range from a tendency towards chronic lying to being weirdly competitive with me about my friendship with Greg. Greg and Jim would rather not be living with her currently (she’s also a pretty messy and disrespectful roommate), and would much prefer to live with just me when I move to their city.
But the thing is, I can’t figure out a way to make this work without being terribly mean. Franny is very insecure, and very attached to her friends–she had a rough home life and a mom who takes more care than she gives, so I am very sympathetic to her problems and can understand why she acts the way she does, even if I don’t want to live with her because of it. She is very attached to Greg, considers him her best friend and since the very beginning of our friendship has been insecure about me being closer to him. If Greg and Jim and I tell her that she needs to move out because I’m moving in, we’ll basically be saying “Everything you’ve ever suspected about how your friends don’t care about you is true, also now you’re homeless.” Especially considering that I’d literally be moving into her room (I guess we could get a new place, but their place is great and that seems. . .unnecessarily symbolic.) But getting a new three-bedroom with someone we don’t want to live with just to avoid the awkwardness also seems like a bad idea.
I’ve suggested that Greg and Jim ask her to move out now for the messiness and disrespect reasons so that it doesn’t appear to be directly related to me moving there, but they understandably aren’t enthusiastic about filling the room with some craiglist rando when I have yet to commit to exactly when I’m going to show up. The most honest thing we can say to her, “We love you but just don’t want to live together” is going to be interpreted miserably no matter how we phrase it. Have you got a better idea that I’m missing?
Mallory: Oh, my God, make your entire life THE EXACT OPPOSITE OF THIS SITUATION. DON’T GO IN THE HOUSE. DON’T READ THE PAGE OUT OF THAT SKIN BOOK, BOY FROM HOCUS POCUS WHOSE NAME I CAN’T REMEMBER. DON’T DO WHATEVER MADE THE MUMMY WAKE UP AT THE BEGINNING OF THE MUMMY, RACHEL WEISZ.
I’m afraid for you, beloved one! What does “down with this idea” mean, in Greg boyfriend terms? Sometimes people will say things to me like “don’t you think it’d be cool to go to Seattle in September” and I say “yeah” because I like to keep conversations light and snappy and then September comes and they say “so what time should we meet at the airport on the 17th” and I’m like “WAIT THAT WAS REAL?” Because somewhere between “we should co-parent our kids someday” and “uuugh I’d like you to live with us but there’s already someone in that room??? but we don’t like her that much…ahhh” is like…at least seven steps.
Okay but let’s say you DON’T decide to totally chuck your life plans because some ladyblogger thinks it’s a structurally unsound foundation, here is my best real-world advice:
I think first do have an exact plan on when you are going to show up! This will make a lot of things much easier. Have a chat with Greg about it! “I would like to move in with you [LOCATION ON THE SPACE-TIME CONTINUUM]. I think it would be easiest to have Franny move out at least a month before said date. Does that work for you?” If Greg spins out a bunch of reasons about how Franny’s really fragile right now and it’s just not a good time, he might not be as committed to the idea of moving in together as you might like, and you can act accordingly (by looking for a place of your own in the area, or not moving there at all, or POETIC IMAGE THIRTY-SEVEN NOT FOUND).
If Greg’s excited to have you move in and willing to ask Franny to move out, he gets to handle that situation, as Franny’s roommate. You don’t have to do any heavy lifting. Make yourself a malted.
Nicole: I do not have a better idea! Other than: this is Greg’s problem, make HIM deal with it. Does he want to continue to be friends with Franny? Then he needs to sack up and manage this situation. If, as I suspect, the experience of living with Franny has sapped his will to remain super-close to her, this may just be one of those “we’re growing upppp we’re getting olderrrr [lyrics to “Landslide”] let’s move on separately with our lives” moments. I also, personally, think that if you have a bad roommate situation, and you have the opportunity to get a new, better roommate (you), you just take it. There are few things less important in this life than the roommates you have had in the past, and few things more horrible in the moment than living with a bad one. Cut ‘er loose. But, again, make Greg handle this shit.
Oh, and, no matter what happens, do NOT get a new three-bedroom with Franny, that sounds like a fucking nightmare.
Tags: advice, advice from two disparate persons, she said she said
Related Posts
She Said, She Said: Advice on Yappy Coworkers and Being Poorer Than You Want
Aunt Acid: Advice About Sisters
“Is This Working?”: Advice On Promotions and Leaves of Absence
“Is This Working?” Introducing Our Job Advice Column
Aunt Acid: Advice on Found Money and Cliques
Raising the Tone: Etiquette for Resentment and Bachelor Parties
YESSS BUFFY. The only way of dealing with roommates is to send them back to their demon realm parents. Otherwise they will try to steal your human body. Sorry.
I was extremely pleased with that pic as well.
I CANNOT GET PAST THE CO-PARENTING THE KIDS AND THE BOYFRIEND IS DOWN WITH THIS THING. That is just so much information for a little aside comment!
Additionally, do you really want to co-parent with a dude who can’t get up the backbone to tell his messy, dramatic, conniving roommate to move out?
And if he can’t tell the roommate what he thinks, it is possible that he’s not saying what he thinks to the prospective co-parent?
Yeahhhh, I was thinking that Greg and Jim’s hand-wavy “welp, guess we are stuck living with Franny, nothing we can do about it!” is actually their (ineffective) way of avoiding this future co-parenting situation that they may have only agreed to in passing.
no I mean hopefully things will work out for the best but you gotta have a better parenting contract in place with people you’re not legally bound to than just “you’re down with this right”
“But Your Honor, he was down with it!“
FUNNY! Thumbs up furiously. Also, as an aside, loving the phrase “sack up”. This post and the ensuing comments is on Monday morning fire!
(Happily goes back to read more wise and hysterical Toastie feedback).
Yeah, that does not make it sound like a well thought out plan with boundaries and legal provisions and financial planning. But maybe it is only the tip of the iceberg!
I can imagine few hells hotter than being the non-parent roommate in a co-parenting apartment. Because, 1) 3 AM baby screams will not be hindered by walls, and 2) GUESS WHO WILL BE EXPECTED TO PICK UP ALL THE CLEANING/COOKING SLACK.
Jim will basically be a third parent, but one without any actual say over how the child is raised. Jim is better off with Franny.
Wait, do any of them even HAVE kids? I feel like this is one of those things you just say to be like “we’ll be best friends FOREVER, right?!”not any kind of concrete life plan.
See also “If we’re both unmarried by 40, we’ll marry each other!”
Yeah, my read on this is that they are “BFFs” in their early to mid 20s who said, “OMG, we should totally have a baby together!”
But, the future-baby has nothing to do with the roommate discussion at hand, and I agree with Mallory.
This sounds like a plan I’d make up at age 9. “Let’s all be best friends and live together when we grow up” “Yeah! And we’ll have kids and raise them together!” “Yeah! It’ll be so much fun!” “And we will eat gummy worms for dinner EVERY DAY!”and then it dissolves into Which Candy Are We Going to Eat Next.
when I was like 10 I said I was going to marry a girl because who wants to marry a boy boys are the worst
SURPRISE I MARRIED A WOMAN and I eat whatever the fuck I want for dinner okay
maybe let’s not openly mock other people’s desires just because they seem unrealistic/idealistic to us!!! HOW DOES THAT SOUND
“maybe let’s not openly mock other people’s desires just because they seem unrealistic/idealistic to us”
Yes, please. I’ve been bothered by this for the past few hours and trying to compose a comment about how parenting agreements not tied to romantic partnerships seem like a pretty great idea to me. Also, putting some thought into giving bad news to a friend and seeking advice about it does not signal being too immature to work out the details. But, this line pretty much sums up what I really wanted to say.
right like people coparent with their friends. this person sounds a bit mixed up with overall life plans but hello Heather Has More Than Two Parents, What The Fuck Is The Problem.
also this was full stop my life plan until about three years ago but then got redirected bc I didn’t want to coparent in LA. and learned to quit dating shitty people. so.
Thank you! I’m LW2 and I’m a little astounded at the amount of judgement being thrown at me for having a non-traditional life plan. For the record, peeps:
This plan started out as something we said to each other half-jokingly, but as we continued to live together and become closer throughout the years, we’ve realized that it is something we are serious about. He hasn’t been in the new city long, and as we started more seriously discussing me moving out there I asked him to have a serious conversation with his boyfriend about it, as we’d only talked about it with him in passing before; if I’m going to make a major life change I need to know that this idea we have is something serious, even though we aren’t 100% committed to anything yet. The boyfriend likes the idea, both because he likes the idea of raising kids in a non-traditional nuclear structure and because I’m also close with him, but said he would need to have lived with me for quite awhile to know for sure, which obviously makes sense. None of us plan on having kids for about 8-10 years, so by the time this happened we would all have been living together for at least 7 years and there would indeed be legal arrangements and all the details worked out. The arrangement as well as our reasoning are expressed pretty well by this article: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/… and I’ve also seen an example of three parents being on a birth certificate pretty recently in Canada.
I glossed over this because the main question was about the roommate situation. FYI, this is not so much a question of Greg’s unwillingness to ‘sack up’ so much as both of us wanting to do this in a way that minimizes causing pain and doesn’t totally destroy our relationship with Franny. He is totally willing to just plain kick her out when I move, but we were just hoping that there might be a different alternative. He takes responsibility for the actual action, but I can’t just put it entirely on him because she is going to be angry with me as well and that will affect my social situation when I move.
Amongst the judgement, I have gotten the message that I need to make a concrete plan to move, and that is useful. With the rest of it. . .maybe consider that people should have the freedom to create whatever families they want, and maybe some of us aren’t thrilled with the idea that our only options are having one long-term romantic partner or being a single parent?
The Candy We Are Going to Eat Next is gummy lobsters. They’re DELICIOUS.
THESE EXIST???? And to think, my gummy of choice has been sharks for years. THE POSSIBILITIES.
I bought five pounds of them for a party. It was a Best Decision.
This is a good point–I’d assumed they already had a kid or kids, either ex-romantically or as a platonic friend-child sort of thing, and were working out a plan to raise them together instead of separately.
Bothe LW’s could do with not trying to manage other people’s relationships and situations. The people you are involved with in whatever degree are adults who can manage their own lives. You aren’t magic. You can’t fix their lives FOR them. They need to be able to use their words!
THAT SAID, so do you! Honesty and the willngness to accept consequences are valuable for both LW’s. LW2, you need to have an actual, honest discussion with real, concrete plans in it! LW 1, you need to communicate with who you hurt and with who hurt you, and work out ways those hurts can be healed, what apology and restitution is needed.
I wonder if LW1 is Franny.
*ding*
Headcanon accepted!
Since no one has asked her to move out yet, it’s presumably Franny from five months in the future. She had to be vague to avoid creating all sorts of causality problems when these letters ran together, thereby rupturing the space-time continuum that Mallory loves so much.
Ronbledore must be involved somehow.
I IMMEDIATELY THOUGHT THE SAME THING.
Ahhhh the house of trust-cards. Yeah, I’m big on the multi-step take responsibility, understand why it was fucked up, apologize and mean it and try to be better process, but in reality I feel like the number of people who are actually capable of this is vanishingly small. If you find one, forgive them of all ills, because they are a fucking gem (assuming they aren’t a manipulative parasite who has figured out this One Trick To Get Away With Anything).
In the more likely scenario that the person who screwed up can’t do one of the steps–either because issues, or other shit going on, whatever–it becomes more about trying to evaluate the risk that it’ll happen again and what this means for how you think of them.
Maybe they stay in your life, but just at like…a demoted level. I dunno, stuff if complicated! But the path of true trust is long and arduous and someone may still be worth having in your life in some capacity even if they don’t make it all the way through.
Demoted level/tiers of trust is a life philosophy I can get behind. There are people in my life who I will talk to about, say, having a rough time at work or how a movie made me bawl my eyes out. But they will not be getting the details about a disagreement with my boyfriend or how my anxiety has been bad lately. Tiers of Trust!
I’ve been thinking a bit about trust in intimate relationships and what makes for stellar trust. I’ve been listening to this podcast which is an advice column type thing (Totally Married), and the way they talk about creating trust, its pretty robust stuff- the couple that does the podcast has rules like, if one of them says no way to something based around trust issues, even if it’s a CRAZY thing to forbid (no watering the lawn on Fridays, because it makes me cry), the other party will accept it. And they have a no exceptions barred rule that if one partner says to the other, you need therapy/rehab, they go, even if they’re like, I haven’t had drugs in 5 years at all. Because of trust. This is a paraphrase, but the big point is that even if the thing that upsets someone is crazy, putting the relationship first and the other person at the top of the list goes in front of your own personal freedoms.
Anyway I’ve been thinking about that. It’s a bit like the obedience bit at the end of Taming of The Shrew, wherein surrendering your trust is not exactly surrender when you explicitly trust the person you surrender it to. Obviously the modern version is better because both partners get the same deal.
When trust gets violated, the person who got hurt gets to get aggressive on the boundaries of trust. Like lets say, person A breaks a valuable heirloom in a long line of breaking stuff belonging to person B. Feeling guilty, person A offers to do anything to make it up to them and stay friends. Person B says, “from now on you can’t take even a hairpin of mine without getting permission and if I say no, that’s it and if I want, I get to watch you closely the whole time you borrow the thing, AND I get to specify exactly how many hands need to connect with the object and the exact minimum dimensions of what you put the object down on and anything else related, down to what brand of chips you can eat while using my stereo or wearing my diamonds.” If person A is really contrite/capable of rebuilding trust, they need to be like, “anything you say my dear! Again I am sorry.” and then follow the rules to the letter, without whining and without ever asking that the terms be renegotiated. Whining that it was unreasonable to be made to go buy kid gloves to wear while reading handle a trade paperback belonging to B, or saying, “I’ve been good don’t you think I can stop asking permission now?” is then itself an accepted violation of trust, because you aren’t respecting what person B said they needed to feel comfortable.
So yeah. I think that’s how you rebuild trust. But it’s rare I think, that when trust has been broken and glued back together that it ends up as good as, or better than it was before the break. It may always be a little fragile going forward.
I love Totally Married! And I think this is a good breakdown of how “demoted levels of trust” works.
Max. His name was Max.
Wait, why do Jim and Franny get asterisks but Greg doesn’t?
I was wondering too! How cold would it be to change everyone’s name BUT ONE in an advice column letter?
I feel like a lot of Gregs are going to get slammed with baffling texts from their roomies today.
So, given that the LW doesn’t really want to be that close to Franny, and that Greg and Jim don’t much want to live with her, everything she fears about her friends kind of IS true, right? I’m not so sure there’s a way to let her down easy on that one.
Just live your life with the inability to completely trust anyone! It’s great!*
*Not great
“Life is short, don’t spend it with people you’re going to be quietly side-eying for the next three years until having kids at different times causes you to invariably drift apart anyway.”
One of the most important life lessons I’ve learned. A friend did a Bad Trust-Breaking Thing a couple years ago. After thinking about it, I decided not to continue the friendship. Haven’t really looked back since. Sure, I miss the fun parts of our friendship, but how much of that could I really have enjoyed if I had let her back into my life?
Sometimes I feel bad about ending a friendship, but then I remember that my friend turned into someone Super Awful and awkward to be around and I feel great about my choice.
A very good friend, one of my oldest, dearest, most emotionally-fraught friendships, did a Bad Trust-Breaking Thing, then disappeared (also a Bad Trust-Breaking Thing, btw: she just up and moved without a word) for several years. She’s made several efforts to reconnect with me, but I’ve resisted them. Then she friended me on Facebook, and for no reason I can adequately explain, I accepted.
After a year or so of alternating episodes of intense overtures or complete silence on her part, I realized this onetime friendship was never good for either of us, and I sent her a polite note explaining the kindest version of the truth: I was scaling down my FB friends list to my immediate social circle and family members, I wished her well, bye-bye.
And it was great. I looked the friendship squarely in the face, acknowledged that it was a product of a different time and place and that however pleasurable it had been, it had never been healthy, and I let it go without rancor or bitterness.
Yes! I lost my two “closest” friends a few years ago, separately (more in a growing-apart than trust-breaking manner), and realized shortly after that my life was so much better without their drama and constant belittlement of me. I’ve always thought I wanted to have more friends, but some things are not worth the effort.
MALLORY I AM ACTUALLY CHOKING on how good that advice is also your _eagle-eyed_ grip on When It It Almost Certainly A Poly Thing.
AGREED.
~*~ poly expect-taa-aaa-tions! ~*~
Second comment: this is the best of three agony-aunt columns I’ve read today, _all_ of which were almost 100% “Just dump them, dump them now, take to the _sea_ DO EET, SEA, IT IS RIGHT THERE TAKE TO IT.”
LW1, are you keeping details to yourself because the trust-breaking events are egregious and you know we’re going to say “JESUS THAT IS TERRIBLE GET OUT OF THERE”???
WELL JOKES ON YOU LW1, I AM TELLING YOU THAT ANYWAY DITCH THOSE SUCKERS THEY ARE GARBAGE
But really, if you’re concealing details because you know on some level that this shit is really ugly, you need to get out of there and find people who make you feel safe and good.
Do not build trust. PUMP trust up. Get your trust SWOLE. Watch your form, eat enough trustprotein.
Seriously, LW1 has to be a poly situation. Somebody used a flogger that was not theirs to use, somebody else admitted mid-flogging that they had binge-watched OITNB with their new secondary in spite of a clear agreement to only watch it with their primary and HER secondary, and someone else’s service top bought non-organic popcorn and now the whole co-housing arrangement is in distrustful chaos.
Get your trust SWOLE is my new life motto.
I’d watch this show.
You guys want to share stuff you’ve agreed to when friends suggest it and also your gut reaction when it’s presented as a real idea?
“Hey, we (all our high school friends) should build like a big longhouse up in Alaska and live there communally! You’re really good at gardening and cooking, A and B are really good at building stuff, and C and I can be the manual labor!”
Actual response; “Oh man, that sounds super fun! We could have goats and bees! Would you want to make the longhouse out of timber on site, or buy 2x4s?”
Internal response; “What. No. I can’t count on you to paddle the front end of a canoe reliably for 15 minutes, I’m supposed to trust you to prepare for an Alaskan winter? Also you guys all act like I’ve violated the Geneva convention when I cry. This is the worst plan. The worst.”
“We should all go on holiday to ireland together”
“Yeah, gonna do that when only one of us can drive, and I can’t trust any of the rest of you to be on time for anything, every, and SHE’LL not pack any walking boots but will pack a load of platform shoes so we won;t get to go on the hikes I’ll want to, and SHE worked as a chef and will be passive-aggressive about my cooking and everyone will want to do different things and very few will use their words, and christ, I don’t want to argue with K because she basically goes for the nuclear option every time … so no”
(I LOVE these people but their flaws and my flaws do not correspond in a way that will allow us to get along for two weeks in rural ireland when you can ONLY get places by car)
I have nothing constructive to contribute except that I thought that Buffy pic was of the dude from “Anne” — the creepy cult demon guy who ALSO has a weird melty face & who suckers lost kids into hell where they work until they die — and then I was confused, until I realized it was demon roomie Cathy. That is all.
Don’t live with anybody, and don’t parent with anybody. Take to the sea. Live in a sea cave. It is the only way.
Bahahahah Futrama reference FTW!
I have a sneaking suspicion that letter writer is actually the Franny in this situation, and Greg is totally a double friend agent. I believe he is definitely whispering sweet-friend nothings into the ears of both LW and Franny about how each is the only one true friend and that the other is annoying and a bad roommate. LW, get your own apartment with roommates you don’t know. If you want to live in their neighborhood, fine, I can’t stop you, but you’re going to need a new circle of friends when this crazy gossip girl-esque situation blows up.
Also the boy in Hocus Pocus was named Max played by Omri Katz. His most notable attribute was that he was a virgin, which is why it worked when he lit the black flame candle, which was the event that triggered Kathy Najimi’s rebirth (in this movie and also in her career).
“Make yourself a malted” totally made me think of Lenny Bruce’s Genie in the Candy Store bit, and I almost did a spit take on my keyboard.
I’m thriving in a poly situation and I didn’t want to admit it before, but 96% of our impetus for success has been spiting Mallory
The remaining 4% is that don’t live together what’s wrong with you
LW2 is SO HARD. Wow. Kicking out a roommate and replacing them with a new one is hard enough even when their insecurities *don’t* line up exactly with that situation. But you know this band-aid has to be ripped off. I think the best you can hope for is that Greg and his partner are honest with Franny in the gentlest way possible. Trying to create some situation to hide the fact that you’re replacing her would only hurt her more. Then, after she moves out, if she still wants to be friends with them, let her keep that relationship and don’t treat her any differently than before.
Roommate stuff sucks, but if it’s any consolation, those wounds heal pretty quickly when you’re not living together anymore.
It was me, actually. And it was! And it was more screwed up than I even have words to describe.
Thanks. And you have no idea. But it's easier said than done.
Hm. That would probably have worked, maybe? It's something to think about. I'll keep it in mind for the future, I guess.
IT REALLY IS. We <3 u.
Haha, THANK YOU, Nicole, that's actually very validating.
"Unexplained radio silence is really hard to deal with."
TRUTHBOMB, as the kids say.
Oh gosh SO much easier said than done. It's also so much healthier to make a distinction between ~rebuilding trust~ and making excuses for relationships that need to end.
I hope you find some peace with your situation!