You deserve relationships that don't leave you guessing

Dear friend,

You deserve relationships that don’t leave you guessing.

You deserve lovers who communicate how they feel about you and partners who do what they say they will do. You deserve friends you can confidently predict will show up when you need them, and friends that will tell you when you’ve hurt them.

You deserve relationships that don’t leave you in a perpetual liminal state of uncertainty.

When a therapist told me 10 years ago that I deserved clarity and predictability in relationships because it is a fundamental need that begins in childhood and never goes away, I didn’t believe her. In my experience, partners lie, family abandons you, and friends drop off for no clear reason. People were not predictable; they were ticking time bombs of inevitable heartbreak.

Which was why, at the time, I rarely reached out to friends unless they texted first. I told lovers I wasn’t looking for anything serious, even if I was seriously interested in them. In the words of 90’s folk queen Sarah McLachlan, I was an expert at “building a mystery” of my true feelings. It was how I felt protected from the uncertainty of other people’s behavior. I had been burned by relationships that left me guessing, so I became the one who left them guessing.

And friend, I know this avoidance of vulnerability is understandable when you’ve been hurt, but I also think our culture rewards and encourages this behavior. We have been convinced that relationships are a game you must strategize to win. So you hold onto your cards, avoid communicating with earnest sincerity and enthusiasm, and hide behind a veneer of too-cool.

It used to be that when you hadn’t spoken to a friend for a while, you had to reach out to them to find out what was happening in their life. Now, people just check their Instagram stories. We make assumptions (guesses) based on what our friends post on social media about whether that person really needs us or is too busy to hang out with us. We have an entire narrative going on in our heads about the nature of the friendship without actually connecting or revealing our true feelings.

It used to be that when you were romantically interested in someone, you had to call them on the phone, approach them at a bar or party, pass them a note before class…now technology minimizes the friction of enthusiasm and renders you emotionally unreadable, where an essential level of “guessing” is always at play. To the point where it’s pretty standard that a person you are talking to on the app will disappear mid-conversation, never to be heard from again. Where did they go? Are they still alive? Who knows??

And even when you do make a connection, the guessing game has become so normalized that it’s almost a faux pas to ask for transparency. It’s wild to me that so many people are afraid to have a conversation about feelings with someone they have had sex with multiple times. Clarity and predictability are treated as a rare gift, not a standard that we need to uphold for ourselves and each other.

At what point is this not self-protection but PERFORMANCE? At what point are we just being fake?

And look, I’m not saying we should know what each other is feeling and thinking at all times in a relationship. I’m not saying that people aren’t allowed to change their minds. But if clarity and predictability are psychological hallmarks of healthy relationships, shouldn’t we at least aim for a healthy experience? Even if that relationship doesn’t last? Even when clarity and communication aren’t easy?

Shouldn’t we do our best not to leave people guessing how we feel about them? Shouldn’t we aim to be the lover, friend, and decent human being we want other people to be? And shouldn’t we expect that from the people we are giving our love, time, and energy to?

If more people broke the cycle of leaving others guessing, wouldn’t we create a new standard for what is culturally acceptable?

Not long ago, I saw a viral post from someone on Threads that said she loved the friendships where she could not text back for 6 months, and it was no big deal. And I couldn’t help but wonder: was it really no big deal to these friends who didn’t hear back or had they convinced themselves that was all they could ask for? Did any of them question if she cared about them or if the friendship was real? What had her friends gone through in those 6 months that they could have really benefited from her support? And I also kept thinking about other people reading that post and assuming this level of predictability in friendships was all they should expect.

Obviously, people go through difficult phases of life when they are less dependable. I’m not saying we shouldn’t be understanding of limitations. My concern is a culture in which we do not tell or show people how much they matter to us; relationships that feel increasingly distant despite technology supposedly keeping us connected, and romance where transparency and honesty are not prioritized.

That’s not the world I want to live in, so that’s not the person I am going to be.

I deserve relationships that don’t leave me guessing, and so do you.

All my love,

Bunny ❤︎

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