Why do some people “keep score” of how people treat them?

r/

I feel like more and more people do this now, and I’m confused. Here’s my perspective on it:

I’m not saying we should let people walk all over us. Obviously we shouldn’t do that. But that doesn’t mean that we should be doing something to the effect of keeping some type of mental log of all the times someone has wronged us.

Existence is complicated. Some of my closest friends are people that I once felt sleighted by, and they either apologized for it or let me know that they were just in a bad spot when it happened, and they’ve shown since that they clearly aren’t like that all the time. Those that haven’t done that, we just never became friends, and I forgot about the original sleight in the first place.

I heard this awful opinion one time that went something to the effect of “if I let my friends treat me like that, then I’d let my enemies treat me even worse.” That’s dumb. Don’t “let” anyone treat you any particular way. Just accept that life is complex.

And if the sleights happen after becoming friends, then just talk to your friend as they happen. Don’t keep a record over time. If they hurt you or say something surprising, bring it up at or around the time when it happens. Don’t just say nothing, deduct points, and then one day say you can’t be friends anymore because of a whole record of sleights that you kept and said nothing about. If you do that, you might think that it’s your friend that’s being the bad friend because of all the sleights, but it’s actually you that’s the bad friend for never bringing it up. What’s a sleight to one person can be just normal existence to someone else, and good friends will adapt, but they can’t if they don’t know they were doing anything wrong in the first place.

Comments

  1. AutoModerator Avatar

    📣 Reminder for our users

    >1. Check the rules: Please take a moment to review our rules, Reddiquette, and Reddit’s Content Policy.
    >2. Clear question in the title: Make sure your question is clear and placed in the title. You can add details in the body of your post, but please keep it under 600 characters.
    >3. Closed-Ended Questions Only: Questions should be closed-ended, meaning they can be answered with a clear, factual response. Avoid questions that ask for opinions instead of facts.
    >4. Be Polite and Civil: Personal attacks, harassment, or inflammatory behavior will be removed. Repeated offenses may result in a ban. Any homophobic, transphobic, racist, sexist, or bigoted remarks will result in an immediate ban.

    🚫 Commonly Asked Prohibited Question Subjects:

    >1. Medical or pharmaceutical questions
    >2. Legal or legality-related questions
    >3. Technical/meta questions (help with Reddit)

    This list is not exhaustive, so we recommend reviewing the full rules for more details on content limits.

    ✓ Mark your answers!
    >If your question has been answered, please reply with Answered!! to the response that best fit your question. This helps the community stay organized and focused on providing useful answers.


    I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.