Member-only story
Are You Secretly Tearing Down Your Friends? — It’s Time to Build Them Up
Sometimes we catch ourselves in the bad habit of hoping a friend will fail. But when you support them, their success is your success.
I once had a boyfriend who would ask me questions that he already knew the answer to. They were usually about things he knew I hadn’t done. He wanted to force me to admit I’d failed. If I didn’t react with shame, he would push me until I did.
And I imagine that we’ve all done that. We’ve all, at some point, asked someone a question deliberately to hear that they’ve failed.
For what purpose? Why do we descend into this so obviously deceptive behaviour?
If challenged, he would always say that he didn’t know the answer and that he genuinely wanted to know. But the trouble with this deception is that it’s so transparent. So universal.
We want to hear the, ‘no. I haven’t done it/learned it/finished it.’
It’s almost as if hearing that person has failed makes us better.
Only it doesn’t.
The failure of others does not make us better. It doesn’t even make us better in comparison.
