People treat you the way you train them. If you let them get away with it, people will abuse you. If you appeal to their nasty side, you’ll get treatment. If you appeal to their nobility, you’ll get that.
I’ve often lain around and bemoaned the way people treated me. Then I listened to a lecture on relationships by Igor Ledochowski and got that idea that we train people how to treat us.
I like tough chicks. I love strong women. I date them. And then sometimes I get weak and allow them to treat me with contempt. And when I only whimper about it instead of setting up firm boundaries, they treat me increasingly worse.
I had a weak girlfriend. She’s the only one I’ve ever yelled at. I’m not a yeller. But because she let me get away with yelling at her, I yelled at her.
I get a lot of emails and Facebook messages from people seeking my help. I can’t think of an exception to the rule that when people I don’t know approach me casually and sloppily, it’s never worth my time to respond to them.
If you don’t know me, you should begin your email with “Mr. Ford” and you should take care that your email is correctly spelled and punctuated. And you should be clear what you want from me.
I get these vague messages from women asking for help with their prospective conversion to Orthodox Judaism. Most of the time, they don’t have any real questions for me. They just want emotional support. They just want me to sit there and listen to them complain about their lives and to assure them that everything is going to be OK.
So I tell them, “Google it.” And they respond, “That sounds impersonal.”
Well, with few exceptions, the only women I’m going to emotionally support are girlfriends. The only people who get birthday cards, let alone gifts, from me are those I might marry.
