If you feel betrayed, it is only because you want to give an irrational and emotional reaction to somebody having different priorities from what you imagined. Your spouse didn’t betray you by having an affair, she simply had different priorities. Your friend didn’t betray you by choosing another over you, he simply had different priorities from what you imagined. Your boss didn’t betray you firing you, he simply had different priorities from what you counted on. I’ve only rarely felt betrayed by friends, and only when I refused to look at either how my behavior precipitated acts from others I didn’t like, or how my irrational thinking about how others should behave set me up for unnecessary pain.
* I’m a mismatcher. Give me three things and I’ll look for what’s different among them. Mismatchers have a hard time relating to other people because they focus on dissimilarities. I get along best with other mismatchers. We’re always looking for the new, routine is boring. I connect quickly and deeply with about 1% of the population, and the other 99% require a lot of effort and patience (of which I have little) on my part to get along with.
* Only one Persian friend repeatedly grabs my cheeks and tells me how cute I am, so it must be a gay thing rather than a Persian thing.
* My first year in Los Angeles, I batted like Yasiel Puig. My last three years, I hit like Andre Ethier in 2013.
* A friend at shul hopes I go blind so I’ll stop caring so much about a woman’s looks and settle down and marry some ugly broad.
* My friends at shul know me. They have no illusions about my self-centeredness and they don’t hold it against me. One bloke, who repeatedly ridiculed my play (without seeing it), gave a lecture and I didn’t go (because the topic didn’t interest me, if the topic had interested me, I would’ve gone). He upraided me over lunch for not coming. “If I had given a talk about Luke Ford, you would’ve come,” he said accurately.
