Do unto ME, O.K.?

I think many of us have the same problem with forgiveness as we have with generosity...
My own actions of giving freely, I find, are always saddled with the expectation of future return, an unsatiated desire for reciprocal gratitude...which makes my 'generosity' more like one half of an unspoken and later unfulfilled barter.
How often do we create and cling to our own misery without even realising it?


Well, you sound sad. What you’ve written here reminds me of this anecdote:

I knew a girl once -- I will call her... Oprah (NOT HER REAL NAME) -- who was always doing things for a small group of female friends. Calling them to check in, making plans with them, picking them up, driving them around, buying them thoughtful little gifts.

After a few months to a year of this, these ladies began to feel a little freaked out by Oprah and her special attention, if not at least slightly annoyed. Oprah was making herself the opposite of scarce, calling several times a day, showing up randomly on people’s lawns. She wasn’t a great conversationalist, but she insisted on dominating and controlling group interactions, vetoing topics she didn’t have an interest in and trying to anticipate and intercept comments that might offend others. You can't make this stuff up.

She was also getting to be quite demanding. She had the courtesy to notify her friends of her every single move; why couldn’t they show her the same 'sensitivity'? She knew their birthdays, shoe-sizes, allergies and bedtimes; why didn’t they put the same effort in where she was concerned? Some of the girls in her circle of friends didn’t appreciate the guilt-trip, some of them didn’t appreciate the crawliness they’d feel when her name showed up on their phones. To my knowledge, everybody stopped talking to Oprah, but she found a new circle of friends and used what she learned in her past life about the nature of entitlement and restraining orders to not alienate them, and she’s finally happy with a group of people who aren’t constantly hurting her feelings and/or making her angry.

Oprah is an example of what can happen to people who don’t get the nuances of how to apply the Golden Rule. Some people think, “ok, surefire way to get what I want from people is to give them what I want. Wicked, let’s go.” It isn’t surefire, and it isn’t right to go about doing kindnesses thinking there should be a payoff of some kind (other kindnesses, respect, loyalty) in the end. To answer your question, I think people create and cling to their own misery VERY OFTEN, and I think at least some of them do this by clinging to their own ideas of justice and what is fair and not leaving room for the fact other people won’t necessarily subscribe to them. Maybe you’re really smart and everybody should think the way you do, but that doesn’t mean that they have to, and the more you live in your own head, the more likely you are to fail at life.

Empirically, undoubtedly: the decent thing is to be nice to people who are nice to you. For example, if you want to be friendly to an acquaintance and wave and say hi or whatever, and they’d rather snub you and be cold with you or otherwise make you feel uncomfortable for trying to be civil, this acquaintance may just be a piece of shit, and you likely need to accept that there’s nothing you can do about it, and that there is nothing you should do about it. Don’t try harder to make them like you, and don’t sink to their level of bitchery. They can be as crappy as they want to be, barring harassment and violence, because there is no niceness police. It might help you to passive-aggressively remember that people do notice and many of them do not approve when someone is shitty to someone who doesn’t deserve it, and that a person’s poor treatment of you could come back to bite them on the ass or cause them to lose the respect of a witness, but again: no real niceness police, and few people will support attempts to exact your own brand of vigilante justice over stuff like rudeness.

It’s kind of the same in the case of a romantic relationship. The decent thing is to treat your S.O. just as well as they treat you. If any of you find your boyfriend or girlfriend is not returning the favour, it could be for a variety of reasons. Maybe they’re clueless and/or inexperienced, and maybe you need to let them know that you don’t feel like they’re being fair to you. Maybe you’re overdoing it; maybe your affection is not proportional to the seriousness of your relationship, and that could mean you’re asking for too much and that you have to cool it down. And, there’s the obvious: if you’re not getting what you want from them, he or she may not right for you.

The decent thing is to treat your S.O. just as well as they treat you, but you can only legally prosecute someone for abuse if you can prove it, and no court of law is going to order your girlfriend to bake you a cake just because you baked her one.

Besides the fact that it’ll make you pretty unpopular, it’s not good for your mental health, martyring yourself out of a desire for gratitude. You risk getting to the point where you’re going around resenting ingrates as complete idiots and thinking of yourself as the world’s best person, cultivating the kind of scary arrogance that a lot of insane dudes rock so well.

Giving freely is great, but if it’s making you expect a lot of other people, to the point that you’re feeling miserable and disregarded by those you care about, and you suspect it may be due to a tendency you have to seek gratitude and reward, maybe it’s better – for everyone involved – if you learn to be little ‘selfish.’