My friend Jacob is someone I know well. He is part of our community and we regularly touch base about different things.
I started to notice, however, that although Jacob is warm and friendly whenever I see him in person, when I text him he doesn’t respond, and when I WhatsApp him, there is only one check mark, indicating he doesn’t even see my messages and perhaps even blocked me!
But then, when he needs something from me, the strangest thing happens—he picks up the phone and calls or texts me! And I answer. But the other way around yields zero response.
I noticed and found it strange, but I didn’t dwell on it too much since I’m usually busy with a million things.
This week, I tried to call him again, and, as usual, it went to voicemail. When I listened to the message, however, I was surprised to hear a woman’s voice saying, “You have reached Jeanetta, please leave a message …” Bizarre!
I double-checked to make sure I had dialed Jacob, and I had.
Something was clearly amiss, so I did a deep dive and checked the number I had saved. It turned out, I had Jacob saved as two separate entries. One number was correct, the other was one digit off.
After some detangling, it became clear that when Jacob was the one reaching out to me, his number came up correctly. But each time I tried to text or call him, I was using the wrong entry, so of course he never responded. And at some point, Jeanetta got sick of me and must have blocked me on WhatsApp.
With that cleared up, I can now happily say: Jacob is no longer ghosting me!
But I learned an important lesson from the mix-up.
In life, it’s all too easy—natural, even—to view things from our perspective and be certain we are 100 percent right. In this case, I was convinced that I was in the right and that Jacob was in the wrong, but I was completely oblivious to the truth that I was, in fact, at fault. I was, essentially, ghosting myself!
We often make assumptions about others. We think they’re angry with us, ignoring us, looking down at us. But rarely is that the case. Often they’re simply busy, or distracted, or there has been some sort of miscommunication. Instead of jumping to judgment (like I did!), let’s try to be more mindful of giving the benefit of the doubt—with our friends, our spouses, children, parents, coworkers and even ourselves. Our relationships will be all the better for it.