Yes, you’ll get in arguments. With everyone, eventually. Yes, people will insult you, say the wrong thing, hurt you.

None of these things are fun. But…

Are they worth getting upset about?

Most of the time, it’s better to assume it’s not. It’s just people being people.

You may not like it. But to assume it’s worth letting it upset you makes more of the hurt and pain than it is.

And getting upset not only magnifies how you feel, it also changes how you react to others.

You lose your equilibrium.

You lose the chance to deescalate.

Because YOU become part of the escalation.

And it’s usually the escalation that threatens our relationships, not the original problems, anyway.

(I’d like to just pause, so we can all contemplate just how TRUE that is.)

After all, how many of us have NOT had the experience of having an truly awful fight over nothing… or nothing that we can remember? That’s what getting upset does. It steers us off-course from lovetown into blameland and hurtville.

What if THEY get upset?

That’s on them. Don’t let their choices affect what you know is right.

My ex and I had a rule:

If one of us was upset (first), the other was not allowed to be.

This worked 98% of the time. I credit it for our still being good friends, even after the breakup.

Because when one person was upset, the other person not getting upset would allow us to interact on a semi-logical level, until we got to the heart of the matter, and talked it out.

But, when you immediately jump to the assumption that this is terrible, that your relationship is hanging by a thread, that everything is awful, all because of this… well, that will come out in your behaviors, and it will very likely make things MUCH MUCH worse.