Had a reader ask me about his reaction to being basically stood up by his girlfriend, and then having her come waltzing through the door like nothing was wrong and innocently asking if he was mad. He essentially explained fairly firmly that she was being rude to him and she did ultimately apologize, but then the sex afterwards was clearly just tolerated on her part, so somehow… he lost anyway… Here’s my slightly more fleshed out reply.
Hi there,
Actually you didn’t pick a fight here, you basically tried to talk your way through a Fitness Test and it’s a mixed bag at best.
She stood you up and ignored you. Instead of leaving the bar by about 10pm and just going home as a natural consequence of her “no call, no show”, you whined at her via text for a bit long. Your actions are telling her she has all the power and control in the relationship.
Leaving the bar would not have been you being an asshole. It’s a natural consequence. If you and I were meeting somewhere and I was “no call, no show”, would you really wait around for me texting and waiting and getting no reply? Probably not. If she was an employee and you her manager, you would have just started calling around and filling her shift and given her a written warning or something. There’s no drama in dealing with this sort of thing; it’s a natural consequence to her behavior.
Of course she came through the door asking if you were mad. That was the whole point of the exercise. She knew you were going to be mad. She wanted to know what you were going to do about it.
The solution in this case would have been to just leave the bar and go home. Turn your phone off.
Once she’s home, explain very clearly that if she ever is “no call, no show” to you again, you’re done with her. Full on boring her down eye contact. If she wants to get into an argument or talk about it, just say there’s nothing to talk about. If she does anything like this again, she’s gone. Acting like you really would dump her would be an action.
I don’t see to much point in wasting time addressing that sort of thing with a girlfriend. It’s not even an anger thing, it’s just unacceptable behavior and you don’t date women who stand you up and don’t call. Girlfriends are replaceable. Consider it a gift when they screen themselves out of your life like this. They didn’t steal your wallet, give you herpes or say the baby is yours when you’re pretty sure the condoms never broke.
Wives have a some more leeway, but I wouldn’t have much patience with this sort of thing. Jennifer once accidentally somehow blocked my number on her cell phone. Let’s just say we got that little mystery addressed within about five hours of my first “ignored” text and then calls. I didn’t yell, but I believe I used the full Captain-from-the-bridge tone of command with her. Communications are down Number One; please report your status.
She was very apologetic and fixed the issue after about fifteen minutes of trying to figure out how to unblock me. After that, I finally I got the information I had needed from her for the last five hours… her panties were pink.
