People are infamously bad at identifying their own shortcomings. We may criticize someone else’s conceit, ignorance, or foolishness without ever taking into account the serious shortcomings they might discover in our personalities.
Every one of our friendships will be affected by this blind spot. Our careless actions hurt the people we love most, even when we never mean to. I’m referring to inadvertent cruelty as opposed to intentional rudeness, yet the results of these mistakes can be detrimental.
I learned that “ambivalent relationships”—those who are both hot and cold—can be even more detrimental to wellbeing than merely spiteful, predictable, and nasty people while I was writing my most recent book on the science of social interaction.
