Stop Treating People the Way You Want to Be Treated

Why the Golden Rule often backfires in relationships

I text people all day. I’m in three group chats and I love every one of them. My friend Lex is the opposite. For years, when he didn’t respond to a text, I got angry. I thought: He doesn’t care about me. He isn’t putting in the effort. The internet would agree with my take.

One day, instead of typing up something passive-aggressive, I asked him about it. I knew a lot about Lex at this point but had never understood how his job and his personality made it difficult for him to be super responsive.

Here’s the context that I missed: Lex has a job that keeps him “on” all day, talking to hundreds of people, managing a thousand emails a day. While I see texting as a nice break from work that lets me get bite-sized pieces of connection, he sees every unread text message as another item to check off his to-do list. His unreads climb into the hundreds, and the backlog itself becomes one more reason to dodge his phone. And our social batteries are very different, so the amount of communication we wanted from each other didn’t match either.

We all do this. We take how we want to be treated and assume it’s universal: that people want to communicate the way we do, that they share our capacities and priorities. And when those things don’t line up, we judge them for not meeting expectations they never knew about, or decide we’ve done something wrong.

When we feel ourselves getting it wrong, we go looking for a rule. Social media is full of them — Five Things to Ask a Partner, Four Things to Never Say to a Friend Who’s Struggling, Why You Should Never Answer a Text with a Call. A lot of it comes from a good place but is also confusing and contradictory. One post tells you to never ask how you can help, just bring dinner. The next tells you to never bring something without asking first. There’s no universal rule for how to treat people, because people aren’t universal. We reach for one anyway, because following a rule is easier than having the conversation.

Growing up, we’re all taught the importance of putting ourselves in other people’s shoes. And that is good advice for creating empathy. But it isn’t always great advice when it comes to supporting other people, because we assume that people want to be treated how we want to be treated. In reality, it’s better to treat people how they want to be treated.

When psychologists Tal Eyal, Mary Steffel, and Nicholas Epley ran 25 experiments on this, they found that imagining yourself in another person’s position didn’t make people better at reading what the other person felt. It just made them more confident they were right. The one thing that improved accuracy was asking. Which, I know, is an annoying answer.

One of the best ways to get information about someone is to ask them. There is no shortcut. So I want you to pick one person whose behavior has been bothering you and ask them something specific. Not “Are we good?” but “Do you prefer texting or are you more of a phone call person?” or “When something hard is going on, do you want me to check in or give you space?”

Then tell them the same kind of thing about yourself — how you like to be reached, what helps when you’re having a hard time, whether you want people to bring up conflict.

With Lex, this conversation took maybe ten minutes. He told me that if anything were actually wrong, he’d call. I told him I’d stop reading his silence as a verdict. It ended years of me keeping score in my head over a difference in wiring that had nothing to do with how he felt about me.

I know these conversations can feel embarrassing (or, with a partner, unromantic), but they make a huge difference in the quality of your relationships.