How old, outdated information creates messy relationships

Take a moment and think about your best friend from when you were a kid. Let's say when you were 10 years old.

Who were they? What was their name? What did you two like to do together? How did you first meet, and why did you become friends?

Now, what is your relationship with that person today?

If you're like me, you might have lost contact with that friend.

Perhaps they moved away.

Perhaps you two had a falling out in middle school.

Or perhaps you still are in contact (thanks social media), but you're not spending every free afternoon together catching crawdads and minnows in the creek behind your house.

Yep, that's where you could find my very best friend and me most summer days when we were young.

Now, think about what might happen if you ran into that friend today.

After years of being apart and out of each other’s daily lives, what would that connection feel like?

For most of us, we'd catch up on what life is like today and reminisce on the time we used to spend together.

But the underlying thread throughout the conversation would undoubtedly be this: Does this person in front of me today jive with the caricature of them I have saved in my memory?

Are they the same person?

Do they care about the same things?

Do they believe the same things?

Lately, this idea has been popping up in my conversations and in things I've been reading — this notion that what we believe about a person is based on just a small sliver of time with them, and it’s hard for us to break past those old conceptions when faced with the reality that they might actually be very different.

Or what might be even harder for us to understand is that they've changed.

When we face new information that challenges our beliefs, it often leads to a messy situation. It reveals a dissonance within our minds where the information you believe doesn’t align with the reality you’re experiencing.

In episode 37 of The Follow-Up Question, Leslie Ehm and I discussed this topic and the relationship drama that can arise when the people closest to us reject us when we shatter their long-held notions of who we are.

"It just means that the person that they loved was their version of you, not the real you," Leslie said.

As you consider your relationships today, think about the areas to which you might be blind and where you might have filled in the gaps based on assumptions. Or, turn it around and consider how others have treated you based on old, outdated information about you.

Heck, think about even the small interactions that happen every day where you create a story about someone's life based on limited data — the barista, the people in the grocery store, the new coworker.

And rather than rely on your biases to create a story about who that person is, become an observer and ask questions that might allow them to reveal who they really are rather than you doing it for them.