Self-Esteem

Does this sound like your romantic life? You meet someone new and you two get along great. You’ve been casually dating with no commitments, but this new person checks all your boxes. They’re perfect! You really want to be with them. Perhaps too much. Your behavior becomes different around them. You had no problem being yourself before, but now you do your best to keep this person’s approval. You try to talk to them whenever you can. If they call or text, you drop what you’re doing to reply. You begin wondering what they’re doing or where they are throughout the day. “Why aren’t they replying to me?”, you wonder. You start to feel dependent, even desperate, on this relationship going the way you want. You treat this person well, you try and help them and you communicate your availability, yet you also hesitate to make too bold of a move – you don’t want to mess this up! The more you try to play it “perfectly”, the less it happens. In a final effort, you make your feelings known – and they don’t feel the same. “Let’s just be friends”, they say. It’s happened again – you’re in the friend zone. “Why do I always get friendzoned?!”, you scream inside your head. Let’s talk about why this happens and how you can prevent this in the future.

Your schedule is tight. You’ve got a to-do list with a thousand items on it. You’re behind on your own work. You’re running late. You haven’t spent any time on yourself. Family matters and logistics add fuel to the fire. On a particularly bad day, you may even experience all of the above simultaneously. Just when you think you’re carrying more than you can handle, a request comes your way. A friend, coworker, manager or someone else asks for a favor. They haven’t got time to take care of a task or tend to a particular matter – they ask you to do it instead. Although you’re at your wits’ end, you begrudgingly say “yes”. The requestor feels relief, while you feel more stressed than before. “But I feel bad saying no! What should I do?”. In this article, we’ll be discussing the reasons we feel guilty saying no and what to do about it.