Not following through is another kind of abandonment. Stop that nonsense.
“Let’s grab coffee together sometime!”
“We should definitely get the kids together sometime.”
“I’ll give you a call sometime.”
Crickets.
Having the best intentions to follow through on promises to connect doesn’t negate the harm caused by failing to follow through. When we or people we know say things like this that express a desire to connect better and find time to deepen our relationships, the failure to reach out can hurt emotionally and is a kind of abandonment that many of us may be used to due to childhood or other trauma.
People fail to call, email, text, or reach out after saying what seems like a genuine desire to reach out to connect as friends, out in the community at church, as parents of kids in the same school, etc. I’m explicitly leaving out the promises occurring on the dating scene those promises usually don’t have the same intention to follow through.
The harm in promising and not following through is that this can make the speaker accustomed to making hollow promises and the hearer fail to trust that people will keep those promises.
Neither of these are good outcomes.
Effects on the hearer
Failing to have people follow through on promises to reach out makes us, the hearers, lose faith that people will keep promises. We feel abandoned, perhaps fitting into a pattern of abandonment that we’re used to, which can have detrimental psychological damage on feelings of self-worth — “We are worthy of having someone to reach out to us”. We stop trusting that people want to connect or are being truthful about their wanting to connect with us — “Maybe they want to connect with other people more. We aren’t worth the time.”
Imagine children hearing from a divorced parent who isn’t around much that he’ll come by next weekend, not coming, and repeating that pattern of promising and failing to deliver. Just because we aren’t children and the promises may not be from our parents doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt.
Effects on the promiser
Failing to following through when we make these promises to others means that we became the bad guy. We made a promise we didn’t keep. We’re flaky and untrustworthy.
Or, we couldn’t be honest. We could have just not said that we wanted to connect if we had no intentions of following through. We get used to breaking promises, and that pattern may leak into other areas of our lives, into our careers or with our families.
Solution
First, if you don’t want to actually connect later with someone, don’t say it. You can make a lot of other comments that are meet the needed social situation. “It was so good to see you!” “I’m so glad to hear that work is going well, and I love connecting with you here when we run into each other like this.”
If you genuinely feel like you’d like to connect with someone to deepen your relationship, though, go ahead and make this promise. But, then follow through.
You don’t have to set up a time to connect immediately. If you’re both really busy, put a coffee meeting on the calendar for a couple months from now or a drink out with the kids a few weeks away if needed.
If you don’t have time to connect in person, try emailing or phone calls and put a reminder on your calendar to actually make the call/email.
If you reach out three times to make something happen and the other person is flaky, your obligation is done. Now it’s on them to reach out to you. Of course they may do the same thing, promising to reach out and never doing it. But if you made a good faith effort to connect, you know the failure to connect isn’t your fault. You tried, and that’s what matters here. Keep trying and you will find other people who you can connect with. A hot-potato game of saying “Let’s connect!” every time you run into each other randomly at the office, school, or church get to feel old fast.
Make real connections, keep them while you can, and realize that life changes.
People who are around this year may have changes in their lives next year that make coffee outings, a drink after work, or lunch venting sessions impossible. Cherish your friendships while you can, deepen the ones you connect with, and then when those relationships have run their course, be grateful that you were able to have had them.
If we don’t try to make connections, we won’t get them. If all we do are make promises to connect, though, we do more harm to ourselves and to others than by keeping our mouths shut.
