mixed signals

Some friends and I were recently discussing the numerous reasons an individual might choose to ignore you.  Of course, the most obvious is that, in fact, they actually don’t notice you.  You simply and utterly fail to catch their attention.  While this can be injurious to the ego, it does, at least, lack the more painful blow that goes along with the second most outstanding reason, which is that you did manage to catch their attention and they deemed you unworthy of it.  Ouch.  Sometimes, of course, we encounter the ignoring that accompanies the advent of unequal affections – either someone is ignoring you because they heart you and know that, were they to pay attention to you either their heart would explode or they would gush their rather embarrassing feelings all over you, or they are ignoring you because they know that, were they to pay attention to you, that is what would happen to you.  In either case, this can, in some ways be viewed as an act of kindness – the avoidance of one of the more awkward situations a person might be prone to end up in in life.  It’s not a very brave or particularly mature way of handling things, but it is understandable, if not respectable. 

Undoubtedly there are a myriad other reasons a person might ignore another person – maybe they simply ignore everybody, maybe they are generally intimidated by you, maybe they are racist, sexist, homophobic, etc., maybe they are afraid you will fall in love with them, maybe they are afraid they will fall in love with you, maybe someone told them you have rabies.  The real point is that, for all of the meanings that might be attached to ignoring someone, I suspect a comparable number of meanings could be attached to the various other behaviors we employ in our interactions with each other.  This leads me to believe that when we complain of getting mixed signals, what we are actually suffering from is mixed and probably selective interpretation. 

I think it is generally accepted that, when we have feelings for someone, positive, negative or to-be-determined, all of their actions take on a degree of being somehow related to those feelings and their reciprocation or lack thereof.  Remarkably, we can even make this apply to people who have never once acknowledged our existence.  We begin interpreting their talking or not talking to us, their looking or not looking at us as something that means something from which we can deduce what our next talk or not talk, look or not look should be. 

Intellectually, we know that this is ludicrous, that there is no reason why this person should in any way be affected by the existence of a relationship that they are not even aware of, but we hope/fear/assume that somehow they sense something and must, naturally, be reacting to this consuming sensation we are experiencing because, hello!, how could they not?  Well, they don’t.  Of course they don’t.  

We can therefore conclude that the “signals” we think they are sending are not, in fact, signals at all but are simply behaviors that they would have whether or not we were primed to take notice of them, and, not being signals at all, they can certainly not be “mixed signals”.  This is not to say that, once the relevant truths are exposed, a person might not be uncertain how to react and, therefore, fluctuate in their behavior as a result.  This, however, is still not really blameworthy as we are all just people trying to figure out what to do next.  All this to say that is really not fair to be disgruntled with the unsuspecting object of one’s attention for the confusion that results from our own obsession with someone else’s affections, particularly when our real point of contention is probably something more closely related to the failure of their behavior to match up with our own fantastical opinion of what that behavior should be. 

Thus the imperativeness of detachment becomes manifest yet again, as detachment can allow us at our boldest to be frank about our relationships – developed or not – and, in our more natural state, to acknowledge, accept, and be comfortable with the fact that, most of the time, most people are not sending us subtextual signals, and it is tremendously unwise and irresponsible for us to base our understanding of people and reality on imagined intentions and interpretations of so much nothing.