I recently, very unfortunately, ended a profitable relationship with a business partner because she was too damn emotional. I love her to death, but working with her was a nightmare. I was never allowed to say anything, for fear it was a personal attack. The minute she read anything remotely negative by email, she would flip out and come to all sorts of conclusions about what I was trying to say. Well, I never
try to say anything - I just say it. She imagined the worst case scenario at every step. If I tell her that next time, she should let me know if a certain supplier has a certain deal, she took that as me saying she was ineffective and inefficient. If I told her that she looks good today, she'll take that as me meaning she didn't look good yesterday. When she would call me and cry, I would explain what I meant. Then later when she calmed down, she would call and apologize because after re-reading, she realized it wasn't actually bad in the first place. This would happen almost on a daily basis. I would rearrange my words for hours on a daily basis before sending her emails, to no avail. No matter what I said or did, her first reaction was offense. We would waste countless hours each day dealing with this. When she had problems with me, she would never tell me, making the problem quadruple in her mind to the point where she was calling Dr. Laura or whoever that radio personality is on a weekly basis. But she never told me - her excuse: she prefers harmony. Well, how harmonious is dishonesty and secret resentments? I ended the partnership last week. She has called me every day since then crying and wondering why it was over.
No matter what I say, she won't hear me. She imagines what she believes to be the truth and refuses to face reality. If she asks, and I answer, she will just add her own color to it and go off on tangents. So I have to use stronger words, so she gets it. Then that starts a whole new cycle of tears because I am so mean... She lives in her own fantasy world. And all the hours on the phone doing crisis management, she thinks that was
productive and she still can't understand why this stresses me out and makes me want to sever ties with her.
Because she refuses to hear me, I must be quite aggressive with my words - so there is no misinterpretation. And this is when the tears start again. I have no patience at this point because I have tried and failed, so the tears seem like a tactic to make me concede or feel bad. This sort of manipulation irritates me to no end. She wouldn't have been hurt if she had just listened in the first place.