I’ve got a small number of ex-friends, ex-lovers, ex-pals, ex-lax etc. who no longer care for me nor I for them, which is fine all around and par for the course, but there are a few who’ve done something a bit of the ordinary: they’ve created an issue that in itself is approximately nothing, and have blown it up into a gigantic something. IOW, rather than having the requisite stones to have a falling out with me over whatever in my personality really cheeses them off, they’ve figured out it’s much simpler to pretend that it’s the little tiny thing that bothers them and they can’t let go of that.
Illustration: a woman whom I almost-loved at one point decided that my not-liking her favorite novel was a personal insult. I couldn’t accept this, so for weeks I argued the point with her (“I said I didn’t like the book, but I like you fine,” “My contempt for the characters has nothing to do with how I feel about you,” “Look, maybe I’m wrong about the novel–I’ll read it again and see if my feelings change,” “Listen, people just disagree about books sometime, it don’t have to mean nothing” etc.) but no dice. When I asked if it was something else that was bothering her, she denied it–“I just can’t get over the insult of your hating a book that I love” and we just agreed to disagree. (Later, I found out that she was pregnant with someone else’s kid, after assuring me that she was infertile, so she obviously had some big issues going on that I wasn’t privy to.) Anyway, it’s just an illustration–I’ve had several ex-friends pull stunts like this on me, though most of the time when someone splits, or when I do from one of them, it’s plenty clear what’s going on. It’s just these people who find it necessary to pick some idiotic fight that doesn’t even make sense that puzzle me–some kind of passive-aggressive behavior, maybe?
Tell me about your fight-pickers? (And nose-pickers, if you like.)
Oh, ALL these people had sufficient reasons to break off with me (or I with them, for that matter). I’m not painting myself as some kind of saint here, jjimm. But the reasons they give, and cling to? Obviously NOT the reason they broke off, just a convenient fight to pick.
I think the phenomenon you describe is the last straw. It may be the thing that people fixate on when there are dozens of other things that are bothering them, and eventually it gets blown out of proportion.
To look at it from another angle though, sometimes you come across someone who exhibits a vast array of quite trivial, yet measurably annoying traits.
What are you gonna do - the sum of all the little annoyances is near critical mass - there’s no graceful resolution; choices seem to be;
[ul]
[li]Tackle them on one, maybe two of what seems like the worst cases, it’ll look like you’re being an ass for confronting them on something trivial[/li][li]Tackle them on all points at once, and you’ll look like an ass for making a list.[/li][li]Withdraw without offering any explanation, and you’ll look like a sullen ass[/li][li]Invent an explanation and you’ll be exposed as a lying ass[/li][/ul]
Another possibility is that whatever it is really *is *that important to the other person, regardless of how inconsequential it is to you.
“I wasn’t talking about you as a person, I was talking about your opinion of X” – “Well, I’m the type of person who likes X, so I can’t separate the two here.”
Didn’t have a fight about it, but this seems to be a common problem these days, I bought several of the Song of Fire and Ice books and hated them, said so online, one bloke [who is a huge fan of the books] hasn’t spoken to me since.
My ex finacé broke up with me because of my fertiliy problems - he seemed to think I was saying “I won’t have your babies” as opposed to the actual “my ovaries don’t function within normal parameters, and as such I may not be able to have any babies”