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When you really love someone, your emotions are strongly linked together. You feel what your partner feels. It’s part of being best friends. His victories are yours, but his disappointments are also yours. It’s one of the beautiful things about feeling very connected to someone—you’re never alone in your sorrows and you always have someone to celebrate your wins with you. But, because this is true, that also means things get awkward when one of you gets some really great news on the same day the other one gets some bad news. It can feel like an episode of “Curb Your Enthusiasm”—you’re just bending over backwards to spare your partner’s feelings, and hide the fact that you’re actually really happy on a day that he’s miserable. And, on a selfish level, you can’t help but think, “Couldn’t this have happened to you on another day?” (Hey, you’re only human). Here are the funny realities of times you have a great day on his really bad day.
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You have to do a quick 180
You bound up the stairs with pep in your step and a huge smile on your face, ready to scream the good news from the rooftop. You got a promotion. Your short story got published. You got the part in a commercial. Whatever it is, you’re bursting at the seams with the information. Then, you see that your partner is crying or deeply upset, and you have to do a total 180 and wipe that smile off your face. It’s not appropriate.
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And probably cancel the party you planned
Uh oh. You may or may not have invited a couple of friends over to celebrate or ordered that traditionally celebratory food to be delivered. You’re rapidly—but discreetly—sending out texts to cancel all of that.
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You hide your good news
So now, you hide your good news. Telling your partner about your really good thing while he just lost his job, lost a loved one, or get rejected from something he really wanted just doesn’t seem right. You know he wants good things for you but, really, you can read the room. It’s not time to share the news.
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The celebration is postponed
So you’ve made the mental decision to postpone your own celebration about your good news. You’re going to put it out of sight, out of mind for now. You’re going to focus on helping your partner with his troubles.
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I mean, you can try but…
You may try to sneak in a celebratory cocktail with a buddy but you kind of feel like a jerk out having a good time when your partner is at home moping.
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You secretly call friends and family
You do still desperately want to tell everyone else in your life. So you call your mom to share the good news while your partner is in the shower and can’t hear you. Or you walk the dog, just so you can call your friends.
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But, you must inform them about your partner
You also have to tell anyone who may see your partner in the upcoming days about his bad news. You don’t want them to make the mistake of barging in and saying to him, “Aren’t you so happy for your girlfriend?!” while he’s miserable about something else.
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You must work extra hard to focus
You can typically tap into your empathy for your partner pretty well. You are very connected, after all. But when you have extreme joy going on, you struggle a bit to feel what your partner is feeling. You have to do a very good acting job.
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You secretly wish for better timing
You can’t help, deep down, but think, “Ah man—couldn’t his great grandma have just waited to die until next month?” You know it’s messed up. It’s not like you’re saying it out loud!
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Okay, there’s no good time for bad news
Alright, alright: you know there is no such thing as a good time for bad news. You know that whenever his bad thing happened, it would have been a bad time for it.
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You awkwardly wait for the right time
Now you’re playing the waiting game of checking in with your partner every day, seeing how he is, seeing if he’s okay, seeing if he’s recovered…mostly because you care about him. Duh! But, um, partially because you’re wondering if you’re allowed to share your good news yet.
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You have to remember he’s struggling
You have to remind yourself that your partner is going through something tough. You put a little note on your steering wheel or something like that. Otherwise, since you’re on cloud 9 about your good news, you can accidentally behave inappropriately cheery.
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You feel guilty
You can’t help but feel very guilty about all of it—about having a good thing happen to you while your partner is so upset, about hiding the good thing from him, about wishing he were in a better place right now…Then you resent having to feel bad when you were supposed to be feeling great!
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When people ask, “What did your man say?!”
When your friends or family call, excited about your good news, asking, “What did your boyfriend say?!” and you have to awkwardly explain that, uh, you haven’t told him yet because he’s kind of going through something awful so it didn’t seem appropriate.
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When he figures it out, he’ll feel bad
When your man does figure out that you’ve been concealing great news to spare his feelings for days, he feels terrible—he says you should have told him and that it would have cheered him up. But you sort of know that isn’t true, and you would have had some fake celebration dinner that he moped through, despite his best efforts to be happy for you.
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