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Trust, honesty, and supportiveness: those are some of the top desired qualities in a friend, says research out of the University of Pennsylvania. If you think common interests play a bigger factor in a successful friendship, then you’d agree with the study out of the National Center for Biotechnology Information that says that is also very important for friendship chemistry. But all of these traits will come to a head when it comes time to execute on a friendship. You can have 100 percent overlapping interests with someone and make plans to go to a museum exhibit you’re both thrilled about…but that won’t be enough if that person regularly flakes on you at the last minute. How about honesty? That’s supposed to be enough to carry a friendship along. But probably not, if what the person is honest about is that they double booked you for that day, and actually cannot meet you for lunch. And you’re already sitting at the restaurant.
It’s common to hear people say that the fun stuff like a shared sense of humor or common interests are what make a friendship great. However, the older you get, you realize that you can’t have any fun with someone who doesn’t respect your time. You might even begin to state “reliability” as a top friendship trait. You even learn to pursue friendships with those who are reliable, even if the chemistry isn’t explosive, over those with whom you really hit it off but…they constantly disrespect your time. So on that note, here are signs that someone doesn’t respect your time. They can easily be translated to platonic, romantic, and even professional relationships.
They only RSVP at the last moment
When you ask this person to do something, they always respond with, “Can I let you know closer to the date?” They may even ask, “Can I let you know day of?” You might say yes, so as to not seem pushy. But the reality is that, if this person can give you a firm No, you’d just go ahead and make other plans for the day. Instead, you have to now take a gamble, and hold time for them that they are not holding for you. They may tell you day-of that they cannot make it, at which point it’s too late for you to make new plans/invite someone else.
They spend your time together on the phone
They spend too much of your time together on the phone. It’s a phone-lovers world, and you understand that someone might have to take a call or respond to a text while you’re together. But this person engages in every social media notification that comes through while with you. You might even realize they are carrying on a full-on, social/catch-up text conversation with another friend during your catch-up time together. They are getting the credit of “being there,” when they technically double booked you, because they’re also getting another friend’s updates via text at the same time.
They talk about themselves the whole time
Someone who monologues the whole time you are together does not respect your time. There should be an understanding, especially in social settings, that conversation should be give and take. It should be a dialogue. And in the same way this person has things they want to vent about/updates they’re excited to share, you, too, have things you want to vent about and share. And you feel totally blue-balled if this person dominates the entire conversation, leaving no time for you to talk. It’s a form of disrespecting your time because you have limited time for socializing, and if you knew it’d be like this, you would have spent it with someone who can talk and listen.
They cancel for weak reasons
This person cancels for reasons that are not real reasons. They have a headache (there’s Advil for that). They don’t feel like going to the movies anymore (okay so…you can do something else). They feel tired (hello, coffee!). If you think about it, you’re not really sure how this person’s life even works. How do they function? If you canceled everything you had to do every time you had a headache or were a little tired…you would never leave your home. And yet, this person thinks it’s perfectly okay to cancel on you, when you planned your entire afternoon around this, because they’re a little fatigued.
They cancel for reasons you haven’t
One of the most important questions to ask yourself if you’re giving someone a lot of leeway is this: would you cancel on them for the same reason? You might realize that they consistently cancel on you, not just over things you’d never cancel for, but over things you experienced…and still showed up during. Maybe this friend cancels when she’s disappointed about bad news at work. You have been in the same place and you still showed up for the plans. Maybe she cancels because she’s a little hungover. You’ve been there: you downed a Gatorade, popped a painkiller, and showed up like you said you would. Surround yourself with people who give you what you give them.
They bail out early
This is one of the sneakiest things of all, because it’s so hard to call someone out on. Maybe they always keep plans. They even show up on time. But…they bail rudely early. They show up for lunch and say, “I have to leave in 30 minutes.” They come to your event but say, “I can only say hi for a few minutes and have to go.” They hop on the 3pm call you scheduled to say, “I have to go in five minutes.” Everyone involved knows that the normal expectation is that a lunch hang lasts for more than 30 minutes. You’ll probably barely be getting your food in 30 minutes! And everyone knows when you schedule a time to catch up on the phone, you meant for more than five minutes. Nobody can thoroughly catch up in that time frame.
Everything must happen on their schedule
This person pushes your interactions into these obscure corners of their schedule. It’s very clear they’ve never even considered that you also have a schedule. In planning a coffee hang, they’ll say things like, “Well I have a workout class at 10am and I like to have at least a half hour to enjoy the sauna after but I also don’t like to have lunch any later than noon or else I get a headache but I’d love if lunch were in this part of town so I don’t have to sit in traffic.” Okay…did anybody think to ask if you’d enjoy sitting in traffic, or how any of that works with your calendar?
They won’t give you their undivided attention
Your time with this person is always a part of something else they’re doing. They ask you to come over and keep them company while they organize their garage. They say you’ll hang out…by keeping them company while they run errands. They do a FaceTime catch-up with you, while clearly also having an in-person meeting with somebody else who they have to give a note to every five minutes. You only get half of their attention, while you give them 100 percent of yours. On the flipside, when you plan something with them, you don’t plan something else that will simultaneously be going on.
They don’t use calendars/alarms
They consistently forget that you had plans because they didn’t put it in their calendar, or didn’t set an alarm. They miss your breakfast meetup because they didn’t set an alarm clock. They completely forget you had tickets to a show because they didn’t put it in their calendar. Even though they’ve screwed you over multiple times by not using these tools, when you beg them to just put something in a calendar, they still say, “I don’t like to use those. They stress me out.” There’s no consideration for the stress it causes you when you sit alone at a restaurant, wondering if they’ll ever show up, because they didn’t put this lunch in their calendar.
They’re consistently very late
If you live in a city with a lot of traffic where parking is a b*tch, there’s a buffer built into nearly every meetup. You understand that a 2pm lunch means more like 2:15/2:20. But some people are consistently incredibly late. The 2pm lunch shouldn’t start at 2:50. You know what that means? It means this person didn’t even leave their home until after the lunch was supposed to begin. When you say you’re having a party from 7pm to 10pm, you didn’t mean for them to show up at 9:30 pm. That’s clearly the wind-down. This is often about someone struggling with time management, but if you’re good with that skill, you deserve to surround yourself with others who are, too.
