Janet and I had dinner with a friend of ours at our house tonight.
It was one of those spontaneous things on a Sunday night that simply came from one thing or another and lent to having dinner. She is divorced with minor children and is talking about somebody she had met a year or two ago.
Apparently, she had several issues that resulted in terminating the couple of dates they had with a request that they both go their own way. No malice or rancor: it was just not right.
What is interesting in the conversation and what I took away was that the problems he had were fairly serious and that our friend was not judgmental at all. In fact, the entire conversation she recited to us really had nothing to do with judgment and everything to do with the choice that she had the opportunity to make.
She said that she was valuing what he was saying and the explanations for why he was in his situation. Her response was that she was in such great shape personally, after the divorce, and after settling into her new life, especially in raising her two little sweethearts, that she just did not understand why it would be appropriate to invite into her life at this point a person with the issues that he had.
From her perspective, while she very much appreciated his candor and understood he was doing everything in his power to try to work it through, she simply made a declaration to herself that it was not in her best interest to make a choice that would potentially have had hurtful effects on both her as well as on her children.
The decision was certainly easy enough for most of us to see.
What was particularly intriguing was the non-judgmental neutrality of the decision making process.
It wasn’t about him or what issues he had, which certainly could have been more than adequate fodder in its own right. But the choice she had the opportunity to make on her own. . .was her own. It was about personal responsibility and choice, not about him.
Needless to say, and especially knowing the journey she had led, I was enormously impressed with that frame.
In my experience, it is far more rare for an individual to cast issues around consequences of personal choices than it is around results that others have produced for you.