One element of human interaction which I have always found perplexing and frustrating is when people lie with the expectation that you will understand that they are lying and also what they are really trying to say. For example, there is a kind of upper class reflex to say something like: “You will have to come visit the house sometime!” when they mean: “We will never see each other again, but please keep treating me like an aristocrat”.
One place where people frequently try this “I’ll be dishonest but assume they’ll understand what I mean” trick is with regard to volume of communication. For whatever reason, people are often dishonest about hearing from you too little or too much, and will even lie about it when directly asked, even if the volume of communication is really annoying them.
What I have learned to do in this arena is to ignore what people explicitly say and focus on rate matching. If someone responds to me promptly, I speed up the pace of my messages to keep the average time between my messages similar to the average time between theirs. Similarly, if someone is slow to respond to me (or never responds), I regulate down the frequency of my communication to be more closely matched. For example, if I send a text and get an immediate response, it’s OK to write back immediately. If it takes an hour, or five hours, or a day, or three days to get a response — it’s best to copy the length of the delay when responding.
The system doesn’t cover everything. One notable consideration is the division of labour. Perhaps because I am a lot keener than most to stay in touch with most people, I tend to be the person to establish and maintain communication. Once that behaviour has become a norm in the relationship, it can produce a dynamic where they rarely or never initiate contact because they now expect me to do it. Still, perhaps even here it would be sensible to rate match; if someone never ever reaches out to you, its probably an unspoken sign that they prefer to do other things with their time.
