I have a family member who maintains that she doesn’t like texting me because I misinterpret her tone and take things too sensitively, thinking she has been funny with me when she swears she hasn’t and has claimed this to be exhausting. She recently sent me a large text and then informed me she had been generous doing this and had gone against her own boundaries to benefit me. I didn’t ask her to do it and it wasn’t a very nice message. She added at the end that she would love nothing more for me to just ring her or catch up in person
Three days later I call her to see how she is doing. She had a baby over four months ago. Asked about her first, then the baby, then her plans for the week. I asked her if she’d like to meet up and she replied quite coldly that all our interactions are on ‘my terms’ (this is confusing to me, I rang her because I thought that was her preference) so she would have to think really carefully about if she is prepared to meet me and needs to feel respected by me enough to do it. How can she be sure I respect her?
I replied, no worries, let me know etc. She then added out the blue, ‘I won’t be bringing baby as I’m going to have to tread very carefully with reintroducing them to you’.
I wasn’t expecting to see the baby, so I just said, that’s fine! But it’s left me feeling weird.
There is no reasoning and I cannot understand, I ask her nicely to explain a bit more about how she feels and she accuses me of looking for trouble. There’s no back story to this which is all the more baffling. Been told on another thread that it seems some traits are manipulative, is this what this is too? I’m starting to wonder if the reason she prefers phone calls is because nobody else can hear what she’s saying?