Are you stuck in movie logic?

I had a colleague who I sensed was giving me the cold shoulder. Just kind of cutting off attempts at friendly conversation, whereas before our relationship had been fine.

As the author suggests, instead of just letting it fester, I caught him at an opportune moment and asked him if I had done anything to upset him (I suspected maybe a not-tactful-enough code review may have been the culprit.) He just denied that anything was wrong, other than that he wasn't sure how to relate to me because our circumstances are so different (I'm quite a bit older than him and have a family, although it hadn't been a problem before.)

Unfortunately this interaction just made our relationship even more awkward, and it never recovered. He ended up leaving the company about six months later.

In summation, simply getting things out in the open is not necessarily the cure-all the author suggests it is.

I had something similar happen at a prior job.

1: Befriend one of the front-end developers 3: The dev stops talking to me, becomes a lot less happy overall 4: The dev quits

In my case, what I didn't know about for a while was 2: The guy got put on a PIP for dubious reasons and got absolutely demoralized.

I mean, if they'd been open to addressing the real problem, it could've worked. Otherwise the remaining solution would be to never try and to never know. Now you know there's nothing you could've done and the ball was solely in his court.

You can't fix everything, but you can set things up so there's an opportunity for change.

It's important to realize that other people may have something going on in their life that affects their mood and maybe their desire to be friends. If it is someone you know at work they may not be comfortable talking to you about the problem. I think you should always be friendly, but if someone isn't friendly back don't just assume its because of you.

Clearing the air has gone well for me before, but it usually goes poorly.

And a lot of the time the air is foggy because I prefer it that way. I know my supervisor doesn't like me. I don't see it as a problem to solve, for now I want the "movie logic" because it's more comfortable than candor.

As the author said: "Our sense that something is weird is often accurate, but our stories about precisely what the weirdness represents are often way, way off." It might have been better to start off with the general impression you had.

Yep. Communication is a two way street. You can find the right words to say and say them all you want but if the receiver doesn't receive the words the way you mean them then it's all for naught.

Further, you cannot control how the receiver receives your words.