I have a sickness. Not a physical one. My body works, I’m healthy, I’m lucky. My particular sickness is that I’ve spent a ridiculous amount of my life assuming people like me slightly less than they appear to.
I’m constantly doing math in the background. Was that an eye roll or were they looking up? Did they cross their arms because I said the wrong thing or because they were cold? Did they mean we should do this again, or was that the polite exit?
Last week, a friend paused before saying of course you should come to her birthday dinner. I spent the drive home deciding the pause meant she didn’t want me there. She was probably just shifting her phone to her other ear.
If you’re anything like me, you know the exhausting little calculations. But I want to tell you something from one overthinker to another: the research says we’ve been grading ourselves on a test nobody else was giving us.
I built a courtroom where liking was almost impossible to prove
The problem isn’t that I looked for signs people didn’t like me. It’s that I discounted almost every sign that they did.
Someone laughed at my joke, and I thought they were being nice. They texted first, and I told myself they were bored. They invited me somewhere, and I assumed everyone got invited. They said I had such a good time, and I translated it as that’s what people say.
Meanwhile, one delayed reply or one slightly flat tone got treated like hard evidence. I did this for years without realizing how rigged the courtroom was. Positive evidence needed a full background check. Negative evidence got admitted immediately.
Roy Baumeister, a social psychologist, found that negative events outweigh positive ones of equal size.
One critical comment outlasts ten compliments. One awkward pause erases an hour of easy conversation.
My brain wasn’t broken. It was doing exactly what brains do. And it was doing it to my friendships.
No amount of evidence was ever going to be enough
This is what finally got to me: what would it take to convince someone like me that I was liked?
A compliment could be politeness. An invitation could be obligation. A warm hug could be someone being friendly. A fast reply could mean they happened to be on their phone. If every kind gesture has an alternate explanation, then there is no finish line. You can never collect enough proof.
I thought I was being realistic. Careful. A sharp reader of people. But I’d built a courtroom where liking was almost impossible to confirm and rejection was incredibly easy to prove. At that point, it isn’t observation anymore. It’s a test that reality can’t pass.
I’d sit in my car after a dinner party and replay every sentence I’d said, checking each one for the moment I lost the room. The joke that went one beat too long. The comment about their kitchen that might have come off wrong. The pause where I should have asked a follow-up question but blanked.
Nobody at the table was doing that about me. They were driving home thinking about what to pick up at the store, or whether they’d remembered to turn off the porch light. The scrutiny was mine alone, and I was applying it in one direction.
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The research interrupted everything I thought I knew
Psychologists have asked people, after conversations, how much they liked the other person and how much they thought the other person liked them back.
Again and again, people guessed too low. Psychologist Erica Boothby paired strangers for conversations and found that people consistently underestimated how much their conversation partners liked them and enjoyed their company.
The gap persisted for college roommates over most of an academic year. It was even wider for people who are shy or have low self-esteem.
That hit me harder than I expected, because it meant the generous interpretation wasn’t the naive one. Maybe I had fun meant they had fun. Maybe the invitation wasn’t pity. Maybe the person across the table liked me fine and went home worrying about their own weird sentence instead of mine.
I thought about specific people after I read that. The friend I’d been sure was tolerating me at brunch for years. The colleague who kept asking me to lunch and I kept telling myself was being professional. The neighbor who always said hello and I always suspected was doing the minimum.
I’d been building cases against all of them with evidence I collected from my own nervous system, not from anything they did.
If you’ve been keeping a list like that, you’re probably wrong about most of the names on it.
Suspicion isn’t wisdom, it’s a bad habit
The goal isn’t to start assuming everyone loves you. It’s to stop assuming the least generous explanation is automatically the smartest one.
I still notice tone. I still notice pauses. I still occasionally walk away from a dinner thinking hmm, that felt off. The difference is that I try not to turn uncertainty into a conclusion.
If someone tells me they enjoyed seeing me, I’m trying to let that count. If they invite me again, I’m trying to stop inventing a hidden reason they didn’t want me there.
Part of what kept the pattern going was that I was so focused on my own performance, I missed what the other person was doing.
A review by the British Psychological Society found the same pattern: we’re so busy grading ourselves that we miss the signs the other person is having a good time. Both people walk away running their own scorecards. Neither one notices the other person was fine.
I spent years acting like suspicion was the same thing as paying attention. It turns out sometimes the person who believes the compliment is the one reading the room correctly.
Last month, a friend told me on the phone that I was one of her favorite people. My first instinct was to figure out why she’d say that. I didn’t. I just said thank you. It was harder than it sounds.
Some people are polite when they don’t like you, and that’s not the point
Obviously, not every compliment is heartfelt. Some invitations are obligatory. Some friendships are more one-sided than either person wants to admit. The point isn’t to stop reading people.
It’s to notice when you’ve created a standard where positive evidence never counts and negative evidence always does. That isn’t being careful. It’s running a rigged trial and calling it insight.
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I’ve been wrong in the same direction for years
I still do the math sometimes. I probably always will. But now, when my brain starts explaining away every kind thing someone did and collecting every tiny awkward moment like evidence in a case it’s building against me, I try to remember that I’ve been wrong in the same direction for years.
Not once in a while. Consistently. Reliably. In the same direction, every time. If a coin came up tails that often, you’d stop trusting the coin. The model here was assume the worst and call it reality. It was never reality. It was a bad habit.
Maybe the problem was never that people liked me less than they let on. Maybe I kept refusing to believe what they were already showing me. The laughs that were real. The invitations that meant what they said. The we should do this again that was exactly what it sounded like.
I wasted a lot of conversations grading a test nobody handed me. These days I’m trying to sit through the good parts without checking to see if they were real.
If you’re still doing the same math after every dinner, every text, every pause that lasted a beat too long, I can tell you from the other side of it: you’ve probably been wrong in the same way I have.
And the people you keep doubting? They like you. They’ve been showing you the whole time.
Editor’s Note: “As Told to Bolde” stories are inspired by reader submissions, interviews, and accounts shared with our editorial team. Details are often changed, combined, or dramatized, and our editors use AI tools in the writing process. See our Editorial Policy.
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