YouTube algorithms occasionally send me a video with a title like the above. I recall Jean Paul Sartre’s No Exit, a play featuring a small group of bickering people in what turns out to be the waiting room for Hell. By the end they realize they’re already in Hell, their punishment is being trapped in this small room with each other for eternity. That’s Hell, suckers, relentless people all around you in a room with no exit.

The best moments in life, outside of whatever joy and solace we take from our own solitary pursuits, (this joy and solace is nothing to sneeze at, I am digging it right now as I write), involve our connections with others. There is nothing like sharing a good laugh, love, an aha! moment, mutuality, appreciation, a meeting of the minds or spirits, an improvisation that works, or participating in, or observing, a group event that inspires joy, hope, courage or just plain awe. We are, in spite of how often groups of us mass murder and enslave other groups of us, social creatures.

Where it gets sticky is when raw nerves, sensitivities, idiosyncrasies, vying strong needs, chafe against each other. The understandable impulse to impulsivity often arises in these situations, at a certain point we need to save ourselves. Someone makes one too many emotionally draining demands and it can take superhuman effort to remain kind and understanding.

In a short video with wise words about life the narrator says “given the choice between being right and being kind, choose being kind.” Beautiful, wise, merciful advice, the world would be better if we could all follow it. Sometimes it’s incredibly difficult, as when facing relentless, desperate argumentativeness from someone you are trying to remain kind to.

Speaking to the son of a longtime, now former, friend, I came to my breaking point about twenty minutes in. At one point he described his father’s inability to separate his feelings and perceptions about things from what actually takes place in front of him. I remarked that this reminded me of the McNaughton Rule in law, the legal definition of insanity in many states. The person, at the time he committed the act, was unable to recognize the difference between his perceptions and reality, between right and wrong, and so is not guilty by reason of insanity.

His response was to become indignant that I’d called his difficult father insane. He told me sternly that he would not tolerate this. My impulse when he got testy was to get off the phone and I began to take my leave. There are many things in life we can’t fix, and one is a person who makes unfair, indignant demands.

It was a heavy, heavy lift to refrain, at that moment, from telling the kid to fuck off, that he was as aggravatingly nuts as his old man. I was able to calm myself enough not to, and the conversation, a somewhat heavy lift for me, as I told him, continued, in a more positive vein, for a long time after that.

In the remainder of that exchange there were reminders of why we persevere in the face of interpersonal difficulty. Sometimes, if we don’t yield to emotional impulses, we get to certain difficult truths, gain clarity and find agreement that might surprise us. These things are hard to come to, and require work, patience, an ability to calm oneself, to listen instead of immediately responding out of emotion. These kinds of talks are rare, valuable, and life-affirming, and we learn things in the course of these dialogues that are impossible to otherwise grasp. The regular rules of life still apply: nobody gets to shit on anybody in the course of these talks.

So, while I can agree, for the sake of discussion, that it is my subjective conclusion that people who can never be wrong, who blame others for all conflict and fight to the death over even a small disagreement are not suitable partners for friendship or marriage, I also know that to be true. Having experienced trying to make relationships with this kind of person work for decades, with a variety of people, I understand, 100%, from reaching the same impasse over and over, and the consistent relief when they are gone from my life, that these motherfuckers are not for me.

You can love them if you like, and figure out how to accommodate yourself to their need to dominate you, but that’s different than saying my side of the story is only my side of the story and that you can’t necessarily take my word about what is true or not without hearing from the lynch mob who tried to kill me a couple of years back. Would it make my position more plausible if you could speak to the lynch mob and get their side of the story of why they were justified to gather together to angrily string me up and then decide more objectively if I’m right about them? Go talk to them.

So, yeah, hell is other people, for sure. But also, with the right set of skills, patience, forbearance, emotional detachment when needed, a strong desire to connect with others, an ability to listen and hear other perspectives, and to sit with discomfort and pain, your own and the other person’s, there is nothing like real connections with other sentient human beings. Connections with others keep us from the hopeless sense of isolation and dread that is a huge deathward factor in our bodily and spiritual health.

The meme definition of insanity, often attributed to Albert Einstein, is doing the same thing over and over expecting a different outcome. I offer a full-color real-life illustration of that principle in action. I am only slightly less insane, for most of this anecdote, than the madman I am describing.

An old friend was going through a difficult divorce (I know of few easy ones) from a wife whose impressive anger he was physically afraid of. He had reason to be afraid, she looked like she could kick the shit out of him if it came to it. They fought constantly, though he never crossed the line to find out if his wife would actually beat him to a pulp, maim or murder him.

That’s where I, his closest friend ever, as he often told me, came in. He could take out some of this anger in the safety of our friendship, through passive aggressive attacks. Physical aggression was never his style, nor mine, but if it came to it, he was taking no chances with me. So he’d provoke me, usually by playing a merciless devil’s advocate in any situation where I expressed indignation, hurt or confusion.

As I’d start getting pissed off and testily tell him to pump the brakes, he’d announce, each time, that I had a problem with my temper. That raises a separate question, most people will eventually lose their composure if provoked relentlessly enough by someone close to them.

Of course, he could never admit to provoking me, since he is a high minded man of peace who simply wants everyone to get along.  How would admitting he purposely makes his closest friend angry every time they got together make him look?  So we had a long stalemate that lasted several years.  We had more than one sit down to talk things out, things that I hadn’t yet realized were in the nature of the irrational beast that was our childhood friendship.  

During this time I exercised a patience that sometimes felt superhuman to me.  I almost slugged him on a couple of occasions, but our middle class upbringings got the better of that impulse.  I came to regard him as something close to a friend, but stopped trusting  him with vulnerabilities he could exploit.  This compromise made our friendship a seriously limited partnership.  If you can’t trust a friend with your feelings, there’s not much left.

In the end, after speaking to him many times about this constant provocation, and his reflexive denial that he’d ever provoked me, or anyone else, I concluded the friendship was not viable. This was some years before I learned the terrible law of some friendships — whatever you once tolerated from a friend is the baseline for what you will get in the future, if things start going south. There is no saving certain relationships. When you see contempt and the constant dismissal of your right to your actual feelings, a friendship can’t be saved.

Toward the end of his hellish thirty year marriage, and the official end of our friendship, I called to see how he was holding up. He texted back that we couldn’t talk on the phone, that any talk would need to be in person. He texted back that he needed to see me as soon as possible. A few days later he showed up in my neighborhood, texted when he arrived and we chose a corner to meet on. I stood on that corner and waved to him, as he pulled up. He looked around frantically, made a right turn and drove up Broadway. When I caught up to him at a red light and got in, I saw how stressed he was by the way one of his eyes was twitching.

He smiled and made small talk until I asked him what the urgency to meet in person was. Then he came to the point.

“I don’t know if our friendship can be saved,” he said, “too much damage may have already been done by what you did, and I don’t know if it’s forgivable.”

I think he understood from my expression that I had no idea what he was talking about, but, taking no chances, I said “you’ll have to help me out here, I truly have no idea what you’re talking about.”

Then it came out in a cascade. I had, either deliberately, or with a recklessness no friend is ever allowed to show to someone he cares about, tried to destroy his marriage.

You could have knocked me over with yer proverbial feather. I asked him to elaborate. It turns out that at a marriage counseling session his wife had quoted me, with massive distortion and out of context, to crippling effect. She was then able to say “I’m not the only one who knows you’re a compulsive liar. Your best friend from childhood says you’re a fucking liar!” citing what I’d supposedly said about two versions of the same story I’d heard from each of them.

His story of a recent conflict between an insane and destructive friend of his and his wife, an anecdote I had no interest in hearing, lasted less than a minute. He stopped, telling me he regretted that he’d started to tell it to me. I asked no questions and we went on to other subjects. His wife, who I always liked, called a few days later and told me the complete story. When she was done I said “well, that makes a lot more sense than what Moishe told me.”

“Oh, what did that fucking liar tell you?” she asked, gearing up for the next round with her provocative sparring partner husband.

I told her he’d started to tell me the story, I had no interest in hearing it, he thought better of telling it, stopped, I’d asked him no follow up questions. I told her I didn’t care to hear about it, and his partial version, which lasted about a minute, hadn’t made much sense, but that her long version totally explained what had actually happened.

From here it was a straight line to the marriage counselor agreeing with his angry wife that if he didn’t have the courage to confront a friend who called him a liar behind his back, a destructive person and false friend deliberately or recklessly trying to destroy his marriage, then neither his wife, nor the marriage counselor, could ever have any respect for him. Thus manipulated he rushed off, eye atwitch, to do battle and prove his courage under fire, to save his doomed marriage.

My reaction doesn’t matter for purposes of this story. I sat with him for a few hours, talking everything through, giving him context, making my best suggestions. I told him to go back and tell the marriage counselor what had actually happened, give her all the context.

I was still too innocent, somehow, to realize that talk, no matter how rational or persuasive, can never make a dent in craziness like this. I also didn’t yet grasp the right thing to do when confronted that way, particularly by someone who fears you. Taking the high road, I could have just left the car and walked away. Alternatively, I could have grabbed him by the front of his shirt and menaced him before walking away. I could have also offered him one hard, open handed slap in the face, to be done with the brittle veneer of our friendship forever. Talking reasonably wasn’t going to help anyone at that point, though, by reflex and long habit, I did this for literally a few hours. He even thanked me at the end.

Now we fast forward a decade or so, a period of non-friendship. He has become, in some ways, an observant Jew. He goes to the Chabad House in his town, puts on t’fillin (ancient prayer accoutrements bound to the head and arm) every morning to pray and studies the teachings of the Jewish religion with a rabbi.

The most important teaching of our religion is our duty to our fellow humans on the holiest day of the year, Yom Kippur. On that day, according to tradition, God judges each of us, according to our deeds. We are required, before nightfall on Yom Kippur, to seek forgiveness from those we’ve hurt the previous year, forgive those who seek our forgiveness and make amends whenever we can.

In this guy’s personal vision of Judaism, apparently, expressing sympathy for another person’s health problems is the highest moral act a person can perform. He calls periodically to express sympathy for my medical challenges, and ask endless questions about my several major health aggravations. I speak to him calmly, tell him about life lessons I’ve learned since we last spoke. He never has any new lessons to report. He calls a few months later, and after expressing shock that we haven’t talked for so long, asks the same detailed questions about the same aggravating health headaches.

In his mind, it would seem, if enough time passes after even the worst interpersonal ugliness, everything mystically heals. Time itself, through the operation of the Divine, perhaps, eliminates the need to do any more than show sympathy for physical troubles in order to make friendship magically bloom again, no matter what has occurred in the past. You can call this idea crazy, I certainly do. And yet, until now, I have picked up the phone when he calls. It is a weird thing on my part, I have to confess.

I recognize that he is, arguably, the most neurotic person I’ve ever met. It’s easy to see he lacks even the most primitive ability to be self-critical, though he is visibly self-loathing enough for a whole family of self-haters. Why do I pick up the phone when I see his name on the screen? I’m certainly far beyond expecting a different outcome.

I guess there’s a side of me that wants to see how far he will keep pushing this crazy envelope. There is a strange fascination for me, not untinged with horror, every time he reaches out as though we are still the best of friends. So far I haven’t had the heart to ask him this heartbreakingly simple, deal breaking question:

If you accuse somebody of maliciously trying to hurt you, and it turns out they were not trying to hurt you, that, acting on false intel, you acted unfairly, unwisely, hurtfully, in a way that would have badly hurt you, had someone done it to you, are you right to pray every day, and study the words of the sages, righteously hoping for a better life, without ever offering an apology to the person you hurt?

I could add, why don’t you ask your rabbi what the thing God wants you to do is? But that would be overkill, no? Like sending him a link to this piece.

Most humans have a deeply wired impulse to avoid conflict. Many people, particularly if they are raised by angry or unstable parents, grow up fearing the worst whenever they find themselves in any kind of conflict. To those raised in an embattled home, perceived conflict, and the fear, anger and other startling emotions it inspires, becomes an emotional emergency, to be immediately talked out with the other party. Addressing conflict when you are upset, before you have digested everything involved in the conflict, is a crappy recipe for conflict resolution.

It’s natural, if you were accosted by unreasoning anger over and over in childhood, to assume that if someone seems mad at you it could be the end of a relationship you value. In the home you grew up in, everything was always phrased that way. You were conditioned to respond defensively, meekly, self-denyingly, by long years of this demand that anger is always your fault. “You crossed me again, you little shit, and maybe this time will be the last time I take that shit from you. I brought you into the world, I have the perfect legal right to take you out of it, applicable murder statutes notwithstanding.” At four years-old, about all you can do is blink and try not to cry.

It is hard, very important, work to separate the cause of the conflict from the most dire emotional outcome you can imagine. It’s important to be able to sit with the uncomfortable feelings, fear of catastrophe, until you have a handle on them, are able to consider, and talk about, the situation calmly. The only thing that makes it an emergency to deal with now, now, now! is in your catastrophizing soul.

A conflict may turn out to be very simple to solve. Someone told me they feel under pressure because I respond to emails within a day of when I get them while it takes him/her/them at least ten days to reply. I described a feature on gmail that allows you to schedule when an email is sent. I write back tomorrow, schedule send for ten days later. Your feelings understood, technology to the rescue, problem solved. Easy.

Underlying conflicts that should be very simple to resolve, assuming good will and ability on both sides, is the vast, bottomless swamp of our emotional needs, many of which are unknown and/or disorienting to us. There are some people whose dread of feeling responsible for ever hurting anyone makes them go to ridiculous, sometimes highly antagonistic, lengths to explain why, since they had absolutely no intention of hurting you, you are clearly wrong for feeling hurt by what they did, which was the exact opposite, intentionally, of what you said hurt you. So you are actually hurting them, really unfairly and aggressively, for expressing your hurt feelings when they can explain all the reasons, in exhaustive detail, that you’re completly wrong to feel hurt by what they clearly didn’t mean to do.

It can literally make your head explode, dealing with these relentless characters. In another life, not long ago, I’d have referred to them as relentless motherfuckers, which is as accurate, maybe more so. Characters can be entertaining, endearing even in their limitations and faults. Motherfuckers can only do one thing, which makes their relentlessness something to avoid. You can’t reason with them, they can’t necessarily dance (in fact, they almost never can) but will insist on dancing to the end of endurance if it suits their larger purpose: never to be wrong no matter what.

It takes a long time, in my case more than sixty-five years, but the understanding that it’s literally impossible to resolve conflict (no matter how insignificant) with a relentless motherfucker is probably the single most important thing I’ve ever learned. I pass it on to you to consider, free of charge.