Friends show up over 30 minutes late to dinner reservation leaving guy sitting awkwardly alone in a busy restaurant, guy orders food to go and leaves leading friends to claim that he is impolite for leaving

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• [Am I wrong] for leaving a restaurant after my friends were 30 minutes late?

  
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  via Eugene Chystiakov

  _{The image is representative only and does not depict the actual subjects of the story.}

• We're often taught that two wrongs don't make a right. It's one of those neat and tidy moral values that line up nicely and give us a warm and fuzzy feeling about the fact that everything is right in the world. But what happens when someone is inconsiderate to you first? Can you be inconsiderate or “impolite” to them in return? Do the two acts cancel each other out? Or is it simply a natural reaction, and is the responder justified in standing up for themselves for being disrespected? 

  Showing up late, cutting you off mid-sentence, and forgetting important dates. Each of these types of subtle actions isn't one thing that will make or break a relationship, but over time, these things will chip away at a relationship's unspoken values and mutual goodwill. Usually, we feel that standing up for ourselves and making an issue of these things will make things worse, but if we don't stand up for ourselves, we will only continue to be disrespected.

  In this way, our neat moral value becomes a little bit less so, and there begin to be situations where doing something that might be impolite and wrong normally begins to be justified.

  See, at a certain point, we owe it to ourselves to set boundaries, but there is a fine line between this and escalating a situation. Responding with escalation only gives them cause to lay blame against you for a situation that they caused or started. And let's be honest, if they know that they're wrong, somewhere deep down, their ego will be looking for any excuse to deflect blame away from themself.

  But walking away from a situation, or calmly addressing the other person's behavior when removed from the situation and cooler heads have prevailed, can be a great way to set a boundary. Ultimately, that line of justified lies somewhere in asking yourself whether you're acting out of principle or just frustration.

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