There’s nothing like waking up to a little relationships bureaucracy shoved up your nose before you’ve even had coffee. It really rounds out the smell of burnt coffee, dry donuts, and a dash of regret.
Relationships Commentary with Aunt Netty™
Relationships Are Just the By-product
If you haven’t noticed, I’m just a little old woman here to tell you the truth about relationships. And honestly? There isn’t much to say. Some relationships are buoyant. They’re light like a gentle breeze. The kind where you wake up and think, “give me more of that.”
And then there’s the other kind, the ones that rattle you down to the studs, like some corporate boss barking a new rule across the office bullpen. “Come here, and I’ll give you something,” they say, always sealed with a promise that never once shows up. I sat with that a while. Tossing it around, I turned it over. Looking at my own relationships in the mirror of it all, I landed on one question.
Are dysfunctional relationships just the by-product of a bureaucratic blueprint?
They have the same mentality. The same chain of command. Oh, honey, they’re just wearing a different name tag.
Sunday Used to Mean Something
I remember Sundays. The smell of fresh coffee holding my cup, while standing in the early morning sun on the front porch. Waiting on the neighbor kid to lob the paper at your feet, giving a friendly wave to a neighbor and with a snap of unfolding the newspaper everything was calm. It was time to sit down in the quiet of the morning with the smell of fresh ink, that was my time of peace. It’s nobody’s peace time now, apparently.
Peace got replaced with a screen popping up every thirty-seconds mid-article. Rude. Genuinely rude, and I will die on this hill seeing it that way. It doesn’t matter which era you grew up in, though. Both versions taught us the exact same nasty habit: hang onto whatever juicy information lands in your lap, and pass it right on down the pipeline to somebody else. People just love a good leak.
Those tall billboards became pop-up ads. The old saying, “What happens in this house stays in this house” got repackaged and sold back to you at the corner store for a fee. Why of course it did. And somewhere in there, the nosy ones (the ones who love watching you spiral) start yelling across the fence, “hey, watch what I can get them to do.” Bless their tiny darkened hearts. Truly.
Same Blueprint, Different Building
Monday morning rolls around, as everyone gathers in the office kitchen. Somebody’s leaning on the water cooler with a “hey, did you hear about” already loaded and ready to fire off something to perk up the ears. That’s the opener. That’s the bid for connection dressed up as gossip, don’t kid yourself.
Then the boss yells, back to work, and everybody scatters off with a cliffhanger they’ll finish later. Don’t you worry, they always finish it later. Always! It’s the same script that runs in families and friend groups. Community boards, church committees, the PTA, it doesn’t matter. Everybody gets handed a little assignment to carry. A drop-off, a kick in the rear, go focus on this instead.
Distractions. Bargaining. Negotiating. It’s everywhere, and it’s all running off the same tired set of instructions somebody photocopied a hundred times too many. Right there in the middle of office chatter on the same machine. But here’s the thing: if you dig far enough, you’ll find the same bureaucratic blueprint sitting underneath coworkers, family, friends, social clubs. And yes, honey, romantic relationships too. One person decides it’s their way or the highway. Somebody’s still quoting “don’t let the door hit you on the way out” like it’s scripture from the mount.
And the bully who works everybody to the bone? Somehow they still get admired. By the weak ones, anyway. The weak ones always clap for the wrong person.
The Blueprint Breakers vs. The Sludge
Then there’s the other one. The one person who walks up while you’re still fixing your coffee, wipes the same three sugar granules off the counter for the fourth time. They can’t quite meet your eyes, talking to the counter instead, sharing whatever they picked up off the news or their phone. A soft bit of proof presented in a little awkward way. But grounded. It’s that critical point where grounding beats loud every single time.
I call those ones the Blueprint Breakers. They stand alone. They listen to their own gut instead of the group chat. They wait for the timing to be right instead of forcing it on everybody else’s schedule.
Then you’ve got the family dinner: eight people, all telling the same story, every single one with a different twist at the end. It seems nobody can just let a story be a story. There’s always that slow burn, one more churn, then fireworks.
A happy gathering turned into a pressure cooker for gossipers and gaslighters. I call those characters the Sludge. They ooze in low and slow, looking for any little crack in the floor to fill, and honey, there’s always a crack somewhere.
Feeling Stuck or like life is repeating the same cycle over and over? Let’s find what’s blocking you.
But hey, what do I know. I’m just an old lady spewing out forty fucking years of keeping my mouth shut.
Nobody’s Reading the Fine Print
Isn’t it funny how two people can hear the exact same sentence and walk away with two completely different stories, and both will swear on a stack of Bibles they’re the one who’s right. Like reading a policy update written in language you need a dictionary for translation. By the time you’ve figured out how it even applies to your life, the meaning’s gone. So is your whole afternoon, and nobody’s giving that back to you.
Some people get it. Others cling to the garbage side of it like one dropped crumb is going to make them worthy. Keep clinging, sweetheart. It’s not working. Now look, there’s chaos at the office, chaos in the friend group, and in romance too. All that turmoil under one roof: an awful lot of the time it’s coming from the exact same kind of person. The darkened sludge running the exact same tired script, still searching for those deep cracks and holes.
The question worth asking isn’t “why is this happening again.” It’s “whose blueprint is this, really?”
Somebody wrote this rulebook. But it wasn’t you.
Because the ones holding their phone in your face going “read it, see, I told you”? Nobody’s actually reading it. Nobody wants the truth sitting right there in their palm, staring back at them. Meanwhile, the person who does stand on their own two feet, sovereign, thinking for themselves? They get treated like the weird one. Everybody else just follows the leader and calls it loyalty. That’s not unique, sugar. That’s just what happens when unhealthy leadership trains good storytellers who won’t own their mess.
So Where Does It Actually Come From?
Ah, there it is. The one who can see straight through the fake cream cheese frosting. Looks pretty. Smells fine for about a week. Then it turns, and everybody knows exactly where that smell’s coming from, don’t they?
In families, that person’s the one who gets shown the door. Never took the blame, gets handed it anyway, every time, like clockwork. At the office, same story, different lanyard. In social circles, the one holding the actual truth is the one who gets quietly pushed to the edge, because the truth threatens the illusion everybody else already agreed to protect. Nobody wants to be the one who breaks the illusion. Except me, apparently.
Then there’s the smiling little sneaks. Friendly on the surface, ready to turn on anybody who threatens that illusion, or delusion, take your choice; I’m not picky. Toxicity running through the veins, through the mouth, into everybody else’s ear, one “yes” at a time. Not one ounce of it about keeping their own peace. It never is.
Here’s the part that really gets me: two people, raised under the same roof, same rules, same blueprint, you’d think they’d turn out the same. But somehow, they don’t. One breaks the pattern. One inherits it whole and hands it right back down: to the new hire, the volunteer, the neighbor’s kid, their own children.
On and on it goes. That’s the loop. The continuing cycle where a leader raises followers, a follower becomes leader. Each blueprint gets photocopied one more generation down the line. Running from office to living room and back again, until somebody, somewhere, finally decides they’re done running somebody else’s program.
I tore my blueprint up. It’s gone. Fin-ito!
What have you done with yours? Leave us a comment below.
Aunt Netty
Cozioligy is an Ascending Times Media LLC publication
