After the Sale
A while ago, I was selling a few things as part of my decluttering project.
One of the clients I met was friendly. Easy to talk to. The kind of person you relax around without thinking too much about it.
As we were negotiating, he smiled and said,
“Come on… don’t make me pay for the other unserious clients you dealt with.”
He said it jokingly.
But something in me paused.
Maybe he noticed it on my face, because he quickly added,
“I saw your ad had been up for months. So either you had no clients, or you met unserious ones. I’m serious. I actually want to buy it.”
And he did.
He got the item.
He got a lower price.
And then he left.
But his words stayed.
I kept thinking about that moment—about how easily he positioned my past experiences as something unfair to him.
As if the time-wasters, the no-shows, the unserious inquiries… were irrelevant now that he had arrived.
As if what I had learned along the way was something to set aside, just to accommodate him.
And the more I sat with it, the more familiar it felt.
Not in selling.
In dating. In relationships.
How often are we asked—softly, playfully, sometimes even convincingly—to do the same thing?
To loosen our grip on what we’ve learned.
To ignore patterns we’ve already lived through.
To treat hard-earned discernment like unnecessary baggage.
All so someone new can feel unburdened.
All so they can access us… without resistance.
And it rarely sounds unreasonable in the moment.
It sounds like:
“Not everyone is the same.”
“Give me a fair chance.”
“Don’t compare me to others.”
And on the surface, that’s true.
But there’s a quiet implication underneath it:
Set aside what you know. Trust me instead.
The thing is—those lessons didn’t come from nowhere.
They came from experience.
From repetition.
From paying attention.
They are not punishments we hand out to new people.
They are protections we built for ourselves.
So maybe the question isn’t whether someone deserves a “clean slate.”
Maybe the question is:
At what point does giving someone a chance…
start to look like abandoning yourself?