Circle of Dumping: The Golden Rule in Reverse

The Dumper: Either you’ve been one, or you’ve been her victim.

The Dumper is the woman who drops her women friends the second a guy - any guy - shows up on the scene. She’ll leave you in a bar, forget to give you the promised ride home from a party, or quit calling you altogether as long as Mr. Wonderful is around.

It’s not only a crummy way to treat your girlfriends, but it’s usually counterproductive in the mad scramble for the attention of the opposite sex.

Dating expert Lisa Daily, the author of "Stop Getting Dumped" (Plume 2002) says, "What usually happens is - girl meets guy, girl drops friends so she can be on call 24/7 for guy, guy starts to suffocate from over-attention, guy drops girl, girl has no guy and no friends."

Male Dumpers are less common. But while leaving your buddies in a bar for the mere prospect of a female companionship may be considered acceptable behavior, men who consistently wuss out on poker night to see a chick flick pay a heavy price when they return to the pack.

"In a situation where a man has a chance to score with a woman he doesn’t know, he is revered for leaving his friends at the bar. But if it’s a woman he’s been with for a while, he’s ridiculed for the exact same behavior," says Daily, a real-life date doctor who appears in a featurette on the DVD of Will Smith’s hit comedy "Hitch."

She suggests that, "Ditching your friends when something better comes along doesn’t just make you a bad friend, it makes you a karmic target for a king-size helping of the same."

It’s no coincidence that the people who dump are the mostly likely to be dumped. It’s sort of like the Golden Rule in reverse: Do it to others and they’ll do it to you.

Many in the spiritual world have suggested that our traditional interpretation of the Golden Rule doesn’t fully capture its true essence. It’s not: "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." It’s actually: "When you do unto others, you do unto you."

How many times have we seen this concept play out?

We eradicated small pox. Yet, we hung on to the last little bit just in case we ever wanted to annihilate some future enemy. Now the few vials floating around have put the entire country in peril.

Diplomatic Decree: Intended future evil begets current terrorist threat.

Enron executives who gambled away their employees’ futures for one more pull on the greed machine turned their own lives into a house of cards. The employees are broke, but the big guys are flat busted.

Earnings Report: Gamble with other people’s money and your own future becomes a losing game of Russian roulette.

Statistics show that when a couple who cheated together gets married, there is a 95 percent chance one will cheat again. So the one who stabbed a former spouse in the back almost always gets stabbed in return.

Love lesson: If you betray someone, brace yourself, because you can count on someone betraying you.

And of the best examples I’ve heard illustrating the circle of bad deeds comes from talk show host Angela Harrington Rice of WAIB in Atlanta. She says, "The U.S. outlaws certain pesticides, but then we ship them off to foreign countries. They spray them on their vegetables and then send ship that same produce right back to us."

Trade formula: Poison out, poison in.

It’s doesn’t matter whether you’re a country or an individual: what goes around comes around. Judgmental people always feel judged. Critical people wind up being criticized. Rude people never get good service. And dumpers get dumped on.

When are we going to learn? Whether it’s a universal truth, a direct hit from the big man upstairs, or concrete proof that we are all directly linked as part of the same universal humanity, when we treat other people badly, it always comes back. And often it comes back worse than we sent it out.

I wonder how we might act if we stayed conscious of that fact, knowing every time we did something to someone else, we were literally doing it to ourselves as well.

There probably would be a lot fewer friends left alone at the bar.

If you’ve even been the victim of a Dumper, or been slighted in some other nasty way, it’s tempting to help the universe along by showing the perpetrator a little Golden Rule action of your own. Don’t bother - the laws of karma like to work alone.

And if you plot revenge, you’d better dig two graves.

Snellville resident Lisa Earle McLeod is a nationally recognized speaker and the author of "Forget Perfect: Finding Joy, Meaning, and Satisfaction in the Life You've Already Got and the YOU You Already Are." She has been seen on "Good Morning America" and featured in Lifetime, Glamour and The New York Times.

Contact Lisa at www.ForgetPerfect.com if you would like additional columns.

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