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Party Cloudy With A Chance Of Fairweather.

The Fairweather Effect: Why Some People Are Only Meant For The Sun Shine



If you are sitting on your couch tonight, staring at the wall, running through a mental list of everything you could have done differently—stop.


Stop wondering what you could have said, what you shouldn't have said, what you could have done better, or how you could have been *more* to make them stay. Stop beating yourself up over the friend who distanced themselves, the family member who went quiet, or the partner who walked away when the sky turned dark.


The cold, hard truth is that you are breaking your own heart trying to solve a puzzle that was never yours to fix. You are trying to figure out how to make a fairweather person survive a storm.


We all encounter fairweather people in our lives. The term often carries a negative connotation, but it shouldn't. Fairweather people are not inherently bad, evil, or even wrong. In fact, they often serve deep, meaningful purposes in our lives. Think of the teacher who saw something in you that you didn't see in yourself, or the mentor who picked you up when you couldn't walk, even if you no longer speak today. Think of the friends you laughed with during the easiest, brightest seasons of your life.



Fairweather people bring light, joy, and lessons. But they are built for the sunshine. When the storm gets too rough, they leave. And it is okay that they do.


The heartbreak doesn't come from the fact that fairweather people exist. The raw, devastating pain comes from misidentifying them. It comes when we believe, with our whole hearts, that someone is a storm-runner—stoic, unwavering, and permanent—only to realize when the wind starts howling that they were only ever meant for the fair weather.


When someone you love deeply pulls away during a crisis, the immediate human reaction is to turn inward. We think, *"If I were just a little better, a little quieter, a little stronger, they would have stayed."* We assume their departure is a reflection of our worth.


It isn't. It just means they were assigned a role in your life that they either weren't meant for, or simply weren't capable of fulfilling.



It is also vital to understand that human capacity is not universal. Just because someone is a fairweather person in your life does not mean they aren't a storm-runner for someone else. You may get mad at me for telling you this, but the reality is that the fair weather people in your life ARE storm runners for other people. It may hurt to hear that, but it’s not necessarily a bad or wrong thing. We all serve different roles to different people. The friend who could not handle the weight of your grief might be the exact person holding someone else's hand through theirs. The partner who walked away from your storm might one day stand firmly in another. People have different capacities for different kinds of pain, and their inability to weather your specific storm is not an indictment of your value, nor is it necessarily an indictment of their character. It is simply a mismatch of capacity and circumstance.


The true life skill to master is not learning how to make fairweather people stay. The skill is learning how to differentiate between the fairweather people and the storm-runners in your own life.


To be clear, I do not believe this is a skill any of us can ever fully master. Human beings are complex, and we are often blinded by our own love and hope for the people we care about. But I do believe we can make deliberate efforts—through life experience, education, counseling, and honest self-reflection—to improve our ability to differentiate the two. By learning to recognize the quiet, steady markers of a storm-runner, and the bright, fleeting markers of a fairweather friend, we can mitigate future pain. We can learn to enjoy the sunshine with the fairweather people without handing them the keys to our shelter.



You cannot force a fairweather person to become a storm-runner. And more importantly, you won't have to force a storm-runner to do anything.


For your true storm-runners, you will never wonder how to "be better, do better, or say better." It won't matter. You can be completely wrong, irrational, mean even, but they don't budge, they don't falter, they don't sway. When the bottom falls out of your world, your storm-runners will be present and they will be seen and you will know who they are. They will not require you to be perfect, or graceful, or easy to love. They will simply pull up a chair in the dark and sit with you until the morning comes.


Attorney Divorce Advice, or Pre-Nuptial Advice: It is a painful reality to face, especially when the person who leaves is someone who promised to stay. If you are married, and your spouse is the fairweather person in your life, I hate to break it to you, but you need to hear the truth: you don't have a marriage and you don't have a spouse. You have a relationship with a fairweather boyfriend or girlfriend. It is a painful but constant human truth. This is not to bash marriage — I love marriage. Marry the storm-runners, people. You will pay attorneys like me a lot less money.


Let the fairweather people go with grace. Thank them for the sunshine they brought, forgive them for the storms they couldn't handle, and release yourself from the burden of trying to make them stay.


Then, look around. Look for the ones who are still standing there, soaked to the bone, refusing to leave your side. But also look just off to the immediate side — because I would be willing to bet there are a few storm-runners standing right there, waiting to jump in for you, if you open up enough to let them in.


Those are your storm-runners. Hold on tight to them. I am eternally grateful for the ones in my life and I hope to be the storm runner in as many lives as I can myself. It's not a bad life goal to have, in my opinion.



When people come into my office for Estate Planning, the number one question they have trouble answering is "who do you want to receive what, who do you want to have control of what". Well, it is ONE of the many questions that we are frequently asked.


I have different ways of saying this depending on the conversation, but the substance always boils

down to the same concept, start with your storm runners. Start with thinking of the people in your life who are with you without fail. You want to start by protecting your storm runners.


If you have put off Estate Planning because you weren't sure where to even start, who to give what, or any other uneasy feeling, let us help you. In fact, just to make it less scary, and easier to begin, we have created a free digital Estate Planning Guide and Journal. Download it here to start planning for your storm runners today.




As an additional resource, we have also released our Passwords and Accounts Digital Storage Vault (Download Below) (Also available in hard copies inside our office lobby)




Judith L. Hampton

Attorney At Law

Hampton Law Firm, LLC



 
 
 

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