Resolving Interpersonal Conflict

Interpersonal conflicts are very common in everyday lives. Personally, I classify conflicts into 2 categories, internal (within oneself) and external (between 2 or more parties). Some conflicts can really spoil your day while some, you'll just sleep on it and forget about it the next morning. Well, different people will handle it differently and it really all depends on how you handle the situation and perceive it.

I still remember the faithful day, 31st August 2008. It was the day when runners from all over the world joined together to participate in the Nike + Human Race 10K, clocking a total of 79,275 participants representing 142 countries. My friends and I decided to challenge the race and fortunately, we survived! However, it did not end on a good note.

The starting point of the race was near Esplanade, so all of us decided to pool our belongings together and keep in one of my friend, A’s locker in SMU (Singapore Management University) which was quite near Esplanade. The race proceeded and after the long and tiring run, we finally made it through the finishing line but we did not finish as a group due to different running pace. Hence, we made our way back to the locker in SMU separately. However, when my friends and I reached there, we were unable to find A to grant us access to the locker as only A holds the matriculation card to enter the campus. So poor me and my friends had to wait for A to come back then we could retrieve our belongings.

As the minutes and seconds crawled by, we begin to lose our patience when our wait leads to no avail. So we decided to borrow a phone from one of the shops nearby in attempt to call A and our own phones, no one picked up. After numerous attempts, A finally picked up the phone and A came down to bring us up. We were all puzzled by why we could not contact A and after exchanging a couple of words, we then realize that he actually went to bath after the run and was with his girlfriend chatting happily upstairs. This made all of us really furious and A and some of my other friends actually got into a quarrel. “Here we are waiting anxiously for you to ‘save’ us and there you are bathing and chatting with your girlfriend!”

I think that A is really very irresponsible. Knowing that all of us are missing, I think that A should at least take the initiative to wait for us to come back before going to bath. With all the rage stirring up, we exchanged some really impolite phrases and all of us departed on a sour note.

I’m sure no one felt good about this. I think that A must be feeling wronged for having so many fingers pointed at him and the rest of us must be feeling frustrated at A for being so irresponsible. All of us then had sour feelings and left. After cooling down, I’m sure many of us will regret for acting rashly as it will definitely leave a scar on our friendship. It’s not worth spoiling our friendship for something so trivial. However, at that spur of the moment, one will just be so blinded by anger and just blurt out whatever that is on one’s mind without thinking of the consequences.

In such a situation, I feel that it is more of a conflict of interest that has sparked off such problem. All of us just wanted to retrieve our belongings as soon as possible but A wanted to spend time with his girlfriend and thus cleanly forgotten about the whole group of us waiting for him. Well, I’m sure we did something that made all of us feel bad but it is impossible to turn back time. If you were in the same shoes as me, how will you react to the situation upon learning that A is being so irresponsible?