Van Halen Of The Heart

There's a possibly-apocryphal story about the rock band Van Halen, where their 53-page tour contract included the weird requirement that the venue provide a bowl of M&Ms backstage, with no brown ones.

When the band arrived at the venue, if they saw an abrunochromatic sweet bowl, they knew that the venue had read the contract carefully and presumably done a good job of the lighting/sound/important structural stagecraft stuff that Van Halen actually cared about.[^1]

I think this very often happens in friendships and relationships. One person asks another person to do something, with slightly detailed and probably unnecessary instructions, and the point is not the thing itself, it's just "do you care about me and can I trust that you will take care of the things I care about?"

And surprisingly often I have seen the second person just treat the request with contempt, aggressively not-doing the thing they were asked to because they don't think it's necessary or important. And then the first person is upset, and the second person doesn't understand why. My man: it's because you very actively, very specifically went out of your way to show you don't care! Just find a way to establish that making the other person happy is important to you, and then you can talk through whether it's actually necessary to spend time on the M&Ms.

[^1]: I say "possibly apocryphal" because I am by default skeptical of stories like this that get propagated around the internet based on one person's evidence. E.g. here's a guy who believes it was in the rider, but not that it ever functioned to keep Van Halen safe.