A piece of advice: If you’re wondering about a person’s reliability, get them to take care of your plants for a couple of weeks. Seriously. Go on vacation. A real or a fake one. You may think that watering plants can’t be such a hard task for anyone to accomplish with reasonable success. This isn’t the case. Trust me. I’ve never considered myself much of a plants person, but somehow plants started coming to my life the moment I got a house with a three-meter wide balcony. And they haven’t stopped coming ever since, although I did change more than a couple of houses and balcony sizes.

I get along with my plants and find interaction with them rewarding. I don’t do much. Just the basic stuff. And I believe this is what they like about me. The equilibrium between not doing too much and not doing too little. And my plants are a very good judge of character. Each time I had to go on a trip, usually there was a boyfriend left behind, assigned with the simple job of taking care of my plants. Every time I found my plants in miserable shape upon my return, I knew – after the first couple of trials – that the relationship wasn’t going to work. And it never did. Sometimes the plants were dying out of lack of water, some others due to overwatering, and sometimes out of plain unhappiness, with nothing apparently being the matter.

You might argue that not everybody is cut out for gardening – and this is true. But to perform some simple tasks and grasp the need of a plant requires a certain level of empathy for all living beings, and plants seem to be very sensitive to that particular value, having no expectations whatsoever to feed upon. Thus, it is only a reasonable conclusion to come to, that a person lacking the basic empathy that a plant needs – and I’m not talking about picky plants here, such as gardenias or orchids – will fail big time in showing empathy when it comes to relating with you as a person. I mean it: Trust the plants.