HAVE YOU EVER TAKEN SOMEONE FOR GRANTED?

Of course you have — we all have. But have you ever taken someone for granted who was so close to you that you didn’t even realize you were doing it?

And maybe you didn’t realize because they’d had your back for so long you lost sight of that fact. I guess that’s the definition of “for granted” isn’t it? Someone who was granted to you — by life I suppose — to be on your side.

Well I’ve just taken someone for granted in a way that has left me feeling a bit foolish.

So an apology is in order.

But, like I tend to do, I’m going to apologize by way of a long and arduous explanation. I have this funny quirk about me that makes me think that if I just explain how I arrived at a poor decision, or bad behavior, then I can make the casualty of my behavior understand how I came to offend. And that somehow lessens the crime.

I think I do that because I’m a bit selfish.

Here’s what I mean: I tend to see my life as me on the middle of a mostly empty stage. From time to time people come onto the stage and make things happen, but I don’t always see those people — or the things they do — as being fully connected to me.

And I think maybe — like some of us out there — for me it’s a defense mechanism. I think a lot of people are like me in that they find life easier to manage when they think they’re only managing — and affecting — themselves.

But there are other people on the stage with us. And maybe when they’ve been there long enough we lose sight of them — sort of in the way that when you stare at something too long you almost can’t see it anymore. It’s as though they somehow become part of the stage itself.

Maybe there are others out there who started out like me, as a shy kid. There was a time once, when I was about 6 or 8, that I was sitting in my grandpa’s car and some local kids wanted me to come play soccer with them. I love soccer, always have, but because I didn’t know those boys I just sat in that car by myself and watched them play a game I would have loved to join.

So why didn’t I get out of the car?

I can’t fully explain that — I guess mostly because I processed that situation with the mind of a child, and so have mostly just the understanding of it that a child could conjure up.

But at some point I think I made the transition from “shy” to something else. That is to say, I went from letting others know I was somehow unable to do a thing, to giving them the distinct impression that I just didn’t want to do the thing. I guess it was a way of taking control.

And we all want to be in control, right?

As I write this it occurs to me that you don’t really get to be shy as an adult. Kids can be shy — that’s normal, even expected. But not adults. Grown-ups don’t really get to be shy. We’re expected to have it all figured it out by now. We’re expected to have come to understand ourselves and to have picked a more mature personality.

Shy isn’t OK.

So what can “shy” become? Well, there’s humble, and modest, and even wary. Those are all mature and believable things for an adult to be. But “shy” just isn’t cool. Shy, in an adult, is seen as odd. As though there’s something wrong with you. Wrong as in, come on, you’ve had years and years to figure this out, so how can you still be shy?

So you pick another thing to be.

I think the thing I picked to be was “aloof.” Aloof is cool. It’s detached, and unaffected. It’s in control and on its own terms. If you’re aloof you seem to know exactly what you want (because you speak up so seldom, people don’t know that you don’t).

But there’s a down side to aloof: It can give the people around you, the people important to you, the impression that you don’t really care. That you’re not so interested. That they don’t matter to you as much as you matter to them. And that’s a bad message to send.

Especially to someone who’s got your back.

I’m not going to tell you who I’ve taken for granted — but I will tell you this: If she reads this she’ll know who I’m writing about. And she’ll forgive me — because that’s what she does. Truth is she’s probably already forgiven me. Real truth is, she probably never held it against me in the first place.

Let me tell you one more thing about her: Right after my divorce, back when I was trying to prove to myself that I really was the good dad I wanted to be, I did something not very smart. My ex-wife took my sons to Disneyland — something I just didn’t have the money to do at the time. Somehow, perhaps out of guilt, she invited me along. Actually it wasn’t hard for her to do — she knew that as much as I had to work to make ends meet, I likely wouldn’t have the time or money to get to Disneyland and then back up here.

But I went anyway.

I came home from working late, and at about midnight jumped in my truck and drove the 400-plus miles to be in Anaheim by morning to meet my sons at the Disneyland gate. I then spent the entire day traversing the park and carrying the youngest one around on my shoulders.

By the time evening rolled around and it was time for me to leave, I was exhausted. But I jumped in my truck for the drive back to NorCal because I had to work in the morning.

Everything was OK until I came down the north side of the Grapevine — at which point my eyes started refusing to stay open. I tried playing the radio loud, I tried driving with the windows down — nothing was working.

My body needed sleep.

So, even though it was the middle of the night, I called the person who was always there. And she stayed on the phone with me for hours. As long as I talked to her, I found I could stay awake. And at one point, when I hung up in the small hours of the morning so she could sleep — I started to sleep, too. So I called her again, and she kept me going again.

The only reason I didn’t fall asleep that night doing 70 mph on I-5 is because she didn’t fall asleep that night.

And that’s just one story of many.

She’s always been there for a guy who’s aloof and who likes to pretend that nothing ever really affects him. But here’s the problem with being aloof — it’s like a self-imposed seclusion. It’s this situation that leaves you alone with your feelings, and because you’re alone with them you’ve got almost no practice in sharing them with others — which is how they get defused, or validated, or whatever it is they need to get.

I’m lucky I’ve got someone like that in my life.

Now I just hope she reads The Herald this Sunday.

John P. Gavin is the author of “Online Dating Sucks… but it’s how I fell in love,” which is available on Amazon and at Bookshop Benicia.