An over-investment in people-pleasing can be emotionally costly. Here’s how I’m training myself to be OK with letting people down
A few months ago, my 10-year-old daughter and I went to our neighborhood cafe. At the counter, the owner greeted us with her typical effusion of warmth and welcome. Instead of greeting her in kind, my daughter looked on with a stony expression and ungiving eyes.
My face flushed. I was embarrassed and incensed by what I perceived as blatant rudeness. You could at least smile, I thought.
When we left, I pulled my daughter aside and gave her a firm talk about respect and manners, but her face dropped and she looked like she might cry. I quickly realized that she was in a bad mood, and totally unaware of her external affect. I felt bad for not approaching the conversation differently – I had assumed she recognized her impoliteness, that she was taking a stab at playing “sulky irreverent teen”.
That’s when it hit me: by dictating that she should comport herself contrary to how she was actually feeling, I was reinforcing society’s attempts to mold girls and women into automatons who reflexively try to please everyone but themselves. It’s ironic, because I had written an entire book to warn her about doing just that: Ugly: A Letter to My Daughter. I knew these types of messages often lead to what psychologist Mary Pipher writes about in Reviving Ophelia: a “split self” that often results in the creation of a “false self” in line with gendered expectations.
Psychologists and studies indicate that an over-investment in people-pleasing and the quest to appear “nice” are emotionally costly. They amplify stress, impede individual fulfillment and self-actualization, and can lead to self-alienation.
I had to ask myself: isn’t my daughter entitled to be in a bad mood? To not mirror someone else’s happy disposition? Why should she fake a smile or express enthusiasm she doesn’t feel? Surely being raised to participate in these gendered theatrics is where the “split” Pipher talks about begins.
Don’t get me wrong – I don’t think manners are trivial. Smiling, holding the door, greeting people and expressing gratitude nurture mutual respect and affection between friends and strangers alike. But a lesson in politeness can so easily tip into encouraging servility in girls.
I’ve spent most of my life people-pleasing. It wasn’t until the last few years of my 40s that I started resisting that urge.
But before then, how often had I violated my own feelings, boundaries and wishes to ensure I was likable? How often had I said “yes” to plans I didn’t really want to partake in or echoed a sentiment I didn’t entirely agree with?
My deep – nearly existential – desire to be likable came, in part, from feeling abnormal and believing I could hide my queerness with 24/7 agreeability. Concealing my lesbianism in situations that felt unwelcome – or worse, unsafe – I’d adopted the affectations of femininity in various ways. As long as I remained feminine in my extreme likability, I could offset the internal and external cultural messaging that lesbians are angry, ugly freaks. But nothing made me realize the extent to which I wanted to be liked as when I started substitute teaching at public schools in New York City at the age of 48.
The first time I stood in front of a classroom buzzing with unimpressed kids, I desperately, stupidly, pathetically wanted them to like me. I felt like an awkward teenage girl again, trying to adapt to 10-year-old notions of cool. I softened my voice and overworked the muscles in my face to evince a perma-smile, even when students were being loud, disruptive and disrespectful.
I felt angry, but knew better than to yield to a displeasing scowl or a voice tinged with fury.
As feminist journalist Rebecca Traister put it in her brilliant book, Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger: “Women’s anger will be – as it has long been – cast as ugly, unappealing, dangerous, something to be shut down or jeered. Nothing, we have long been assured, is more unattractive in a woman than anger.”
Think of all the language used to describe – or rather, dismiss – an irritated or furious woman. She’s difficult, aggressive, challenging, crazy, a witch, a bitch, a Medusa, a hellcat. Her “upset” is pathologized – and it’s enough to make any woman reach for the social ease of likability.
