Good Manners for Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck (4 page)

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Hurt management:
How to respond to inconsiderate clods, what to say when you’ve been one, and how and when to help a stranger who’s hurting.

REQUEST MANAGEMENT

How to say no.

If you’re one of those people who just can’t squeeze out the word no, chances are you’re the slave of just about anyone who asks anything of you. (The world is your chore wheel!)

That used to describe me, by the way. “No” was not a word (or attitude) that came naturally to me. In fact, I think one of my greatest accomplishments was becoming kind of a bitch. Not all the time but when called for. It’s a huge improvement over the person-shaped doormat I used to be, thanks to having no friends—not even one—until I was thirteen.

As soon as I was no longer a total outcast, I seized the opportunity to become a total suck-up, which I remained well into my twenties. It was then that I finally realized that I had lots of “friends” but only one real friend and that I couldn’t find my opinion with a search party because I was always trying to say whatever I thought people wanted to hear. (This doesn’t earn you anyone’s respect, but people do sense that you’re the one to call when they need help moving.)

The ability to say no comes out of self-respect. For people who have it, standing up for themselves is second nature. Unfortunately, developing self-respect generally takes a good bit of time. Do get to work on that if you’re in need. (Nathaniel Branden’s book
The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem
is an excellent resource.)

In the meantime, don’t just resign yourself to bending over upon request. Instead, try Option B, the guts approach: Squirrel up the courage to say no when it needs to be said—whenever somebody’s violating your boundaries (or what you sense should be your boundaries) or even just pressuring you to go to a party you think will be a real drag. You need to
choose
when to do nice things for people instead of allowing them to wring them out of you. The thought of doing this will be terrifying at first, but once you stutter out your first no, the experience should prove revealing: The earth will not open up and a big clawed hand will not pull you in, and you’ll find that people actually respect you when you stand up to them. It’s also how you’ll come to have real friends—the kind who are
interdependent
with you and will come around for you when the chips are down instead of letting all your calls for help go straight to voicemail.

The more you keep saying no the easier it gets, and there’s a bonus:
Acting
as if you have self-respect should bring it your way faster and more easily than
thinking
really hard about how you should have it. Decades of research finds that one of the fastest ways to change how you feel is to change how you behave. In one of these studies, from 2010, experimental social psychologist Dana R. Carney found that even your posture seems to matter. Male and female subjects assuming the body language of a high-powered executive for just two minutes experienced empowering psychological, biochemical, and behavioral changes in line with actually
being
a high-powered executive. Those assigned the “power poses” (like sitting, Master of the Universe–style, with their feet up on a desk and their arms crossed behind their head) showed an increase in their level of the dominance hormone, testosterone. They reported feeling significantly more powerful and “in charge” than subjects assigned the “low-power” poses, and their greater willingness to take risks in a subsequent gambling test suggests that they meaningfully increased their confidence. Other studies of power poses have shown similarly positive effects.

What this should tell you, if you’re one of the wimps of the world, is that there’s really no reason to wait until you’re a ballsier person. You can start right now by walking tall—regularly and whenever you particularly need to stand tall. If you’re at work, close your office door (or find a big broom closet and lock the door), and then stand up straight, put your hands on your hips, stride around the space and tell your chair or the janitor’s mop just how things are going to be. It will probably seem ridiculous, but remember, the research does suggest that your body will lead your head in the direction you need to go. Realistically, you probably aren’t going to be George Clooney–smooth right away, but if you’ve previously resigned yourself to remaining meek, this is your chance for a change of plans. Today could be the first day of the rest of your noes—and maybe even the occasional “absofuckinglutely not.”

How to retroactively say no.

It’s important to be a person of your word, but there will be times when you have given your word that you’d do some life-sucking favor for someone but realize, as the deadline looms, that you absolutely shouldn’t have and maybe can’t even deliver. If you’re like most people, instead of doing the healthy thing and telling the person you’re in over your head (explaining why you overpromised and apologizing), you get mad at them for asking and mad at yourself for saying yes, and you start marinating in dread.

We humans are born overpromisers. Our brains are prone to “optimism bias”—the tendency to think positive instead of considering what’s actually realistic. Often, at the moment we’re saying yes to doing some favor, empathy for the person in need and enthusiasm to help shove aside practical, rational considerations, like calculating what, exactly, helping will entail. At that moment, time is made of spandex, and our calendar is vast and white like the first big snow.

If you generally keep your word, don’t be too harsh on yourself on the occasions you overpromise, but do use the experiences to guide you in predicting more realistically in the future. Often, bucking up and following through on whatever you offered is the right thing to do, but if you won’t cause real harm or hardship by telling the person you made a mistake in saying yes, pulling back can sometimes be okay—assuming you don’t make a habit of it.

When you must shed some favor you’ve agreed to, tell the person as soon as possible. They may be annoyed at you for bailing, but if you pull out in a timely way, explaining that you didn’t really understand what was involved, they can probably understand and even forgive you. This also may allow them time to find another patsy,
uh,
helper.

How to avoid having people retroactively say no to you.

When you’re asking someone a favor, be mindful of our tendency to breezily say yes without quite processing what it will take for us to follow through. The “retroactive no” often follows the inappropriate request—something unfair or unrealistic to ask of somebody because it exceeds their comfort zone or abilities or because your interactions with them are starting to seem modeled on the parasite/host relationship.

I did my best to explain all this to a doctor friend of mine who vented to me about his “RUDE!” doctor colleague who’d agreed to read an article he’d written. Not an article in a medical journal. An article on modern dance. Maybe his colleague sincerely intended to read it, or maybe it was just easiest to say yes (and kinder than “I’d rather have my toes snipped off with rusty garden shears”), but he will most likely go to his grave in forty or fifty years never having looked at a word of it. And, frankly, it’s to be expected.

It’s an imposition to ask someone who is not your mom or your grandma to read something you’ve written, whether it’s the community center bulletin or your award-winning short story. (In Los Angeles, a person’s greatest fear is not that somebody will pull a gun on them but that somebody will reach in his jacket and pull out a script.) It’s likewise out of bounds to expect a friend to give you an assessment of your band’s latest CD—beyond “Thanks, really liked it!” People who are not professional critics often have no idea how to read or listen critically or give meaningful criticism, and they’re afraid of seeming stupid or hurting your feelings if they say the wrong thing. The whole deal becomes overwhelming—as is the case with many chores we try to stick on friends and acquaintances. If you want to maintain your friendships, it’s often best to hire a professional to do your dirty work and ask your friend to go out for a beer with you while you’re waiting for that person to finish.

If you do decide to ask someone a favor, consider whether you have enough of a relationship—meaning a reciprocal relationship—or whether you’re that “friend” who’s always there for them whenever
you
need something. Like lions scanning the veld for the limping gazelle, there are human predators who search out the psychologically wobbly types who will say yes to even the most absurd requests simply because they lack the self-respect to say no. (Will they drive the getaway car? Babysit the feral cat?
Surrre
they will.) The wobblies’ inability to stand up for themselves doesn’t make it okay to make them your choreslave; it just means it’s possible—at least until they crack open that box of Froot Loops that has a map to their spine inside and start plotting against you for all the times you took advantage of them.

It’s also important to consider whether what you’re asking of someone is less a favor than an insult with a question mark on the end. Some people, for example, think nothing of asking some acquaintance or a neighbor they barely know to drive them to the airport—because, hey, that guy’s time has no value and a cab would cost them 60 bucks. If that person asking for the ride stripped away all their insincere hedgings and couchings (like “Wouldja mind?” and the obvious lie “I would normally not ask this, but…”) and let their swollen sense of entitlement do the talking, their request would come out something like this: “Look, schmucko, I’ll give you a choice. You can either drive me to the airport or give me the $60 for a cab.”

HONESTY MANAGEMENT

When, why, and how to weasel out of telling people exactly what you think.

Sometimes it’s best—less hurtful and more relationship-preserving—to hint, suggest, and dance in the direction of “no” instead of actually saying it. The same goes for variations on no, like “Leave me the hell alone!” and, of course, advice that someone send some idea or object on a brief tour of their rectum. In short, as you’ll see in the examples just below, honesty is the best policy—except when lying or euphemizing your ass off is a better policy.

THE BEAUTY OF INDIRECT SPEECH.

(Why horny people invite you up to see their art collection.)

Euphemism—a pleasantly vague word or phrase substituted for a harsher, franker one—is the plastic nose and glasses of civilized speech. It’s a silly, cheap-ass disguise but usually just enough of one that both you and the person you’re saying the dicey thing to can pretend you really meant something else, which keeps them from getting offended and chewing you out.

For example, we all know that somebody who asks “Wanna come up and see my etchings?” isn’t inviting you up for a few hours of art appreciation. But sending their message in disguise cloaks their intent in plausible deniability, eliminating the offense or embarrassment that a direct request—“Wanna come up so we can fuck our brains out?”—might cause if you’d be appalled to think of that particular person thinking of you in those terms.

It seems sort of unbelievable that such a flimsy euphemistic cover works. But psychologist and linguist Steven Pinker, speaking about the etchings weasel-ism and other forms of “indirect speech” at the NorthEastern Evolutionary Psychology Society conference in 2008, explained that we don’t seem to need
substantial
plausible deniability. Even the slimmest possibility that the euphemism peddler wants to guide you to something other than their broom closet sex dungeon seems to serve as a conversational air bag—allowing the two of you to pretend that sex wasn’t on the person’s agenda and to maintain whatever cordial, sexparts-free relationship you had previously.

Having witnesses weaponizes criticism.

A favorite weapon in many a passive-aggressive person’s war chest is the cc function in e-mail—the digital version of humiliating remarks dropped on a person while they’re in the company of others. This is frequently used in the office:

From: Bob Backstabbinsky
To: Joe Co-worker
cc: Hal Higherup
Subj: Let’s not gross out the clients, mkay?

Luckily, the client only came into the men’s room as you were leaving it. You know those sinks they have in there? Hint: They’re actually good for more than recovering from hangovers.

Our drive to guard our reputation makes us acutely sensitive about having criticism of us made public, whether the conversation is spoken or digital. Pinker concedes in
The Stuff of Thought
that we are all aware that other people talk trash about us—even our good friends. We may overhear some unflattering remark about us, but if nobody knows we’ve heard it, we can let it slide, he explains. But when we know that some third party has heard the remark, and when
they know
that
we know
they were witness to our dressing down, if we don’t seek redress from the person who made the remark, we can lose face—although by fighting back, we may lose in other ways, like by doing damage to a friendship or relationship we need or by coming off as an argumentative asshole.

Accordingly, when it’s your turn to tell somebody they’ve messed up, be mindful that including witnesses cranks your bitchslap up to turbo and that you’re less likely to get through to a person if you’re also getting them all ashamed and thus all the more defensive. So, in e-mail, for example, if you must loop in a third party, separately forward that person any scoldmail you’ve sent (instead of visibly cc’ing them on your original scolding) or otherwise privately relate what went down. Again, in keeping with Pinker’s assertions on plausible deniability, the scoldee can believe and even be pretty darn sure you’ve looped somebody else in. But if you don’t tell them so in so many words, you’ll leave that much more of their ego unchewed.