Good Manners for Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck (5 page)

The right time to discuss something is sometimes never.

We all know this, right? But when you’re speaking with someone who’s trotting out obviously idiotic beliefs, it’s tempting to yank out all the evidence they’re wrong and beat them over the head with it until they give in. So, consider this a reminder: Nailing somebody to the wall with your incisive logic is a good thing if you’re trying to win the seventh-grade state debate finals. Socially, it’s best to identify people who will never be convinced and who, in fact, are likely to be deeply wounded that you hold different beliefs (and maybe even think you’re a bad person for holding them). Talk with those people about shoes, good books, and the weather.

It’s also a good idea to consider whether all truths need to be told to all people. I am open with my friends and blog commenters that I see no evidence there’s a god. They can handle it. I, however, saw no reason to reveal my nonbelief to my boyfriend’s late mother, a sweet little devout Catholic lady who was fond of me and would likely have worried that I’d burn in hell and Gregg would be left alone for all eternity.

Deliver the bad news about a person last.

You catch more flies with a fly swatter.
⁴
(Honey is messy and hard to throw.) But when speaking critically to someone, you’ll catch less hatred and anger if you start on a positive note. Even really bad news about a person’s fate is best presented with a flattering startup (assuming you aren’t telling them, “You have beautiful eyes, and oh, yeah, you have a month to live”). For example, if you have to tell somebody that they’re fired, first give them props for some things they did right. Next, say something like, “But, you messed up, and here’s how, and we have to let you go.” The positive lead-in doesn’t make a person any less fired, but at least you won’t clear out all their dignity before you have them clear out their desk.

Bad news is kinder than no news: Breaking up with a friend.

We humans are conflict-avoidant beings. We hate uncomfortable conversations and will put them off endlessly if we can. For example, there may come a time when you need to break up with a friend. The thing you’re probably most tempted to do—make like Casper and disappear—is also the cruelest.

Unfortunately, I say this from experience. My best friend of eight years broke up with me without a word. We were very much entwined in each other’s lives, and for years, we had been meeting in the mornings at a café and emailing multiple times daily. All of a sudden, he wasn’t at the café and wasn’t responding to e-mail. He’s a professor, so I figured he’d just gotten crazy-busy at school. But time passed, and I still heard nothing from him. I worried he was lying hurt somewhere and nobody at school had missed him. I escalated to calling (not how we usually communicated with each other), left desperate voicemail messages, and sent pleading e-mails, “Maybe you’re mad at me, but just tell me you’re okay.”

Probably out of sheer annoyance at the message storm, he sent me a curt e-mail telling me he no longer wanted me in his life, saying I had “gotten angry” in recent months. As he knew, a good friend of mine had died two months prior after a painful and protracted battle with lung cancer, and I was one of a group of her friends caring for her. So, sure, maybe I
was
angry. But we all go through pissy periods in life, and a friend gives you a heads-up—“Hey, I find it hard to be around you these days…”—and maybe tells you he has to take a break from you; he doesn’t just vanish.

In other words, yes, you actually need to tell your soon-to-be ex-friend that it’s over—as briefly and kindly as possible. Getting officially dumped allows them to lick their wounds and move on. As for how to tell them, a friend of mine who got dumped by e-mail by her male best friend and the godparent to her children said, “Only a coward breaks up with a friend by e-mail, phone, or text.” Perhaps. But, to me, the point isn’t to seem brave but to get the message across in the least humiliating way possible, and a face-to-face firing by a friend is pretty humiliating, which is why I think it’s best to do it in a gently worded handwritten note. (Handwriting your message takes more effort than e-mail, possibly eliminating some of the notion in their mind that you just took the easiest way out.)

Whatever your reasons for ending the friendship, it’s kindest and most dignity-preserving to stick to vague excuses for your departure, explaining it as a conflict in dynamics, which it almost certainly is. For example, you just have “different approaches” to life, you’ve “grown apart,” or you feel you’re just not “clicking” anymore. Be prepared to stick to the reason you choose in case you’re called and pressed for more. The important thing isn’t telling the whole truth about why you’re outta there but telling them the least hurtful thing you can that says “goodbye forever.”

BEHAVIOR MANAGEMENT

Criticizing people doesn’t make them change; it makes them want to clobber you.

I was inside my house, in my office, with all the windows closed, struggling with a passage I was writing, when my thoughts were suddenly drowned out by some chickie’s loud argument. I opened my front door and saw a woman in a blue Volkswagen Bug parked across the street yelling into her cell phone speakerphone—and out her open driver’s side window—which meant she was basically loudspeakering her conversation to every house on my block.

I do not live in the countryside with six grazing cows and four acres of land between the street and my front room. It is an urban neighborhood where the houses and apartments and a number of residents’ windows are right along the sidewalk—a fact that should be apparent to anyone not taking a stroll while blindfolded.

Thanks to my inability to crack the passage I was trying to write, I’d already gotten a head start on being annoyed when the woman’s loud conversation shoved its way into my office. I stomped out onto my porch, glared over my fence at her, and hissed: “I can hear you
inside my house.
”

Sure, my annoyance also came from the reasonable presumption that the sounds you hear in your house will be house sounds—the teakettle whistling, bacon frying, your dog snoring—but I usually know better than to go out and hiss at somebody. Criticizing a person’s behavior, especially angrily, is not a way to get them to change it. Not for the better, anyway.

In this case, it led to the spitting of angry words between the two of us. But standing there on my porch, yelling to her about how rude she was, I realized that I was being a counterproductive ass and surely causing even more of a disturbance to my neighbors than she had been. I went back inside—at which point the girl marched up to my gate, yelled in the direction of my closed front door for five minutes straight, and then vandalized my mailbox.

On a positive note, this was such an obvious example of how I
shouldn’t
behave that I turned it into a benchmark for how I
wouldn’t
behave in the future. I realized that I’d forgotten to consider my goal when I stormed out on my porch. Did I just want to go off on the girl, or did I want to get her to pipe down? I’m more likely to get peace and quiet—and avoid flooding my body with the poisons that well up from the biochemistry of fight-or-flight—if I ask in a way that doesn’t make somebody long to give me a colonoscopy with that cute VW dashboard bud vase.

As I noted earlier in the chapter, because of the lack of firmware updates to our body’s ancient fight-or-flight system, when we’re verbally attacked, we launch the same supercharged biochemical ammo we’d need to fend off something sharp-fanged that thinks we’d make a nice dinner. It’s criticism and blame—statements that attack and diminish a person—that fire up this defense system, causing people to rationalize and defend their behavior and then attack you for attacking them.

Therapist Carl Alasko, in
Beyond Blame
, suggests you test whether something you’re about to say is a blaming statement by considering whether it is likely to provoke “a reaction of anger, resentment, anxiety, pain, fear, or humiliation.” Common blaming statements start out with “How come you didn’t,” “Didn’t you know that,” and “It would help if you’d just.” But Alasko says the single most common blame trap is a “why” question, like the accusatory “Why didn’t you put the milk away?” Answer: “Because I’m too stupid to remember!”

To avoid ugliness and maybe even motivate change, forgo accusation and criticism for a request—“Hey, honey … please remember to put the milk away”—or offer a calmly uttered statement of fact: “Hey, just wanted to let you know: The milk was still out on the counter when I came home. It smelled funny, and I had to throw it away.”

Calm fact-stating was the tactic I started using on bargoing loudsters who park in my neighborhood. One night, at midnight, right outside my house, four guys were sitting in an SUV with most of the windows down, playing their radio at a wake-the-dead volume and repeatedly yelling, “Woo-hoo!”

My first impulse was to vaporize them and their vehicle with an alien ray gun. Instead, I channeled—I dunno—Desmond Tutu, the Dalai Lama, and somebody who’s had way too much electroshock therapy and went outside in my robe. I knocked on the driver’s-side window. Entirely without animus. Cool as chalk.

Looking surprised, the guy rolled it down.

I said in a calm, matter-of-fact tone, “Hey, just wanted to let you know, we’re real close to the street here in these houses, and we hear pretty much everything.”

Despite my restrained approach, I had low hopes for their response, since the
woo-hooing
made them sound plastered. I waited for the drunken “Fuck you, bitch!”

“Oops, sorry,” one of the guys said. “We’ll be quiet.”

“Sorry!” “We’re sorry!” others singsonged.

“Hey, thanks,” I said and went back in the house—with nary a
woo
or a
hoo
in my wake.

Awful truths and uncomfortable requests are often best expressed in ink—sometimes anonymously.

Say somebody has bounced a check to you or a friend has gotten in the habit of taking advantage of you in some ugly way. Trying to straighten things out face-to-face will be icky and uncomfortable for you and for them. As I advised about how to dump a friend, telling them in writing—perhaps in a gently worded e-mail—allows them to get the message offstage, minimizing the embarrassment both of you would feel if you were there to see their reaction.

Other merits of sending a note include adding time and distance, giving the person you’ve sent it to the chance to cool down and respond in a more reasoned way. It also allows you to support any solutions you propose with reference material, if needed (such as an article about no-bark collars for a neighbor with a persistently yapping dog).

The gentle anonymous note is particularly helpful in alerting co-workers to their failures in hygiene or other personal care issues. (What’s even more embarrassing than learning that you stink? Knowing who knows you stink.)

Take a common problem, especially in the workplace—cologne wearers who seem to confuse “spray-on” with “hose-on.” If you’re like many of those suffering from the regularly overscented, you may find it too uncomfortable to say something to them. Even if you
are
comfortable speaking up, if you don’t have a solid working relationship with the person—and if they’re a little unstable—they could turn your working life into working hell.

Still, many people would argue against sending an anonymous note, as it allows the recipient no opportunity to reply. This may seem unfair—and even rude. Well, it’s also unfair that you’re being gassed, and the point isn’t to start a conversation about it but to have the stench purveyor realize that they need to stop.

You could also speak to your supervisor or drag the problem up to human resources and ask them to do the talking for you (and to keep mum that you’re the one who’s complained). In an ideal situation, HR would put out a memo telling everyone to be mindful that some co-workers have allergies and chemical sensitivities and asking them to cut back on (or cut out) the Napalm No. 5. In a less-than-ideal situation, they’d yank the offender in for a talking-to, which could be very embarrassing for that person and potentially very bad for you should the HR people drop any clues as to who made the complaint.

That’s why an anonymous note is sometimes the best solution—or at least the best first attempt—to solve the problem of an overly-perfumed co-worker, providing your workplace is large enough that they won’t easily guess the sender. Be prepared to have no clue as to what the hell they’re talking about, in case they ask. Cover your tracks by printing the note at home (because workplace printers may have distinctive imprints or quirks that make it easier to narrow down which computer a particular printout came from). Fold it (so nobody popping into their office can read it without going into snoop mode), and sneak it onto their desk or chair.

In your message, tell the offender (usually a she) that her fragrance is lovely (even if it’s anything but) but that you have chemical sensitivities and/or terrible allergies and perfume makes your nose and eyes itch and your throat swell and gives you these terrible headaches. Could she kindly wait until she leaves work to put it on? This tactic makes the issue a medical problem on your part, and your request that she take a compassionate approach to it should go down far easier than the truth: She smells like she narrowly escaped being killed in an explosion at a ladies’ bathroom deodorizer factory, in turn causing anyone who works in the same zip code to feel as if a scented railroad spike is being hammered up their right nostril and into their brain.

The best way to bend people to your will is to avoid trying to bend people to your will.

I’m an advice columnist who defies her job description, which is supposed to be telling people what to do. I instead use humor to try to show people the absurdity of their behavior, both because it’s more fun to read than finger-wagging advice and because research in psychology and addiction treatment suggests that leading them to their own conclusions is more effective than hammering them with mine.