Besides Personality Problems, There's This Problem

Why oh whydee why why is it so upsetting to be nice to someone I dislike? I have a few theories.

*The Implicit Approval Problem*

Let’s say being nice to people functions as our implicit approval of them. Therefore, being nice to someone you do not like is a form of lying, which feels bad or insincere or whatever – I do not approve of you and your behavior, yet here I bestow my kindness as though I do. Even though, seriously now, I do not approve of you. Perhaps this makes a chink in our integrity armor? Maybe it’s a sort of Pride & Prejudice problem, in that we do not communicate sincerity in our kindness when it is indiscriminately offered (i.e., Jane Bennett was so nice to everyone that Mr. Darcy could not be assured she had any particular regard for Mr. Bingley)?

*The Invasion of my personal sense of . . . something*

This is the one I’m more interested in - for this example let’s say now that it feels gross to me to be nice to someone I don’t like. I don’t want to look in their eyes. I don’t want to make little I-am-amused-by-your-puns titters or express other niceties that indicate some version of “I’m listening to you, and you’re okay by me, man.” I don’t want to ask them regular, everyday conversational questions in the usual polite way because I do not want to invite them to talk or indicate in any way that I would like to pursue a greater level of intimacy than complete distance. It’s not that it would feel like lying, or insincerity, or anything like that to make eye contact, laugh politely, or ask banal questions, no no. Instead, it feels like kindness on my part would widen the very pores of my skin and let the disliked person’s invisible yuck-oil slime all over me. You see, the disliked person in my mind has a kind of abhorrent dander that intrudes on me. To stay “untainted” I go into shut down mode. No smiling. No eye contact. No questions. It’s like avoiding poison ivy. Look out, don’t get any on you.

Why? Why does it feel gross to be nice to people I don’t like? Why does it give me the ick-it’s-getting-on-me feeling?

Is this too brutal to share? Too late now. Really though, what is the deal with disliking people and its effect on me?

I understand a few things about the futility of dislike. One ridiculous thing is that there is clearly no “benefit” to me of disliking someone – what do I think, that I can dislike them so much that they become likeable eventually? That they learn their lesson a la the playground and re-align their behaviors to become re-ingratiated? Dislike them so much that it somehow makes being around them bearable for me? Yeah, no – it’s more like be so mean that they dislike me right back or feel kind of upset, or that I become so distracted by my loathing that it takes up way too much space in my brain. So basically my feelings have the potential for either imaginary or horrible outcomes. So what’s the plan here? What’s my strategy? What’s my problem?

One strategy I’ve heard, besides pretending you’ve never met the person before each time you see them (hi! What’s your name? ha ha), is to be nice. I know, this sounds pretty obvious, but it isn’t to me. Being nice has all those problems I mentioned above – I want to make no indication that I am inviting further intimacy or encourage what would feel like over-reaching, and there’s that sincerity problem in there related to how I express my affection. But I guess there is a way to be nice that has nothing to do with either of these things. This is really clear in some circumstances, such as marketplace interactions – consider being nice to customers in a store. It’s free, it makes things better for everyone, and it doesn’t crack anyone’s integrity to do it (from my point of view). But there’s a clear boundary there between people; the interaction is in a store and is limited to the five minutes you spend together, so there’s no long-lasting further entanglement consequence attached to the niceness here. This example is different with regular customers you see every day, with whom your relationship can become damaged, or over-reaching customers who think workplace friendliness is actual life friendliness - then it gets messier. And then there’s this thing about politeness – people’s knowledge, conscious or unconscious, that our culture’s type of politeness requires people to endure certain kinds of unacceptable behavior, another kind of over-reaching. Well I guess I'll still be thinking about this for a while. Book suggestions welcome.