Good Manners for Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck (6 page)

Addiction treatment specialist Stanton Peele explains that telling people what to do just makes them defensive, leading them to cling to whatever they were doing instead of being open to giving it up. “People change their behavior when they sort it out in their own mind that what they’re doing violates what they care most about and what they want most for themselves,” Peele told me.

Peele, in
7 Tools to Beat Addiction
, writes about motivational interviewing, a technique used to stimulate positive change in addicts, which can also be useful with any person stubbornly clinging to a damaging behavior. First, you draw out the person’s thoughts, feelings, values, and goals by asking them what they want for themselves. You listen empathetically and without judgment. And then—the kicker—after they’ve laid out how they’d like their life or some situation to play out, you gently ask them how their current course of action dovetails with that (or doesn’t). This is the point at which they are most able to see the discrepancy between what they want and what they’re doing.

Peele, in
7 Tools
, cautions: “The aim in this kind of questioning is never to place yourself in direct conflict with the target. Whenever you sense resistance, back up. The key to this approach is to push the ball back to the other person (generally by asking questions), even when you feel you know what the truth of the matter is.”

It’s unrealistic to expect that person to do an immediate U-turn in their thinking and behavior, but by eliminating the element of defensiveness and getting them to more open-mindedly consider what they’re doing, you at least help them plant some seeds that may lead to change.

I’ve often seen this approach be more successful than direct advice. In addition to readers I’ve given advice to who’ve written me to report on the progress they’ve made, a cop friend who worked a domestic violence beat for the LAPD told me she had the best success getting victims to pull themselves out of abusive situations by persuading them to attend discussion groups with other victims. They’d hear other victims’ stories and see bits of their own situation in them. Because nobody was directly challenging them, they didn’t feel compelled to defend their behavior or their abuser’s, and they were more likely to recognize how crazy and dangerous it was for them to keep going back to their abuser.

HURT MANAGEMENT

When your mouth becomes a storage area for your foot.

I was at a friend’s dinner party, and a few of the twelve or so guests were really pretentious Hollywood types I hated instantly. About 9 p.m., when we sat down to eat, one guy kept his sunglasses on.
Oh, come on,
I thought.
Glare of the salad dressing too much for you, dude?

For some inexplicable reason, I decided to share this thought. “Sunglasses indoors? What are you, blind?”

“As a matter of fact, I am,” he said.

Time to crawl under the table and die!

I can’t remember my response, but the temptation when hoof goes into mouth is to let your embarrassment run the show. This leads you to get all rambly in apologizing, drawing the incident out and making it more embarrassing for everyone. You should instead get in and out with a quick, neat apology—“Oops, I bungled that one. Really sorry!”—and then change the subject so everyone can move on.

How to respond to well-intentioned idiots.

Sometimes people with the best of intentions say or do hurtful things. Someone may offer a bus or a subway seat to a woman they believe is pregnant. This happened to a friend of mine—several months
after
she’d had her baby, just when she was feeling good about starting to get her pre-pregnancy body back. She was wearing an outfit she’d chosen specifically for what she called its “doesn’t-make-me-look-pregnant quality.” So, in the span of five minutes, on a single subway ride, when the third person offered her their seat, she had a mini-meltdown—dropping her bags and making a loud announcement to the entire subway car: “I AM NOT PREGNANT!”

I’ve always found public meltdowns fascinating—second in entertainment value only to televised slow-speed police chases. But when people who surely mean well do something hurtful to you, it’s best to respond to their intentions instead of their actions. A woman in my friend’s situation, for example, should thank the person offering her the seat and sit down—because it’s nice to take a load off and because when people are just trying to be considerate, it’s kindest to avoid embarrassing the hell out of them by doing as my friend did: screaming, “… ACTUALLY, I’M JUST FAT!”

Fighting ugly with pity: An all-purpose comeback for cutting remarks.

You’re in some social situation when somebody says something seriously rude about your looks or maybe your intelligence, right to your face. Of course, you come up with the perfect comeback—two days later while sitting on the toilet.

The truth is, even professional comedians can find it hard to have a good comeback in a social situation. They’re ready for the occasional heckler when they’re onstage (and often have a fistful of preplanned comebacks, since how they’ll be heckled is pretty predictable). But when they’re standing in a group of people at a party and somebody puts them down, shock and anger can take hold, shutting down the smartass remark-building parts of the brain. (It’s that “emotional hijacking” Daniel Goleman talks about in response to dignity violations.)

Sure, when you’re loose from a few beers, maybe your wit will sometimes come through for you, but it’s safest to assume that it will instead scurry off and hide behind a large piece of furniture. In other words, you should dispense with the notion that a winning reply to a rude remark involves a response so witty that it incinerates the rudester right where they’re standing. Rather, keep in mind that there’s a reason somebody is being so ugly and cutting. Happy people tend to be kind or, at least, uninterested in tearing other people down. Miserable people often want to lash out at the world—and there you are, so conveniently located as a target for their hate.

When one of these spitebags hurls a put-down at you, they expect that you’ll either try to fight back or just stand there blinking and wishing you could disappear. Instead, you should do the last thing they’d expect: Look straight at them for a moment, and coolly call them on their rottenness with a remark like “Clearly, you must have had a pretty bad day to feel the need to say something so nasty to me. I hope you feel better.” (Sincerity is not required here—just believability—so say it devoid of anger, and sound like you mean it.) By expressing sympathy for them, you’ve accomplished three things:

1. You’ve refused to accept their turning you into their victim.

2. You’ve come off classy and bigger than they are.

3. You still managed to stick it to them, sending the message, “Sorry your life is such a suckhole that your lone path to happiness is trying to make other people feel like shit.”

How to shut down prying questions.

Conversational bullies—especially those who share your DNA—will feel free to ask you prying personal questions, such as “When are you two lovebirds having kids?” No matter how obnoxious the intrusion, getting ugly will only reflect badly on you. This isn’t to say you should feel compelled to give any sort of direct answer, both because you’ll surely feel victimized (if in a minor way) and because answering encourages the prying person to keep trying (which, if they’re old and related to you, they’ll probably do anyway). You may be tempted to respond with something jokey, like “Actually, we’ll go upstairs right now and get cracking,” but that’s still an answer of sorts. Your best bet is refusing to engage. This takes only five words: “Time to change the subject!” Say only those words, in a singsong tone (more “just joshin’” than spittle-flecked with annoyance), and keep saying them until your interrogator gives up.

Public crying: When to butt in.

One day, around lunchtime, for about ten minutes straight, I heard what I thought were the loud, persistent howls of a child coming from the city parking lot by my house. I kept thinking a parent would calm the kid down, but the howls persisted. I went out to see what the deal was and found that it wasn’t a child at all but a woman in the driver’s seat of a parked car, wailing at the top of her lungs.

“Are you okay? Did something bad happen to you?” I asked her.

“My father died,” she sobbed.

“I’m so sorry,” I responded. And never really knowing what to say in death situations, I blurted out, “Can I get you a bottle of water?” She nodded. I announced, “I’m going to go get you a bottle of water,” and I ran back to my house. How a bottle of water relates to a father dying, I don’t know, but I said I was going to get her one, so I did. I took it back across the street and handed it to her through her open car window.

With that, she stopped wailing and, through sniffles, thanked me.

In retrospect, I don’t think what I gave her mattered. What she needed was to have another human being reach out and show her some kindness.

This got me thinking about public crying. Some people believe that when you come upon a stranger crying, you should just leave them be. I think that’s true—when they’re crying quietly and doing their best to hide it from passersby. In that case, you probably help them most by pretending not to notice.

But a person sobbing their guts out in public is different. It’s the emotional version of running down the street naked—a sign that something has gone so drastically wrong for them that normal social conventions have gone out the window. They are not just upset; their world has been yanked out from under them in some awful way. That’s a terribly lonely feeling. Maybe the loneliest feeling. So, even if they end up declining your offer to help, chances are it will mean a lot to them that you, a total stranger, noticed their pain and made an effort to comfort them.

WHY I ALWAYS TALK TO STRANGERS

I know, “the gift that keeps on giving” sounds like something you get from eating a bad clam, but on a more positive note, it describes what you can get—or give—when you strike up a conversation with a stranger. To me, it’s like an Easter egg hunt without the plastic eggs. You’ll never know whom you’ll meet, what you might become to each other, or what fascinating, funny, or useful things a person can tell you until you crack them open.

I’m a chatter. I chat with the skycap, with the parking lot cashier (briefly if somebody’s behind me), with the lady who checks me in for my mammogram and with the lady who administers it, and with probably a good third of the people who sit next to me in coffee shops. I’ll pretty much talk to anyone who doesn’t seem to be putting out vibes of “Sure, people
could
talk to me, but I’d rather they throw hot coffee in my face.” The point is just to connect—if briefly—and make people feel good, which usually makes me feel good right back.

My longtime boyfriend, an introvert whose favorite kind of social event is one that’s been canceled, finds my love of talking to strangers bizarre. Of course, if I weren’t this way, he’d just be some guy who was once in the Apple computer store at the same time as some redheaded woman and I’d have a number of blank spaces in my life where some very good friends are.

Beyond the practical benefits from connecting, life just seems warmer and more livable when you have friendly interactions between all the transactions. Also, with most of us living in these vast strangerhoods where we can sometimes go days without running into a single person we know, striking up conversations with strangers seems even more of a necessity—which isn’t to say it’s always easy. A friend remarked to me, “Unlike you, I’m afraid to just go up and talk to people.”

“Actually,” I said, “I’m often afraid to go talk to people, but that doesn’t seem a good enough reason to avoid doing it.” This is sometimes underscored when I see how reaching out to people can help change the world in small but meaningful ways. One Saturday at my favorite coffeehouse, I remarked to the woman in the next booth about an ornate book on her table with hundreds of linen-y looking pages and a beautiful, obviously handmade collaged cover. It was all she had left of her blog, she said. A good friend of hers had printed out all the entries and created the book for her shortly before her blog had fallen, suddenly and irretrievably, off the Internet.

A few hours later, a guy sat down at the booth where she’d been. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him pushing some item aside. It was her book. I was horrified. The café is closed on Sundays, and I imagined her, Saturday night, realizing her book was missing and having to wait for the coffeehouse to open on Monday to see whether they’d found it.

I got on the Internet, using clues from talking to her to try to track her down. I sent a tweet to some professor who might’ve been her teacher and messaged a woman on Facebook who I thought might be her. (Her profile picture showed only a close-up of an eye, so I couldn’t be sure.) But minutes before closing, she dashed back into the coffeehouse, hugged her book, hugged me, and tearfully told me how wonderful I was. I thanked her but said I thought it was just what a person should do.

The following Saturday, Gina, who works at the coffeehouse, told me that the woman had put $20 on account for me. I thought that was really great of her, but I also felt a little icky about getting $20 simply for acting like a decent person. And then a homeless man whom a few of us regulars buy coffee and breakfast for came in and sat down. I went over and said hello and told him I’d love to buy him lunch. I put the turkey and cheese croissant and Coke he wanted on my “account,” telling Gina she could use the money still left to feed him when he came in in the future. I hopped on Facebook and messaged the woman, thanking her and telling her about the lunch she’d bought: “Your gift has done a little good in the world—thought you might like to know.”

Now, this is a man who sleeps in alleys around Santa Monica and seems schizophrenic or otherwise not all there. Obviously, a turkey and cheese croissant isn’t the answer to all his problems, but it’s something—lunch for a guy who surely doesn’t always get lunch. That and reuniting a woman with an irreplaceable item that meant a lot to her came out of a little friendly busybodying. People will tell you that opportunity knocks. I’ve never even heard it tap a little, but I’ve found time and time again that it chats.