How we can move beyond our defensive instincts to foster genuine connections, challenging the common misconceptions that often harden our hearts and complicate our interactions. By rethinking how we interpret others’ motives and acknowledging our shared fragility, we can build a more compassionate approach to everyday life.

Core Idea

Быть снисходительным, понимающим и добрым означает понимание того факта, что все мы люди и ничто человеческое не чуждо каждому из нас. За каждым незнакомцем скрывается человек, движимый теми же страхами, стремлениями, уязвимостями и надеждами, что и мы сами. Более того, истинная доброта несовместима с чувством превосходства над другими. Любовь и понимание начинаются тогда, когда мы учимся видеть за несовершенствами другого человека нашу общую человеческую природу.

На пути к пониманию и доброте (как к себе, так и к другим) критически важной становится способность выйти за рамки унаследованных сценариев и авторитетных мнений. Настоящая зрелость наступает, когда мы перестаем жить по чужим указкам и начинаем доверять собственному суждению, понимая, что не существует единого, проложенного кем-то другим пути к счастью.

Being nice and kind means accepting the fact that we are all human, and nothing human is alien to any of us. Behind every stranger lies a person driven by the same fears, aspirations, vulnerabilities, and hopes that we ourselves possess. Moreover, true kindness is incompatible with a sense of superiority over others. Love and understanding begin when we learn to see our common human nature behind the imperfections of another person.

On the path toward understanding and kindness—toward both ourselves and others—it becomes critical to move beyond inherited scripts and authoritative opinions. True maturity arrives when we stop living by someone else’s script and begin to rely on our own judgment, recognizing that there is no single, pre-determined path to happiness laid out by another.

Kindness and Charity

Charity goes far beyond finance. It is in our relations with colleagues, friends, and family members that charity becomes particularly necessary. Here what we tend to be short of is charity of interpretation: that is, a kindly perspective on the weaknesses, eccentricities, anxieties, and follies that we present but are unable to win direct sympathy for.

A charitable soul does the extra work for us. They come forward with explanations of why we behave as we do: They understand enough about our past to have a picture of where our impatience or over-ambition, rashness or meekness comes from. They hold in mind what happened with our parents and with the move to another country. They create a picture of who the person in the «begging» position is that is sufficiently generous and complex as to make us more than just the «fool» or «weirdo,» the «failure» or «loser» that we might otherwise so easily have been dismissed as.

Charity remembers how there might still be virtue amid much evil. Charity keeps in mind that if someone is tired and stressed, they are liable to behave appallingly. Charity is aware that when someone shouts an insult, they are not usually revealing the secret truth about their feelings; they are trying to wound the other because they feel they have been hurt – usually by someone else who they don’t have the authority to injure back.

In life as a whole, and especially in relationships, charity is unlikely to end up one-sided:

Who is weak and who is powerful can change rapidly and frequently. You are likely to be, as it were, a «patron» in one area and a «beggar» in another. So, we must be kind not only because we are touched by the suffering of others but because we properly understand that we are never too far from being in need of an equally vital dose of charity to get through life.

The Weakness of Strength

The Weakness of Strength theory dictates that we should strive to see people’s weaknesses as the inevitable downside of certain merits that drew us to them, and from which we will benefit at other points, even if these benefits are not apparent right now. What we are seeing are not their faults, pure and simple, but rather the shadow side of things that are genuinely good about them. We’re picking up on weaknesses that derive from strengths. If we were to write down a list of strengths and then of weaknesses, we’d find that almost everything on the positive side could be connected with something on the negative side.

Every strength that an individual has brings with it a weakness of which it is an inherent part. It is impossible to have strengths without weaknesses. Every virtue has an associated weakness.

Not all the virtues can belong together in a single person.

This theory usefully undermines the unhelpful idea that, if only we looked a bit harder, we would find someone who was always perfect to be around. If strengths are invariably connected to failings, there won’t be anyone who is remotely flawless. We may well find people with different strengths, but they will also have a new litany of weaknesses. It is always calming to take a moment to remind ourselves that perfect people don’t exist.

Losers and Tragic Heroes

For a long time, around success and failure, the rhetoric tends to be very upbeat. We hear about resilience, bouncing back, never surrendering, and giving it another go. But there’s only so long this kind of talk can go on.

At some point, the conclusion becomes inevitable: Things won’t work out. The political career is not going to have a comeback. There’ll be no way of getting finance for the movie. The novel won’t be accepted by the 32nd publisher. The criminal charges will always taint one’s reputation.

You could be good and yet fail. To keep this idea at the front of the collective imagination, the Ancient Greeks developed a particular art form: tragic drama. They put on huge festivals, which all citizens were expected to attend, to act out stories of appalling, often grisly, failure. People were seen to break a minor law, or make a hasty decision, or sleep with the wrong person, and the result was ignominy and death. What happened was shown to be to a large extent in the hands of what the Greeks called «fate» or «the Gods.» It was the Greeks’ poetic way of saying that things often work out in random ways, according to dynamics that don’t reflect the merits of the individuals concerned.

In The Poetics, the philosopher Aristotle defined the key ingredients of tragedy. The hero of the tragedy should be a decent person: «better than average,» often high-born but prone to making small mistakes. At the start, it may not be obvious that they are making an error. But by an unfortunate chain of events, for which they are not wholly to blame, this small mistake leads to a catastrophe.

We are currently uncomfortable around the idea of a good person not succeeding. We’d rather say that they weren’t good than embrace a far more disturbing and less well-publicized thought: that the world is very unfair. But without the idea of tragedy, we make existence for everyone far crueller and more judgmental than it needs to be.

Motives

A fundamental path to remaining calm and kind around people, even in very challenging situations, is being able to distinguish between what someone does and what they meant to do. In law, the difference is enshrined in the contrasting concepts of murder and manslaughter. The result may be the same; the body is inert in a pool of blood. But we collectively feel it makes a huge difference what the perpetrator’s intentions were.

We care about intentions for a very good reason: If the action was deliberate, then the perpetrator will be a persistent source of danger from whom the community must be protected. But if it was accidental, then the perpetrator will be inclined to deep apology and restitution, which renders punishment and rage far less necessary.

Motives are therefore crucial. We see intention where there was none and escalate and confront when no strenuous or agitated responses are warranted. Part of the reason why we jump so readily to dark conclusions and see plots to insult and harm us is a rather poignant psychological phenomenon: self-hatred. The less we like ourselves, the more we appear in our own eyes as plausible targets for mockery and harm. Why would the phone operator be taking so long to find our details? Because there is, logically enough, a plot against us. Because we are appropriate targets for these kinds of things; because we are the sorts of people against whom disruptive drilling is legitimately likely to be directed; because it’s what we deserve.

When we carry an excess of self-disgust around with us, operating just below the radar of conscious awareness, we constantly seek confirmation from the wider world that we really are the worthless people we take ourselves to be. The expectation is almost always set in childhood, where someone close to us is likely to have left us feeling dirty and culpable. As a result, we now travel through society assuming the worst, not because it is necessarily true (or pleasant) to do so, but because it feels familiar; because we are the prisoners of past patterns we haven’t yet understood.

If we employed the infant model of interpretation, our first assumption would be quite different: maybe they didn’t sleep well last night and are too exhausted to think straight; maybe they’ve got a sore knee; maybe they are doing the equivalent of testing the boundaries of parental tolerance: Is jumping in front of someone in the queue playing the same role as peeing in the garden? Seen from such a point of view, the adult’s behavior doesn’t magically become nice or acceptable. But the level of agitation is kept safely low. It’s very touching that we live in a world where we have learned to be so kind to children; it would be even nicer if we learned to be more generous towards the childlike parts of one another.

The French philosopher Emile-Auguste Chartier (known as Alain; 1868-1951) was said to be the finest teacher in France in the first half of the 20th century. He developed a formula for calming himself and his pupils down in the face of irritating people. «Never say that people are evil,» he wrote. «You just need to look for the pin.» What he meant was: look for the source of the agony that drives a person to behave in appalling ways.

The calming thought is to imagine that they are suffering ott-stage, in some area we cannot see. To be mature is to learn to imagine this zone of pain, in spite of the lack of available evidence. They may not look as if they were maddened by an inner psychological ailment; they may look chirpy and full of themselves. But the «pin» simply must be there, or they would not be causing us harm.

We need to imagine the turmoil, disappointment, worry, and sadness in people who may outwardly appear merely aggressive. We need to aim compassion in an unexpected place: at those who annoy us most.

Suffering and Meanness

It happens pretty much all the time: a small jabbing comment, a joke at our expense amid a group of old friends, a line of sarcasm, a sneering assessment, a provocative comment on the internet. These things hurt a lot – more than we’re ever allowed to admit. In the privacy of our minds, we search for explanations, but anything satisfying and soothing is usually hard to come by.

This is what we should actually think – a truth as basic as it is inviolable: Other people have been nasty because they are in pain. The only reason they have hurt us is because they are – somewhere deep inside – hurting themselves. They have been catty and derogatory and foul because they are not well. However outwardly confident they may look, however virile and robust they may appear, their actions are all the evidence we need that they cannot be in a good place. No one solid would ever need to do this.

A kind of punishment has been delivered cosmically already somewhere behind the scenes; their suffering, of which their need to inflict suffering on others is incontrovertible evidence, is all you need to know that they have been served their just desserts. You move from being a victim of crime to being an audience to an abstract form of justice. They may not be apologizing to you, but they haven’t escaped freely either; their suffering is proof that they pay a heavy price.

This is not merely a pleasant story. A person who feels at ease with themselves can have no need to distress others. We don’t have the energy to be cruel unless, and until, we are in inner torment.

The temptation is to be stern and cruel, but the only way to diminish the vicious cycle of hate is to address its origins, which lie in suffering. There is no point punching back. We must – as the old prophets always told us – learn to look upon our enemies with sorrow, pity, and, when we can manage it, a forgiving kind of love.

Politeness

«Politeness» can sometimes even carry almost the opposite of its traditional connotations, suggesting an offensive or insolent degree of insincerity and inauthenticity. A «polite» person may be judged as a bit fake – and in their own way, really rather rude.

The rise in our collective suspicion of politeness has a history. Politeness used to be a key virtue for young aristocrats, yet by the late 18th century it had been thrown into disrepute. An alternative, Romantic ideal had emerged, in large part driven by the Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), who powerfully redescribed politeness as an indication of servility and outright deceit. What was important for Rousseau was never to hide or moderate emotions and thoughts, but to remain – at all times-fundamentally true to oneself.

What ultimately separates the Polite from the Frank person isn’t really knowledge of etiquette. The difference doesn’t hang upon considerations of which knife to use at a formal dinner, when to say «please» or «thank you» and how to word a wedding invitation. It comes down to a contrasting set of beliefs about human nature.

The Polite and the Frank person behave differently chiefly because they see the world in highly divergent ways. Frank people believe in the importance of expressing themselves honestly principally because they trust that what they think and feel will be fundamentally acceptable to the world. These are some of the key ideological issues that separate them:

Robustness vs. Vulnerability

The Polite person starts from a contrary assumption that all of us are permanently only millimeters away from inner collapse, despair, and self-hatred. However confident we may look, we are painfully vulnerable – despite the outward plaudits and recognition – to a sense of being disliked and taken for granted. Every piece of neglect, every silence, or slightly harsh or off-the-cuff word has a profound capacity to hurt.

Accordingly, the Polite person will be drawn to spend a lot of time noticing and commenting positively on the most apparently minor facets of others’ achievements: They will say that the watercress soup was the best they’ve had in years; they’ll mention that the ending of the writer’s new novel made them cry; they’ll say that the work on the Mexico deal was helpful to, and noticed by, the whole company. They will know that everyone we come across has a huge capacity to hurt us with what we foolishly and unfairly refer to as «small things.»

Yet the Polite person knows that we take a lot of ourselves into our jobs and need to find respect and a form of love from them as much as we need the cash. So they will be conscious of an additional need to contribute smiles and a pleasant word or two to the person stamping their passport or changing the bedclothes in the hotel. These people are doing their jobs for the money, of course, but payment never invalidates an emotional hunger for a sense of having been useful and appreciated by another person, however brief and functional the encounter may seem.

Grand vs. Small Gestures

The Frank person is often very kind, but in a big way. They are interested in enormous acts of generosity and kindness towards major sections of humanity: perhaps the rescue of the whole continent of Africa or a plan to give every child in the country an equally good start in life. But a consequence of their enthusiasm can be a certain impatience with smaller moves and gestures, which they may view as a distraction from the larger causes.

The Polite person also passionately cares about spreading kindness and love and goodness on a mass scale, but they are cautious about the chances of doing so on any realistic time horizon. Their belief that you probably can’t improve things for a huge number of people in the coming decades makes them feel that it is still worthwhile trying to make a modest improvement in the lives of the few humans you have direct contact with here and now. They may never be able to transform another person’s prospects entirely or rescue our species from its agonies, but they can smile and stop for five minutes to chat to a neighbor about the weather. Their modesty around what is possible makes them acutely sensitive to the worth of the little things that can be done before today is over.

Self-Certainty vs. Self-Doubt

The Frank person has a high degree of confidence in their ability to judge quickly and for the long term what is right and wrong about a given situation. They feel they can tell who has behaved well or badly or what the appropriate course of action should be around a dilemma. This is what gives them the confidence to get angry with what strikes them as rank stupidity, or to blow up bridges with people they’ve become vexed with, or to state a disagreement emphatically and to call another person stupid, monstrous, or a liar to their face. Once they have said something, they know they can’t take it back, but they don’t really want to. Part of their frankness is based on the notion that they can understand at speed the merits of any situation, the character of others, and the true nature of their own commitments.

The Polite person is less certain on all these fronts. They are conscious that what they feel strongly about today might not be what they end up thinking next week. They recognize that ideas that sound strange or misguided to them can be attempts to state-in garbled forms-concepts that are genuinely important to other people and that they themselves may come around to with time. They see their own minds as having great capacities for error and as being subject to imperceptible moods that will mislead them-and so are keen not to make statements that can’t be taken back or to make enemies of people they might decide are worthy of respect down the line.

The Polite person will be drawn to deploying softening, tentative language and holding back on criticism wherever possible. They will suggest that an idea might not be quite right. They will say that a project is attractive, but that it could be interesting to look at alternatives as well. They will consider that an intellectual opponent may well have a point. They aren’t just lying or dodging tough decisions. Their behavior is symptomatic of a nuanced and intelligent belief that few ideas are totally without merit, no proposals are 100 percent wrong, and almost no one is entirely foolish.

The Purpose of Friendship

The key to the problem of friendship is found in an odd-sounding place: a lack of a sense of purpose. Our attempts at friendship tend to go adrift, because we collectively resist the task of developing a clear picture of what friendship is really for.

The problem is that we’re often uncomfortable with the idea of friendship having any declared purpose, because we associate purpose with the least attractive and most cynical motives. Yet purpose doesn’t have to ruin friendship. In fact, the more we define what a friendship is for, the more we can focus on what we should be doing with every person in our lives – or indeed the more we can helpfully conclude that we shouldn’t be with someone at all.

There are at least five things we might be trying to do with the people we meet:

Networking. Networking is an unfairly maligned idea. We are small, fragile creatures in a vast world. Our individual capacities are insufficient to realize the demands of our imaginations.

Therefore, we need collaborators: accomplices who can align their abilities and energies with ours.

Reassurance. They refuse to admit that they too are going slightly out of their minds. The reassuring friend gives us access to a very necessary and accurate sense of their own humiliations and follies, an insight with which we can begin to judge ourselves and our sad and compulsive sides more compassionately.

Fun. Despite talk of hedonism and immediate gratification, life gives us constant lessons in the need to be serious. We have to guard our dignity, avoid looking like a fool, and pass as a mature adult. The pressure becomes onerous, and in the end even dangerous. That is why we constantly need access to people we can trust enough to be silly with.

Clarifying Our Minds. To a surprising degree, it is very hard to think on our own. The mind is skittish and squeamish. As a result, many issues lie confused within us. We feel angry but are not sure why. Something is wrong with our job but we can’t pin it down. The thinking friend holds us to the task. They ask gentle but probing questions that act as a mirror that assists us with the task of knowing ourselves.

Holding on to the Past. A number of friends have nothing to say to who we are now, but we keep seeing them, get a little bored in their company – yet are not wrong to retain them in our lives. Perhaps we knew them from school or college, or we once spent a very significant vacation with them 20 years ago, or we became friendly when our children were at kindergarten together. They embody a past version of ourselves from which we’re now distant and yet to which we remain loyal. They help us to understand where we have come from and what once mattered. They aren’t relevant to who we are today, but not all of our identity is entirely contemporary-as our continued commitment to them attests.

One side effect of seeking more precision about what we’re trying to do with our social lives is that we might conclude that, in many cases, we are spending time with people for no truly identifiable reason. These proto-friends share none of our professional ambitions or interests; they aren’t reassuring and may in fact be secretly excited by the possibility of our failure; we can’t be cathartically silly around them; they aren’t interested in furthering either our or their path to self-knowledge and they aren’t connected with important phases of our lives.

They are simply in our orbit as a result of an unhappy accident that we have been too sentimental to correct.

We should dare to be a little ruthless. Culling acquaintances isn’t a sign that we have lost belief in friendship. It is evidence that we are becoming clearer and more demanding about what a friendship could be. In the best way, the price of knowing what friendship is for may be a few more evenings in our own company.

The Problem of Over-Friendliness

There is a particularly poignant way to be a social disaster: through over-friendliness, a pattern of behavior driven by the very best of motives that ends up feeling as irritating as outright rudeness.

We meet the over-friendly at the office, laughing at the jokes of the senior management; behind the desk at the hotel, wishing Sir or Madam a highly enjoyable stay; and across the table on a first date, lavishly endorsing their would-be partner’s every opinion about recent books and movies.

The over-friendly are guilty of three large errors:

First, they believe they must agree on everything. When we say something clever, they are thrilled. When we say something daft, they like it no less. Their ritual approval may seem attentive. In truth, it’s a version of not listening at all.

Second, their praise is ill-targeted. Plenty of nice things are being said, but they are not the ones we happen to value. They claim to love our umbrella, our credit card is from their favorite bank, – our chairs are deeply beautiful, we apparently have a nice way of holding our fork … but none of this counts for us if it isn’t connected up with our own sense of meaning and achievement. Everyone loves being praised, but to be praised inaccurately is its own kind of insult.

Third, their friendliness is remorselessly upbeat. They point out how well we look, how impressive our job sounds, how perfect our family life seems. They want to make us feel good, but they dangerously raise the cost of revealing any of the lonelier, darker, more melancholic aspects of our characters.

By contrast, the less ardently friendly and therefore properly pleasing person will keep three things closely in mind:

First, that disagreement isn’t necessarily terrible – it may be exhilarating to be contradicted when we don’t feel that our dignity is at stake and we are learning something valuable at the hands of a combative interlocutor.

Second, that people only want to be complimented on things they are actively proud of. The value of the currency of praise depends on it not being spent too freely. The truly pleasing person knows they must pass over many things in discreet silence; when they eventually do bestow a blessing, their words have a proper resonance.

Third, that we are cheered up not so much by people who say cheery things as by people who appear to understand us. This usually means people who sympathize with our sorrows and show a willingness to travel with us to the anxious, hesitant, or confused parts of our psyches.

At the core of the pleasing person’s charm is a metaphysical insight: that other people cannot, deep down, be very «other.» Therefore, in core ways, what one knows about oneself will be the master key to understanding and getting along with strangers – not in every case, but enough of the time to make the difference.

Over-friendliness is not just a feature of one-to-one encounters; it is an entrenched flaw within modern consumer society more generally. We must reconcile ourselves to the risk of not making friends to stand any chance of actually making any.

How to Overcome Shyness

Shyness is rooted in a distinctive way of interpreting strangers. The shy aren’t awkward around everyone; they are tongue-tied around those who seem most unlike them on the basis of a range of surface markers: of age, class, tastes, habits, beliefs, backgrounds, or religions. With no unkindness meant, we could define shyness as a form of «provincialism» of the mind, an overattachment to the incidentals of one’s own life and experience that unfairly casts others into the role of daunting, unfathomable, unknowable foreigners.

On contact with a person from another world or «province,» the shy allow their minds to be dominated by a forbidding aura of difference. They may (silently and awkwardly) say to themselves that there is nothing to be done or said because the other is famous while they belong to the province of the obscure; or because the other is very old while their province is that of 20-somethings; or because the other is very clever while their province is that of the nonintellectual; or because the other is from the land of very beautiful girls while they hail from the province of average-looking boys. This is why there can be no grounds to laugh, to hazard a playful remark, or to feel at ease. The shy person doesn’t intend to be unpleasant or unfriendly. They simply experience all otherness as an insurmountable barrier to making their own goodwill and personality apparent.

…it was to this «cosmopolitan» mindset that the Roman playwright and poet Terence gave voice when he wrote: «I am human: nothing human is foreign to me,» and that Christianity made use of in rendering universal sympathy a cornerstone of its view of existence. The cosmopolitan is well aware of differences between people. They just refuse to be cowed or dominated by them. They look beyond them to perceive, or in practical terms simply to guess at, a collective species unity.

All human beings (however varied their outward appearance) must-they know-be activated by a few basic dimensions of concern. There will be uniting likes, hates, hopes, and fears, even if it is only a love of rolling a ball back and forth or a mutual interest in sunbathing.

The shy provincial is a pessimist at heart. The modernizer won’t-they feel certain-be able to talk to the traditionalist; the enthusiast of the left must have no time for anyone on the right; the atheist won’t be able to engage with the priest; the business owner must get awkward around the socialist. The confident cosmopolitan, by contrast, starts from the assumption that people are endowed with wildly opposed views, but that these need never fatally undermine the rich range of similarities that will remain in other areas.

The mind fixates on the gulf: My nose looks as if a child had modeled it out of plasticine, yours as if Michelangelo had carved it; I fear losing my job, while you fear that expanding your business into Germany won’t be as profitable as you’d forecast.

Shyness is a touching, yet ultimately excessive and unwarranted, way of feeling special.

Why Affectionate Teasing Is Kind and Necessary

It may not seem like it, but teasing done with affection and skill is a profound human accomplishment.

All of us become a bit unbalanced in one way or another: too serious, too gloomy, too jokey. We all benefit from being tugged back towards a healthier mean. The good teaser latches onto and responds to our distinctive imbalances and is compassionately constructive about trying to change us: Not by delivering a stern lesson, but by helping us to notice our excesses and to laugh at them.

The English literary critic Cyril Connolly once famously wrote: «Imprisoned in every fat man a thin man is wildly signalling to be let out.» This is a general idea with multiple variants: Inside the fussy, over-formal individual there’s a more relaxed person looking for an opening; there’s an ambitious, eager self quietly despairing within the lazy man; the gloomy, disenchanted cynic harbors a more cheery, sunny subself in need of more recognition. The teasing remark speaks over the head of the dominant aspect to the subordinated side of the self, whom it helps to release and relax.

Perhaps the most instructive question we can ask-the one that teaches us most about the value of affectionate teasing – is simply: What do I need to be teased about?

How to Be Warm

Picture the person who ends up, despite their best efforts, seeming what we can call coldly polite. They may be keen to please those they are seeing, they obey all the rules of etiquette, offer their guests drinks, ask them questions about their journey, suggest they might want a little more gravy, remark on the interest of a recent prizewinning novel-yet never manage to make their hospitality feel either engaging or memorable. It may be a long time before another meeting with them is suggested.

By contrast, there is the person we recognize as warm, who follows the cold person in the basic principles of politeness, but manages to add a critical emotionally comforting ingredient to their manner.

They might, when we have an evening planned with them, suggest making grilled cheese sandwiches at their place rather than going out to a restaurant; they might chat to us through the bathroom door; put on the songs they loved dancing to when they were 14; plump up a cushion and slot it behind our back; confess to feeling intimidated by a mutual acquaintance; bring us a posy of daisies or a card they made; call us when we’re sick with the flu and ask how our ears are feeling; make encouraging «mmm» and «ah» sounds to show sympathy and interest for a story they have teased out of us about our insomnia; give us a sly conspiratorial wink when they notice we’re finding someone else at the table attractive; mention they like our haircut, and then, when we spill something or fart by mistake, exclaim: «I’m so glad you did that! Usually it’s me.»

Beneath the difference between the warm and the cold person lies a contrasting vision of human nature. Broadly, the cold person is operating with an implicit view that those they are attempting to please are creatures endowed only with the highest needs.

Yet, the warmly polite person is always deeply aware that the stranger is (irrespective of their status or outward dignity) a highly needy, fragile, confused, appetitive, and susceptible creature. They know this about the stranger because they never forget this about themselves.

«Just because an animal is large, it doesn’t mean he doesn’t want kindness; however big Tigger seems to be, remember that he wants as much kindness as Roo,» says Kanga, in what might be a definition of the philosophy of warmth.

Why Flirting Matters

At its best, flirting can be a vital social process that generously lends us reassurance and freely redistributes confidence and self-esteem. The task is not to stop flirting, but to learn how better to practice its most honorable versions.

Good flirting is in essence an attempt, driven by kindness and imaginative excitement, to inspire another person to believe more firmly in their own likability – psychological as much as physical. It is a gift offered not in order to manipulate, but out of a pleasure at perceiving what is most attractive in another. Along the way, the good flirt must carefully convince us of three apparently contradictory things: that they would love to sleep with us; that they won’t sleep with us; and that the reason why has nothing to do with any deficiency on our part.

Good flirting exploits – with no evil intent – an important truth about sex: that what is often most enjoyable about sex is not the physical process itself so much as the idea of acceptance that underpins the act; the notion that another person likes us enough to accept us in our most raw and vulnerable state and is, in turn, willing to lose control and surrender aspects of their own everyday dignity.

We have for too long been warned against flirting by an unfortunate Romantic ideal of total coherence, one that implies that either we are completely sincere in flirting and so must make love or we are, in effect, liars. In many Romantic novels of the 19th century, «flirt» is, therefore, a term of abuse. No hero or heroine could ever adopt a playful, semierotic tone with anyone except their true love. But they would thereby miss out on an important enlargement of their sensibilities.

The ideal flirtation is a small work of social art cocreated by two people, a civilized artifice that acknowledges limitations, worries about consequences, and knows the importance of not letting momentary impulses damage long-standing commitments. It knows that avoiding sex is usually wise, but is intelligently invested in sharing some of the benefits of sex without the act itself.

The good flirt carries out an important psychological mission: to restore balance to our view of ourselves. They remind us that, for all our failings of character and bodily liabilities, we are, in certain ways, properly appealing and, in a better situation than the one we find ourselves in, a truly interesting person to want to spend a night with.

Why Kind People Always Lie

Truly good people are always ready and even, at times, highly enthusiastic about telling lies. This sounds odd only because we are in the grip of a heroic but indiscriminate and delusional addiction to truth telling.

But good people do not lie for their own benefit. They aren’t protecting themselves and they aren’t disloyal to the facts out of mendacity: They tell lies because (paradoxical as it sounds at first) they love the truth intensely and out of good will for the person they are deceiving.

We are ready enough to admit to a role for lies in certain situations. You might be visiting an elderly aunt who prides herself on her talent for carrot cakes with vanilla frosting. But her heyday is long gone. Now she muddles up the recipe and sometimes forgets how long the butter has been in the refrigerator. The result is pretty off-putting. But it’s deeply important for her to feel that she’s still able to please others. That’s why you lie.

The lie isn’t produced to protect oneself. It is told out of loyalty to a bigger truth-that one loves the aunt-that would be threatened by full disclosure. As is so often the case, a great truth has to pass into the mind of another person via a smaller falsehood.

What makes falsehoods so necessary is our proclivity for making unfortunate associations. It is, of course, entirely possible to love someone deeply and at the same time believe they are terrible at baking. But in our own minds, the rejection of our cakes tends to feel synonymous with the rejection of our being. We’re forcing any half-decent person to lie to us by the obtuseness of our thought processes. It is because the aunt is in the grip of a falsehood («If you don’t like my cake, you can’t like me») that we will have to offer her a dose of untruth («I like your cake») by which we can make sure that a bigger truth («I like you») remains safe.

It can feel condescending to hear the logic of the good liar spelled out. But that’s only because we don’t like to acknowledge the fragility of our own minds. We may believe we are heroically ready to embrace the truth, however painful. We may insist that others should tell us everything, whatever they do. But we thereby discount our own powerful tendencies to emotional indigestion. It’s why we should not only occasionally tell untruths, but actively hope that, from time to time, others will lie to us-and quietly hope that we will never find out that they have.

How to Be a Good Listener

Being a good listener is one of the most important and enchanting life skills anyone can have. Yet few of us know how to do it; not because we are evil, but because no one has taught us how, and – on a related point-few have listened sufficiently well to us. So we come to social life greedy to speak rather than listen, hungry to meet others, but reluctant to hear them. Friendship degenerates into a socialized egoism.

As with most things, the answer lies in education. Our civilization is full of useful books on how to speak – Cicero’s Orator and Aristotle’s Rhetoric were two of the greatest from the ancient world – but sadly no one has ever written a book called The Listener. There is a range of things that the good listener is doing that makes it so pleasant to spend time in their company.

The good listener (paradoxically) is a skilled interrupter. But they don’t (as most people do) interrupt to intrude on their own ideas; they interrupt to help the other person get back to their original, more sincere, yet elusive concerns.

A big worry in a competitive world is that we feel we can’t afford to be honest about how distressed or obsessed we are. Saying one feels like a failure or a pervert could mean being dropped.

They confess not so much to unburden themselves as to help others accept their own nature and see that being a bad parent, a poor lover, or a confused worker are not malignant acts of wickedness, but ordinary features of being alive that others have unfairly edited out of their public profiles.

How to Be Open-Minded

There are those rare individuals who seem able to take most of what we are for granted from the first – and whom we gratefully honor with the term «open-minded.» Without particular surprise or fuss, they assume from the first that being human is a messy and impure business and that any person they come across is likely to contain a host of less than ideal dimensions and at points be really quite close to madness. They know, simply on the basis of your membership of the human race, that you have thought and done a range of wild, unethical, and sometimes lamentable things. They don’t know the details, but they correctly assume the broad shape of the issue. They calmly accept the gap between how a person appears and what they are probably like in private. For them, a person who seems normal is just someone they don’t yet know very well.

The open-minded are unafraid of what is inside the human soul for two reasons: first, because they are confident that there is in almost everyone a huge and secure gap between feelings and actions. They understand that most of what we fantasize about will never be played out in reality and therefore doesn’t pose an active threat either to ourselves or to the social order. We may spend a lot of time entertaining what we’ll say to our enemies, how we’ll give up on everything and everyone (and the world will be sorry), and crafting lurid sexual scenarios contrary to every civilized dictate. But, as the open-minded know, fantasizing is not a prelude to action: it’s an alternative to it.

While hoping it might be otherwise, the open-minded simply take it for granted that nice people constantly do and think not very nice things. The open-minded person isn’t merely being sweet in calmly accepting this as a given, and therefore not judging harshly when news of misdeeds arises. They are committed to open-mindedness because they are operating with a picture of how people can improve. They implicitly propose that the way we change is through warm forgiveness, not cold censure.

The open-minded know that most people are already brim-full of self-criticism. We’re not in need of further, harder condemnation. Where we truly need help is in liking ourselves enough to dare to develop, given what we know of the sinister regions of our psyches. By their unshocked reception of the stranger elements of who we are, combined with supportive exhortations to betterment, the open-minded model for us the relationship we would ideally have with ourselves as we strive to encourage the nobler parts of our nature and overcome the weakest. It is easy to see why we should so badly want them as friends.

How Not to Be Boring

One of our great fears – which haunts us when we go into the world and socialize with others – is that we may be boring. But the good news, and a fundamental truth too, is that no one is ever truly boring. They are only in danger of coming across as such when they either fail to understand their deeper selves or don’t dare (or know how) to communicate them to others.

The human animal witnessed in its essence, with honesty and without artifice, is always interesting. When we call a person boring, we are just pointing to someone who has not had the courage or concentration to tell us what it is like to be them. By contrast, we invariably prove compelling when we succeed in saying how and what we truly desire, envy, regret, mourn, and dream. Anyone who faithfully captures the real data on what it is like to exist is guaranteed to have material with which to captivate others. The interesting person isn’t someone to whom obviously and outwardly interesting things have happened-someone who has traveled the world, met important dignitaries, or been present at large geopolitical events. Nor is it someone who speaks in learned terms about the weighty themes of culture, history, or science. They are someone who has grown into an attentive, self-aware listener, and a reliably honest correspondent of the tremors of their own mind and heart, and who can thereby give us faithful accounts of the pathos, drama, and strangeness of being alive.

What, then, are some of the elements that get in the way of us being as interesting as we in fact are?

First, and most crucially, we bore when we lose faith that it really could be our feelings that would stand the best chance of interesting others. Out of modesty, and habit, we push some of our most interesting perceptions to one side in order to follow respectable but dead conventions.

We can end up boring not so much because we don’t want to share our lives as because we don’t yet know them well enough to do so.

Fortunately, the gift of being interesting is neither exclusive nor reliant on exceptional talent; it requires only direction, honesty, and focus. The person we call interesting is in essence someone alive to what we all deeply want from social intercourse: an uncensored glimpse of what the brief waking dream called life looks like through the eyes of another person and reassurance that we are not entirely alone with all that feels most bewildering, peculiar, and intense within us.

How to Talk about Yourself

We put in so much effort to be perfect. But the irony is that it’s failure that charms, because others so need to hear external evidence of problems with which we are all too lonely: how unnormal our sex lives are; how misguided our careers are proving; how unsatisfactory our family can be; how worried we are pretty much all the time.

Revealing any of these wounds might, of course, place us in great danger. Others could laugh; social media could have a field day. That’s the point. We get close by revealing things that would, in the wrong hands, be capable of inflicting humiliation on us. Friendship is the dividend of gratitude that flows from an acknowledgment that one has offered something very valuable to someone by talking: not a fancy present, but something even more precious, the key to one’s self-esteem and dignity. It’s deeply poignant that we should expend so much effort on trying to look strong before the world, when it’s only ever the revelation of the somewhat embarrassing, sad, melancholy, and anxious parts of us that is what makes us endearing to others, and transforms strangers into friends.