Good Manners for Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck (19 page)

There
are
some clever douche-iopaths out there who can hide their malevolent nature.
³³
But, much of the rudeness that people suffer in dating (along with any ensuing flood damage and intense burning and itching in their special place) could be avoided—if only they’d figure out what a person’s made of before they let themselves get seriously involved. This actually isn’t all that difficult. Therapist Nathaniel Branden once told me that people will let you know what they’re all about—if you’re willing to look and listen.

Of course, digging up the ugly truth is the last thing we want to do. We meet somebody, and the roar of our hormones drowns out any small voice in us cautioning us to be rational and sensible. And if our hormones don’t entirely do our reason in, romanticism will bat cleanup. For instance, we’re quick to claim we’ve found “love at first sight,” which makes us sound romantically lucky, instead of referring to ourselves as “two people who know very little about each other rushing into a relationship,” which makes us sound like idiots.

• Yes, you really do need a list.

To assess what somebody’s made of, you need standards for what you require in a partner. We all
believe
we have standards, but often, what we really have is just the hazy idea that we’d like somebody “nice.”

Coming up with standards takes figuring out who you are and what you value. You then need to articulate what your standards are, especially on ethics, and look for a partner who meets them. And when I say “look for,” I mean watch a person over time to see who, exactly, they really are, and admit it if they fall short of your standards instead of pretending all is well so you don’t have to go back on
Match.com
.

You’ll probably be tempted to settle. I know I was when I wandered alone in the desert for forty years—sorry, wrong story—but that’s pretty much how it felt. In my thirties, I spent eight long years in Los Angeles largely alone, going on a series of sometimes-horrible, occasionally degrading, and mostly disappointing first dates.

I would sometimes meet guys who were kinda-sorta in the ballpark, but I was holding out for a guy who had what I called my “man minimums,” which I figured out, very LA-ishly, in a sort of movie log line: “Tall, evolved man of character who thinks for a living and cares about making a difference in the world.” Eventually, I met my boyfriend of ten-plus years—truly the best person I know (and everything on my list)—but I might not have been free to go out with him had I gotten together out of loneliness with some kinda-sorta-in-the-ballpark guy.

Six months into dating him, wanting to make sure that I wasn’t with
him
out of loneliness, I did something I now advise everyone to do at the point they’re starting to get serious with someone: I figured out all his faults and any little annoying things about him. This probably sounds horribly unromantic, but we all have stuff about us that will bug the hell out of somebody. When you’re looking to have a person in your life for more than an occasional movie date, taking stock of the less-than-ideal things about them allows you to reasonably predict whether you can deal instead of eventually finding that you can’t. (Nobody breaks up with somebody because they’re really witty and great in bed.)

Figuring out who a person really is involves seeing them when they let down their guard, when they forget to keep up their party manners. The classic advice on assessing character is right on: looking to see how they act when they think nobody’s looking and observing how they treat the waitress, the busboy, and the taxi driver.

• Forget tea leaves. Let spilled wine tell the tale about a person’s character.

One Saturday, a bunch of my friends and I got together for happy-hour drinks. Lawyer Tom, who was seated next to me, got animated in conveying some point and knocked my entire glass of wine into my lap. What didn’t go into my lap went straight into my open purse under the table. My
new
open purse. Well, laps and new purses eventually dry, and I didn’t want Tom to feel bad, so I just laughed, tried to soak up the wine with napkins, and ordered another glass.

Later, when I was walking to my car with filmmakers Courtney Balaker and her husband, Ted, Courtney told me I’d passed “The Spilled Drink Test.” The term came out of the time that Courtney and Ted were at a film networking event and a guy spilled his
entire glass of red wine
down the front of her white sundress—and then continued talking to the man he was with as if nothing had happened.

Courtney, who’s a sweet person but nobody’s pushover, said, “Excuse me, but you just spilled red wine all over my dress.” The man stared at her, said “Oh, sorry,” and went back to his conversation.

Courtney explained, “I’m not the emotional type, but I have to admit, I wanted to get right back on the bus, cry, and go home. He was mean, my dress looked ridiculous, and I had the entire night ahead of me.” But, she instead went to the bar, got fizzy water, took out as much of the stain as she could, and then decided she was “going to have a lovely time” despite everything.

Later in the evening, her husband turned to her and said, “It takes someone with grace to handle it the way you did.” And what was an ugly experience ended up making her feel good about herself—and understood.

“Anyhoo,” Courtney wrote me in an e-mail, “my theory (and I think Ted would agree) is that if you are a woman who can have a drink spilled on you in the midst of a social event and handle it with humor and grace, that this is the sign of a solid, grounded woman that men will admire.”

Now, of course, I’m not advising that people go around dumping drinks on their dates. But, it’s important to find a way to observe who they are in a situation—camping, hiking, doing a project together—where there’s more stress put on them than when the waiter in a fine restaurant doubles back to ask whether they’d like their filet mignon
au beurre
or
au poivre
.

THE DATING-AVERSE

The Girl with the Imaginary Boyfriend

Sometimes a really bad experience puts a person off dating for a while. I’ve had numerous dating-avoidant people write me over the years, but none so avoidant as the nineteen-year-old woman who asked me for advice about her nine-year relationship with her imaginary boyfriend.

Of course, my first thought was that she was pranking me, but the more I exchanged e-mails with her the more convinced I was that she was for real. And no, it didn’t appear that she was hallucinating him, nor did she report that the neighbor’s dog speaks to her and tells her to do very bad things. In fact, she explained about her Prince Nonexistent-But-Charming, “I understand that he isn’t real and that I’m supposed to have had real relationships with real men by now. (I have the complete capability to get a real guy and have let lots of opportunities go by because of him!)”

I acknowledged that an imaginary boyfriend does have his merits. He will always be loving and supportive, and he will never fart in bed or cheat on you with your best friend. He can also be a useful tool for getting a pesky flesh-and-blood suitor off the phone—forever: “Sorry. Gotta go. Just heard my boyfriend’s unicorn pull up outside my apartment.”

But, I told her, an imaginary boyfriend also never challenges you in the good ways a real boyfriend and a real relationship do. A real relationship requires compromise and empathy. It’s also an interpersonal flashlight of sorts, pushing you to grow as a person by highlighting what’s less than ideal about you—stuff you can’t learn by spending your nights going to second base with your pillow. Also, it’s got to be pretty awful to wake up at forty and realize that you’ve been pretending to have a love life for thirty years.

The trade-off, for anyone who takes their chances with a flesh-and-blood partner, is that you could—and most likely will—suffer some heartbreak. And when I say heartbreak, I mean feeling kind of like you were run over by a truck and then backed over a few more times. On a positive note, it’s an imaginary truck, and though the feeling really sucks, with time, tears, and dozens of pints of ice cream, it eventually subsides. The person you were sure you couldn’t live without becomes the person you can live without—as well as the person who helped you figure out what stuff you need to choose better on the next time around. At this point, you lick your wounds, go back out, and try to be better at identifying the assholes—and to
be
less of an asshole yourself—in hopes that you’ll someday have real love in your life from somebody who is flawed and human just like you but is mostly pretty great.

Cars, sidewalks, public transportation, and airplanes

If a scratch is that big a deal, you aren’t rich enough to drive it.

Piggy parker the day after Christmas at the packed Irvine Spectrum mall, Orange County, California.

THE NAKED APE GETS A PRIUS

It’s the twenty-first century, and we’re going places—while exercising our baser instincts. Our cars have backup cameras and backseat movie theaters with surround sound, but nobody’s come up with spiffy new technology to advance civility. In fact, when offended while driving, we’re quick to turn to the old familiar weapons: the screamed obscenity, the flipped bird, and occasionally (standing in for the club brandished by our loincloth-wearing ancestors) the golf club through the windshield.

Sometimes we go off like that because some other driver has nearly cost us our life. Other times, it’s because they’ve cost us a whole two or three seconds by tearing through a stop sign out of turn. Although the cost from that is minuscule, someone who imposes it on us is stealing from us (as well as turning us into a chump for obeying the rules), and psychologically, even tiny fairness violations are a big deal.

Anthropologist Robert Trivers explains in his famous 1971 paper on reciprocal altruism that our sense of outrage at cheaters and rule-breakers probably developed when our ancestors started living cooperatively in small, stable hunter-gatherer bands. In an environment where group members survive by trading food and favors, there’s a need to guard against the shifty-ass cheaters whose idea of reciprocity is give-and-take—you give; they take. To keep the two-legged rats at bay, our psychology evolved to include a cheater detection and punishment department, logging who owes what to whom and dispatching that information to the enforcement division, our emotions. When somebody’s done us a good deed, guilt wells up in us, reminding us that we’d better hop to it and repay their kindness. In response to a take-take-taker, anger rises in us, messaging us that somebody seems overdue for a beatdown.

Trivers calls the rage we evolved to feel in response to an injustice “moralistic aggression” and notes that it’s often way out of proportion to the offense committed. One of its functions, Trivers explains, is to “educate” a nonreciprocator “by frightening him with immediate harm or with the future harm of no more aid.” In extreme cases, it puts a stop to any future possibility of unfair treatment from the offender by injuring, killing, or exiling him. A fierce reprisal also “educates” others that the person administering it makes a poor patsy.

Of course, back in the ancestral environment, the need for moralistic aggression was tempered by the fact that we were interacting with the same people every day. Living among people we know in a small, consistent, interdependent band deterred exploitative behavior, even by born users, who needed to maintain a reputation as good and fair to avoid getting shunned or booted from the group. Today, however, on the highway, on an escalator in a public building, or on the urban sidewalk, we’re just one more stranger among strangers—which means we have no say in the reputation of the roadhogs, the line-jumpers, and all the other adult bullies on the go.

People in cars, especially, have license to treat us badly. The “automotive bubble” distances them from not only other drivers but also the visual cues that they’re taking advantage of another
person—
cues that they’d have if they, say, took cuts in the office building coffee line. Further greasing the wheels of rudeness, that automotive bubble can speed them away from the target of their abuse at seventy miles an hour. And besides, as I noted in chapter 2, only a few among us are what economists call “costly punishers”—people (like me) who get so enraged by injustices they see that they can’t help but go after the perpetrators, and never mind the potential costs.

Unless you and your vehicle manage to radiate a certain white-supremacist motorcycle gang member
je ne sais quoi
, the pathologically self-serving find that it often
pays
to ignore what’s fair and polite and park so they block your car in while they run an errand or endanger your life by making a right turn from the left-turn lane. If you’re like most people, you will just suck up the abuse and drive on. These motoring rudesters make a gamble—sometimes calculated, sometimes subconscious—that you will not be that rare fed-up driver who ends up tailing them home, bludgeoning them with her “World’s Greatest Mom!” mug, and crucifying them on their trellis, explaining somewhat apologetically: “I know, they say Jesus died for our sins. I like a more direct approach.”