The Price of Nice
Don’t change yourself just to make someone love you,
be yourself and let the right one fall for you.
One of the most challenging aspects of life is finding the right line between the compromises you have to make for the relationship to work and the compromises that diminish your own integrity and sense of self (“the price of nice”). It is a challenge my two key characters in A Fitting Place face on a regular basis, although in very different ways.
I suspect there are very few people who have not, at some point, agreed to do something they didn’t really want to do, or given up something they did want because a friend or lover didn’t approve.
My concern here is not with isolated incidents but rather with a consistent pattern of deferring to someone else, a consistent willingness to subjugate one’s own desires and needs to the desires and needs of partner or friend.
This pattern is often referred to in the psychology literature as “people pleasing.” Typical examples include:
Trying to be (or do) what you think “the other” wants you to be (or do) without actually checking to find out;
Failing to ask for what you need or want, for fear your friend or lover will find you foolish, or perhaps too demanding;
Trying to be perfect when perfection is not required.
The motive behind these patterns is, of course, to be loved and/or appreciated, but as I learned from painful experience in my first marriage, it can have just the opposite effect.
This is the price of nice.
If you are a people pleaser, you may find yourself angry because your desires are not being considered, your needs are not being met or your partner seems to be taking advantage of your good nature.
If you are the partner of a people pleaser, you may feel guilty when your partner is so obviously trying to please you, but doing so in ways that do not, in fact, meet your needs.
How do you establish a meaningful degree of intimacy when one of the partners does not trust the other to love or appreciate who or what they are … when one of the partners does not the trust the other to be honest about what s/he feels or thinks?
Through both therapy and hard work over the years, I have learned to put more trust my own judgment, which has allowed me to trust others more. Because of that, I no longer fit the people-pleasing mold I had in my marriage, but it is a tendency I still struggle with almost daily.
Have you paid the price of nice? How have you dealt with it? Do you still struggle with it?
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