Good Manners for Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck

by Amy Alkon

We can’t turn back the clock to a world where we all live in small villages and everybody knows everybody and the blacksmith. What we can do is take steps to re-create some of the constraints and benefits of the small groupings we evolved to live in. This may sound like an enormous undertaking, but it’s actually not. In fact, we could dial back a lot of the ME FIRST!/SCREW YOU! meanness permeating our society if we do just three things: • Stand up to the rude. • Expose the rude. • Treat strangers like neighbors.

We think we persuade people by using reason and facts. But, Goulston explains, they won’t hear our reasoning unless we connect with them—ask them about themselves, truly listen to them, and make them feel heard, valued, and understood. This breaks down their resistance. They can stop fighting us off and relax, and it’s only then that they can hear what we’re saying, consider it, and maybe come around to doing what we want them to do.

• Request management: Ensuring that you have full use of the human vocabulary, including the word “no.” • Honesty management: How and when to be imperfectly frank. • Behavior management: How to politely and effectively persuade people to mend their ways. • Hurt management: How to respond to inconsiderate clods, what to say when you’ve been one, and how and when to help a stranger who’s hurting.

Our brains are prone to “optimism bias”—the tendency to think positive instead of considering what’s actually realistic.

It’s criticism and blame—statements that attack and diminish a person—that fire up this defense system, causing people to rationalize and defend their behavior and then attack you for attacking them.

The best way to bend people to your will is to avoid trying to bend people to your will.

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.”

Even if you are among the considerate, you may want to rethink how you use the telephone. There have been a few changes in what’s considered polite telephone behavior—most strikingly that, in many cases, one of the rudest things you can now do with your phone is to use it to call somebody.

if you’re going to invite somebody to dinner and ignore them, at least have the decency to get married first and build up years of bitterness and resentment.

Whether men want thinner or fatter women seems to correspond not to the availability of Maxim, Hustler, and the Victoria’s Secret catalog but to the availability of food in a society. Population ecologist Judith L. Anderson and others have done research on this, finding that where grub is scarce, like in parts of Africa, men go for the meatier ladies. In our culture, where there’s a 7-Eleven, a Starbucks, and a supermarket the size of Rhode Island every few miles, men tend to prefer slimmer women (arm candy, as opposed to the whole candy store). Obviously, character counts in a relationship, but women need to accept how much looks matter to the opposite sex and keep up their curb appeal or, if they decide to slack off or resign from general groundskeeping, accept that it’ll be harder to land or keep a man.

So, what should you say when a friend tells you they have cancer or some other horrible disease? “I know you can do this,” meaning, “I know you, and I know that whatever comes, you will deal with it.” Don’t say “you’ll be fine,” since you don’t know that they will be. —Cancer patient Jeanne Sather, assertivecancerpatient.com “I’m so sorry this is happening. It could happen to any of us. Life is so unfair sometimes.” This helps remove the blame or shame that people with cancer sometimes feel. —Cancer survivor Lori Hope, author of Help Me Live: 20 Things People with Cancer Want You to Know “You’re very strong. I can’t believe cancer would be dumb enough to try to go after you.” What I wish I’d said to my late friend Cathy Seipp.

Consider using CaringBridge.org to build your friend a free, password-protected website complete with a patient-care journal to update family and friends and a guestbook for messages of love and support. Friends can leave a string of comments on an entry, and the sick person can respond with a single “Thank you all so much.” If your sick friend is a multitasking overachiever who might feel guilty about only responding in brief, it might be helpful let them know it’s okay to take a sabbatical from always putting the “to do” in today.

I went on to lay out the elements of a sincere apology: • Admitting you were wrong. • Expressing remorse. • Pledging it won’t happen again. • Making amends.

As Albert Ellis, the late co-founder of cognitive therapy, put it, to be human is to be “fallible, fucked up, and full of frailty.”

Why what you did was wrong. • What it must mean to the person you wronged. • How things could and should have been different.

Living meaningfully means being bigger than just yourself. It means making the world a better place because you were here. It is possible to do this through your job, especially if your work involves helping others but even if it does not.

The essence of empathy is the ability to stand in another’s shoes, to feel what it’s like there and to care about making it better if it hurts.