Why We Become “Too Nice” When We Like Someone

You end up later in your life truly resenting the fact that you can't be who you really are and that this relationship only works as long as you're saying yes. Why is it we become too nice with someone we like? There is an interesting switch, isn't there, between... it's almost like a before and after. And sometimes, by the way, there's barely any before. Sometimes you've decided that from the moment you see someone, you look at them across the room in a public setting. They're a stranger who just walked into the place where you are having your lunch on your work break. And it's not even a conscious thing. You don't think to yourself, I want this person. You just immediately feel drawn to this person. And there is the fear and the nerves that go with that. Because now, if you ask yourself, why do I feel so nervous about talking to this person, about the idea of approaching this person, if I was even thinking of approaching this person? And it's because we've decided, all in the space of a second, we've decided they're incredibly attractive and that we really want them. Now, sometimes it takes longer. Sometimes we can know someone for a little bit. We can go on a couple of dates with them. And there's a moment where we tip over into, oh, I really like this person. Before, maybe I thought they were attractive. Maybe I thought they were cute. Maybe I thought they were even a little bit sexy or something, you know. Or maybe I just thought they were interesting. And that was enough to get me on a date with them. But somewhere along the way, whether it was late in date one, whether it was on date three, or whether it was in the kind of phone calls that we were having with someone in between, there's just a moment where someone says or does something. And it's been, our liking them has maybe been building a little bit, but we haven't really noticed. And then all of a sudden, there's a moment of connection. There's a moment of the way someone thinks, or there could even be a little goofy thing that they did, or something that just makes you go, oh, I really like them. And that is the moment typically where we start changing the way that we behave around them. And it's a subtle thing because it's like they became instantly, they became in the, between that before and after, on that line, they became significantly more important to us. And when someone becomes more important to us, and even if for superficial reasons, right, someone could, you could see someone in a coffee shop and they immediately become important to you because you think they're so attractive and you like, you want them so badly. But when someone becomes important to us in that way, or to some need we're trying to meet, the stakes suddenly become very high. And when the stakes become high, the cost of mistakes feels great. So now we don't want to make any mistakes. Now we want to perform perfectly because we don't want to do anything that could scare this person away, anything that could get us rejected, anything that could ruin this thing that we've decided we want and is important to us. So now begins all of the behavioral patterns that you see when it feels like the stakes are really high. You see it in sports too, by the way, you know, someone could be playing a casual game with their friends and having the game of their life, but suddenly throw them into an environment that's a competition environment or something that actually feels like, oh, you need to win this or it feels important. And all of a sudden the game goes out of the window. Some of this I'm setting up because within everything I've said are some of the clues as to how we might begin to redress the balance and regain some of our personal power in the situation. Because it's a kind of a sad thing that happens. Some of it is natural, like someone's just going to become more important to you. As they do, the stakes feel higher. We get a bit more nervous. In some ways, all of that is just a part of romance. To have none of that would be a, well, it would be a small tragedy, firstly, because we just wouldn't get to feel some of those wonderful things that we like to feel early on and that propel us forward. But the danger becomes when all of that becomes too great. It's the same with getting on stage. Having some nerves before getting on stage can be a wonderful thing. It can engage you in the process. It can make you do your best. It shows you that there's something you care about in this performance. To have none would be, I think, a disadvantage. But to have so many that you become a different performer on stage than your best or that you get stage fright and don't go on stage altogether, that's where the problems arise. Maybe we could just start by highlighting what are some of the things that we do when we have put someone on a pedestal in this way, when we start to think the stakes are impossibly high. What are some of the damaging behaviours that we engage in? Well, I think one of the ones we do is we stop focusing on connection. I mean, we're in LA, right? It's the same idea if people see famous people or they're interacting at a party with famous people, you start thinking, you start behaving in a way where you're trying to dance over laser beams to make sure that you say the right thing that they like or they agree with you. And then you're stifled. You're not really being who you are. You're not focusing on connecting with the human being in front of you. You're like, hopefully I can do the right Jedi mind tricks and the right phrases that are going to light them up and I'll agree with them on the right opinions. So I don't always even think of it as us being too nice. I think of it as us being overthinking and being really closed up and tight. And that tight energy, people can kind of sense that, that you're not really just letting out who you are. Being too nice is a byproduct, right? That's a symptom of the things that we're talking about. Because what happens is, if you're a comedian who's so scared of hurting anyone's feelings, then you're going to end up on stage being just someone who's very nice. Exactly, yeah. And you're not going to have any of that edge that makes some people not feel like you're that great. And some people think, oh my God, I would go to see this person live anytime because they always, they say the thing. And if you're afraid to say the thing because you're afraid you're going to scare off an audience, then you become so middle of the road that you end up not standing out in any way. And the same happens in attraction. Sorry to interrupt my own video, but I have a very special announcement to make. The early bird tickets for the virtual retreat 2023 are only available for a couple more days. This is a $200 discount on the regular virtual retreat ticket, plus some really special bonuses. Go get your ticket now before they are gone. The price goes up in a couple of days. You can get yours at mhvirtualretreat.com. I'll see you there. Back to the video. If we censor ourselves to the point where we're afraid to have an opinion, we're afraid to state that geeky thing that we really like doing, or that interesting way of thinking that we have, you know, or that goofy side that we only let out around the people that we're closest to. We start sort of rounding every edge we have to the point where we now blend into the wall. When I was younger and more insecure, all of texting women when I was like a teenager was all about, I hope I'm saying the right opinion, or what's the exact text that's going to be correct. Instead of saying like, what I feel in the moment, and this is funny, or this is like me, and I'm just connecting. It was all like, am I saying too much, too little? Is this the right joke? Is this corny? Is this geeky? And then you're just lost. You're just in a complete like maze of just trying to like outguess what you should be saying. It strikes me that what happens is the goal, somewhere without us even realizing it, the goal gets switched to something that's really unhelpful and really, actually it tends to lead us down the wrong path. When we're on our own and we want to find love, there's a purity to the goal. I want to find an amazing connection. I want to find my soulmate. I want to find a wonderful love. But what happens is when we find someone we think is great, very quickly, it's almost as if our ego co-opts that goal and hijacks it and says, the goal is no longer finding real love. The goal is to win over this person. And when that happens, we get led astray very, very quickly. Because if you think about the things that create real love and reveal real love, it's okay, I think you're wonderful and really impressive as a human and I feel a connection to you and I feel drawn to you. But I also need to be able to be myself around you and I need to learn whether that is something you're able to make space for. And the only way I will learn that is by revealing myself. Otherwise, I will never know. I will never know if your space can hold, your life can hold space for me and I'll never know if you fully accepted me. So I can only learn that during the dating process by, in stages, being more vulnerable, revealing more about myself, letting you in. And when you do something I don't like or that disagrees with my values in a way that I feel unhappy about, I have to be able to talk about that with you to see, not if we'll agree on everything, but to see if we can negotiate differences and disagreements. And if we can come to a place that works for both of us in that challenge and vice versa, then I'll know whether the two of us can weather disagreements together. I need to know if we have some kind of conflict or tension about something that it's safe for us to argue. And if, whether it's a romance or a friendship or even a colleague in a company, I need to know if our relationship can be robust enough to endure and survive conflict. And when I learn that, because I know the strongest relationships in my life are the ones that have actually already endured and survived real conflict. And the fact that we've survived that conflict means that both of us feel more safe and secure. Because we go, oh, we've fought before. Now when we fight again, we also both have that kind of in our muscle memory that, oh, we fought before and we got through it before. So I don't need to worry that this fight means that the relationship is over. And that's true of any kind of relationship. So the things that allow us to see whether, if you define real love, not by a feeling of being enamored and infatuated. If you define real love by the ability to be robust in the relationship together, to continue to give to it in a consistent way, to be able to stand the test of time and weather differences and show up for each other in spite of those differences. If we define real love by that, then the only, and I should add into that, the feeling accepted by somebody else, the only way to arrive at a place of knowing that you have real love by those definitions is to do all of the things we're afraid to do when we like someone a lot. Ah, so to get to the deeper issue there then, which I know Audrey will be a fan of because she likes getting to the deeper issue. Is it that when we don't do any of that and we don't bring up those things, on some level do we feel that we're not enough? We're not worthy of being considered by this person our needs if we say something that's in conflict with them or with a famous person. We feel I shouldn't disagree with this person or say that I think they're wrong because you are walking into that room feeling you are not worthy of being considered in that way. It's so funny, I was actually going to say exactly that point which is I think when humans interact they like to know where they stand with each other. That's why boundaries are important. Boundaries make us feel safe and they make us sort of be able to see a whole person for who they are and where can I push it, where can I not, what is this person's parameters. When somebody is just pleasing and being agreeable all the time, what we see as somebody, I don't even think it's conscious, I think subconsciously what we read is that person doesn't have any boundaries, they don't respect themselves and therefore that's not interesting to me because I can walk all over them. I think our ability to be able to stand up for ourselves, speak up when we have an issue or something, not have to be agreeable all the time is actually, the reason it builds attraction is because it shows confidence and it shows a level of self-insurance and the fact that we have our own backs and our own needs backs in a way that it doesn't if we're constantly just placating the other person. I think that's exactly right Stephen because it really is, the deeper issue is that we feel like if we show every facet of ourselves we're going to get rejected. It's much easier to be rejected for pleasing and being agreeable than to be rejected for being ourselves. So we never show ourselves, instead we show this meek, watered down version of us that no one's ever going to fall in love with that person because it's not even us, it's not even a real person, it's just a sort of yes person there to serve the other. Yeah, it's what Alain de Botton talks about when he talks about nice people that they actually, the kind of nice person that we often refer to when we think of a nice person doesn't exist, they're not actually nice in those ways, it's just that's the survival mechanism they've learned in order to get by. But behind closed doors they're not, you know, they have the same thoughts as the rest of us and they can be just as freaky as the rest of us, they can be just as, you know, they can get just as angry but they're just packaged very differently as a survival mechanism. Piggybacking off of those points about well we don't show, we don't have boundaries, we don't show up authentically, we don't risk an argument or a difference because we don't feel like we're worthy, we don't feel like if I do those things this person is going to stay around and therefore what we've really said in that is my value is being amenable, my value is blending, my value is never saying no and always saying yes and always being what you need me to be at all times and if I'm convenient enough to you and giving enough to you and non-offensive enough to you and just if I'm like the minibar of a relationship then you're always going to want me because, or that's what at least I'm hoping, is that that's my best chance at you wanting me is by showing up all the time in easy ways. Wait is that, that's the minibar analogy? Yeah. So wait you're easily available, is that what a minibar is? It's also really expensive. Very expensive, high value. Yeah well, that's the first metaphor that Matthew's failed. It's about convenience, you're making your entire value convenience and that is what the entire value of a minibar is, right? It's not even what you want necessarily. If you went into a shop or a restaurant you wouldn't necessarily go for the thing you go, I never eat a Snickers, ever. Most of the Snickers I've ever eaten is in a hotel room. And costed eight dollars. Right, but I did it because it was convenient, because it was there and so that's, to me, that's the minibar thing is you're about convenience and you're not even necessarily being the things that someone actually wants. Craft service Snickers. No one knows what craft service is. Of course they do. Oh they do. They know craft service. Do they? I think he turned the analogy around. Yeah I mean I stand corrected, you did turn that analogy around, well done. Don't ever doubt me in metaphors. And I don't know, I don't know about you but when I am at my most confident and when I'm like loving life, I feel I'm living a life I'm passionate about, I feel successful, moving through things like dating or meeting people who seem intimidating or that, it just feels like you're kind of just swimming through like, oh that person was fun, I had connection with them, maybe I'll see them again, oh that person was kind of boring or we didn't really connect. You're not even thinking about status and things, you could meet someone you even thought was high status but because you feel like you're the shit and you feel like you've got loads going on, it's cool, you're just like, ah that person wasn't really for me or wasn't that interesting, you met them at a party and everyone's like, oh that person, but you're just not, you're just not really feeling like that, you're just looking for the good vibe or the people you connect with because you don't feel like you need other people to make you feel worth something or that your life has something going on. So again, this is where I was going with this point because I think we have to separate two things. One is the somewhat kind of almost a fatalistic argument that take the whole self-worth thing out of it. If I just keep doing what I'm doing, it's never going to give me what I actually want. You can forget worrying about being confident enough to think that someone else is going to like you for who you are and they're going to still want you even if you have boundaries and are not convenient all the time. There's just the fact that continuing to just try to blend into someone's life in the most convenient way possible and always kind of censoring yourself and never truly being yourself or risking losing them through an argument, it doesn't work because it produces very, very average connections with people so you never have the depth of connection you really want. Also, it actually reliably has us rejected but unfortunately not even for the right reasons. You're not rejected for who you are, you're rejected because no one actually saw who you were. I'd rather be rejected for someone actually learning who I was and not wanting that than be rejected for some version of myself I'm putting out there and never even know if they could actually want the real me. I think this is a really interesting question. Do you think, because there's this ongoing argument of it's more painful to be rejected for your true self, which is why people tend to avoid and not really be fully themselves because in theory they say it's easier to be rejected for someone you're not than but what you're saying is it's better. Which one do you think is more painful? Well, I just think that, again, you have to take that fatalistic view that it may be in some ways more painful to really reveal myself than to be rejected but at least that way lies the possibility of finding what I really want but the other way there is no possibility because you can only end up with one of two things. You can end up with a relationship that is one where you're merely kind of a tool for that person's convenience and enjoyment and comfort and I know this because we've dealt with this person for years. You end up later in your life truly resenting the fact that you can't be who you really are and that this relationship only works as long as you're saying yes and what happens is 20 years down the line, 30 years down the line, someone ends up finally deciding enough is enough. I'm going to have boundaries. I'm going to say what I really want. I'm going to say no to things I don't want and then that person breaks up with them. That person divorces them or they act out in unbearable ways and then you realize, oh my god, I've never been in a relationship of equals. I've never been in a relationship that can support me having needs and the only way it's lasted this long is that for all of this time I've not had needs or I've pretended I don't have needs. I've kept them inside or I've exercised them with other people in my life. So, two things happen. You either end up in a relationship like that or you just get rejected by someone because you don't actually, there's nothing that they see in you that compels them to stay. So, you can take the fatalistic view and say this is never going to work. Therefore, I don't need more confidence in myself and my value to start speaking up and behaving differently and just being who I want to be in this and testing the relationship with having real boundaries and being willing to have conflict. I don't need to have more confidence in myself for all of that. I just need to have confidence that doing the opposite is never going to produce the result that the child in me is looking for. The other way to go and I would argue it's always going to be, you should always opt for a combination of both, is building our self-worth to a place where we realize that no one's more important than me. I don't, I have to stop going through life with this idea that I should be putting someone on a pedestal. We really do over-respect other people. We make them too important. They're not better than you. That person's not better than you. What, because they got looks? Like they won the genetic lottery of symmetry? That makes them more important than you? What is that nonsense? From the point of view of value, looks mean nothing to me. Nothing. They may create an animal attraction but that's a very different thing from equating that with someone's value. Looks mean nothing to me on that level because everything I value in myself are the things that have produced self-esteem. They're the things that I've actually earned or worked for or overcome and it doesn't, it means nothing to me that someone was born with good genetics in that department. Then when it comes to other things that we pride other people on or we give other people value for, whether it's their humor or whether it's their intelligence or their whatever, those are all things that you have to just come back to a place of saying, just because someone has more in those departments sometimes, it doesn't make them more valuable than me. Often we overestimate how much better people are in those departments anyway. It's about imbuing ourselves with value again and stopping this nonsense of everyone's better than me. In order to be on the level with everybody else, I have to do more than they are. Often the truth is we need to do less and just focus on connecting with other people and then look for the people that like what they see when we're just connecting instead of constantly doing things for them. Then the doing becomes a byproduct of a relationship where there's mutual investment. The doing is no longer a product of how valuable I think you are. What I love about what Steve said early on was that when you are trying to dazzle somebody, when you like decide that you really like them, you're trying to dazzle them with the right text message, you're trying to dazzle them with the right line, but what you should try to do is try to dazzle them with connecting. If you just try to take that away from oh, it's going to come back to one line or it's going to come down to one text or it's going to come down to one interaction where I'm like really funny in front of them, just take away that little trophy you're trying to get and just try to connect and it'll either work or it won't. Of course, you can't be that text message for a lifetime. You can't be the funniest thing that you said or that your friend told you to say in that text or that extra bit of charisma that you had in that one moment. You can't be that 24 hours a day. If you're in a real relationship, you have to be who you actually are. So if it can't, if it only works because of that time when you were particularly on form and exciting and you sent that really witty message, then it's not going to work. I hope you enjoyed that video. Before you go, like I said, the early bird tickets to the virtual retreat are only available for a couple more days. This is three days of live coaching with me and my team, not just for your love life. This is not a love life retreat. It's a life retreat and we're going to spend three days analyzing the patterns, the behaviors and the habits that are going to get you where you need to be and get you to experience the peace and the happiness that you want to feel. Come check it out at mhvirtualretreat.com while those early bird tickets are still available and I'll see you there.