Song of the Week: “Mastermind,” by Taylor Swift - “No one wanted to play with me as a little kid / So I’ve been scheming like a criminal ever since / to make them love me and make it seem effortless”
In my first year of university, a classmate of mine developed a crush on me. I was interested in someone else at the time, and so when he asked me out, I gently turned him down. He persisted for months, repeatedly telling me he liked me, asking why I wouldn’t just give him a chance, and even telling me that he was dangerously depressed — and it was my fault.
This classmate also saw himself as a deeply logical person: he constantly started debates in our friend group, and delighted in playing devil’s advocate.
One spring day, after I had gently turned him down for the sixth or seventh time, my classmate delivered his assessment of my personality with a flat coldness that I mistook for rationality:
“You’re a real bitch,” he said. “You think of yourself as so kind and intelligent, but you’re actually not that smart, and you’re actually not that kind. Everyone can see it, and they’re all either annoyed by you or being nice to you out of pity.”1
I was, of course, devastated. Not just because his words were cruel, but because I was scared they were true.
Now, of course, I know that my classmate was a deeply unhappy teenager lashing out at me. His words were barbs specifically chosen to wound me where I was most vulnerable, all wrapped in the guise of unbiased assessment.
Now, of course, I know that men frequently punish women, for not affirming them or not dating them or not being the kind of women they expect them to be.
Now, of course, if a small, angry man called me a bitch, I would wear it as a badge of honor.
But I was a kid back then. No one had ever said something like that to me before. And so even though I cried to a dear friend about it right after, and they reassured me that that boy’s assessment of me was nonsense, those words burrowed deep into my bones.2
And, much like a recurring infection, when I am at my weakest, they come back.
How Can I Stop Caring?
The other night, I was cooking dinner while listening to Dear Hank and John, the informal advice podcast from longtime YouTubers and all-around-wonderful-people Hank and John Green.
In the episode I was listening to that night, a listener writes in with a question about her likability: specifically, “How can I stop caring whether people like me?”
The brothers immediately begin to laugh. “Nat,” John says, “you have asked the wrong two people how to not care about being liked.”
Both John and Hank, of course, owe much of their fame to the continuous success of their YouTube channel vlogbrothers, which began in 2007. Hank is wildly popular for his science explanation videos on TikTok, and John is one of the most successful young adult novelists of all time. They both speak frequently about the power and the danger of having that level of exposure and influence - and the ways it has changed how they think about themselves.
Likability, Hank points out in the podcast episode, is a good and important thing to prioritize. “Of course we care what other people think about us - we should want people to like us” - especially the people in our lives that we care about deeply. Humans are social creatures, and our societies succeed because we work together and take care of each other.
Social media, however, extends the question of likability beyond our friends and coworkers to - potentially - the entire world. The basic unit of interaction on most social media is the “like,” for crying out loud!
Whether we’re posting selfies to a few hundred followers or making viral TikToks that are loved by millions, the positive attention and affirmation that social media can provide is intoxicating - and never satisfying enough. Social media, John says in the episode, is a “hard drug,” and “I am a black hole of want.”
Hank then shares a story about when he was first getting popular on Science TikTok, and he spent a beautiful morning at the farmer’s market with his wife and son obsessively checking his phone for the dopamine hit of new likes and followers. John laughs ruefully in recognition, and then summarizes the situation. “You are there with the people you care about most in the world…and you are looking at how many new strangers are following you on TikTok.”
The good news, Hank says, is that when he takes a step back, he can reaffirm that the approval of his family is far more important. When his wife or his brother tell him they like and value him, he believes them.
John, however, struggles with that belief:
I agree with you in the abstract, but when, like, MrPoopyPeanutButt on TikTok says that ‘John Green is a typical moderate who’s trying to appease everyone and not offend anybody, ‘I take that really personally. Because he knows the secret truth about me, which is that I’m a terrible person. And the people who love me, who know me the best, don’t know that secret truth. Because they’re blinded by their affection for me. And so I’m always drawn to the people who hate me because there is a part of me that thinks, well, that’s the truth. That’s who I really am, and they know.
Grade Me!
There’s a term for the problem both John and I struggle with: negativity bias, or negativity effect. In a 1992 article in the European Journal of Social Psychology, psychologists Maria Lewick, Janusz Czapinski and Guido Peeters review decades of research on how people react to both positive and negative experiences, interactions, and feedback. “The negativity effective,” they write, “is a reaction to specific stimuli and means HIGHER IMPACT of negative than of positive stimuli of the same intensity on behaviour, affect, and cognitive representations of evaluated objects” (426).
In other words, we give more weight to negative things than positive things. Bad experiences stand out more in our minds, and hateful comments or cruel people might seem more important to us than kind and loving ones.
But even if we know negativity bias exists, how do we deal with it? How do we differentiate between valid criticism, a difference in taste or opinion, and the cruel words of someone lashing out due to their own fear or insecurity?
I can’t help but relate my anxiety over this dilemma to my lifelong love of report cards and other graded work. From first grade to graduate school, I’ve always appreciated the combination of affirmations and constructive criticism, written down and available to be returned to at leisure.
FCQs - the anonymous evaluations completed by university students at the end of a course - can be problematic, both in their effectiveness as an assessment and in their fairness to instructors from underrepresented groups. But I have to admit - I loved getting mine after each course I taught. I’ll cherish the kind things my students said forever, and when they had critical feedback, it was usually either helpful or amusing.3
After a staggering twenty-one years in school (and four years of teaching university), the sudden absence of regular feedback has left me a little lost. I’m like Lisa Simpson when Springfield Elementary is temporarily closed.
Though I am irrepressibly outgoing and chatty, I tend to leave social situations obsessively replaying my actions and worrying that I was oblivious, annoying, or rude. “Was I weird?” I ask Taylor in the car on the way home from a party. “I feel like I was weird. I talked too much, right? I shouldn’t have told that story. They’re probably talking about how weird I was.”
In other words, I find myself constantly mentally taking this quiz from feminist satire site Reductress: “Did you have a nice time with friends or did you say something stupid and now they all hate you?”
Sometimes I wish that I could send people one of those customer service surveys that you receive by email after you buy a pair of jeans. “Were all your needs met in this interaction? Did you enjoy the anecdote about the different kinds of British sandwiches, or did it drag on too long? Do you agree that my new shade of lipstick is probably too bright and it makes me look like I’m trying too hard?”
The irony, by the way, is that most people are going through social situations having the same fears about themselves, and are too busy in their own heads to think about whether I’m being weird. In fact, psychologists have identified a phenomenon they term the “liking gap”: people actually tend to like us more than we think they do.
As a 2018 article in Psychological Science reports, “following interactions, people systemically underestimated how much their conversation partners liked them and enjoyed their company…The liking gap persisted in conversations of varying lengths and even lasted for several months, as college dorm mates developed new relationships. Our studies suggest that after people have conversations, they are liked more than they know” (1742).
Some People Just Aren’t Going to Like You
Okay, but how do you react when people occasionally genuinely don’t like you? What are you supposed to do about it?
Parks and Recreation is my favorite TV show of all time, in no small part because of my deep and abiding love for its protagonist, Leslie Knope. Leslie is the cheerful, ambitious, and incredibly hardworking deputy director of Parks and Recreation in the fictional town of Pawnee, Indiana.
I see a lot of myself in Leslie, from her commitment to giving wildly specific gifts to her dorky sense of humor. Unfortunately, we also share a deep need for people to like us - and a bad habit of fixating on why they sometimes don’t.4
In season four, Leslie decides to run for a seat on the Pawnee City Council, and in one episode, “Bowling for Votes,” her team runs a focus group to assess how people see her as a candidate.
“Some things are very helpful,” Leslie says, as she secretly listens to the feedback. “Other things are not so helpful. All the things make me feel a lot of feelings about myself.”
One man in particular says that he would not vote for her because “She seems a little uptight. She doesn’t seem like the kind of person you could go bowling with, you know?”
Leslie, of course, fixates on this comment, does a ton of research on the guy - Derek - to figure out why he doesn’t like her, and eventually decides that the campaign should host a bowling night, which she anonymously invites him to.
At the beginning of the night, Leslie’s boyfriend and campaign manager Ben Wyatt tries to help her put the negative comment in perspective. “What happened to the big picture?” He asks. “Some people just aren’t gonna like you. Let it go.”
“Okay, I hear you,” she replies, absolutely not hearing him. “I’ll treat him just like everybody else. I’ll just say hi to him, shake his hand, buy him a few beers, share a few laughs, bowl a few frames, lose intentionally to make him feel good, friend him on Facebook. And by the end of the night, he will be mine.”
As you can see in the video below, instead of focusing on spending time with other potential voters, Leslie spends all of her time desperately trying to convince Derek that she is laid back (which she is not), and then later proving to him that she is superior at bowling (which she is).
It does not work, of course. By the end of the episode, Derek calls Leslie a bitch, Ben (wildly out of character) punches him in the face, and the entire thing ignites a major scandal for her campaign - which ultimately makes the next focus group like her more.
In politics, as in life, you simply cannot force people to like you - nor can you predict why they won’t.
A Woman Who Does It Exactly Right
While everyone deals with the dilemma of likeability, it is particularly challenging for women, who are simultaneously taught to make everyone happy while also being repeatedly held to impossible standards of perfection that they cannot achieve.
A few years ago, I read a short book titled Dear Madam President: An Open Letter to the Women Who Will Run the World (2018). The author, Jennifer Palmieri, was the communications director for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign. Unlike many similar books, Palmieri’s focus is not on providing an autopsy of how the Clinton campaign went wrong, nor is she interested in defending or condemning Clinton as a politician. Rather, she focuses on the broadly applicable lessons she learned during the campaign about the struggles that female political candidates face due to their gender. In the chapter that most impacted me, Palmieri recalls the constant feedback they received on Clinton’s public image:
In one memo, a person would argue that [Hillary Clinton] needed to project strength but couldn’t be shrill, couldn’t ever shout but needed to show passion, couldn’t ever look weak but should show more vulnerability. The main advice in each memo was for her to be ‘authentic.’ I complained to Hillary one day about how frustrating all of it was. She came up with the best response to this kind of advice. ‘Tell them,’ she said, ‘that you really appreciate the advice but what would really help Hillary is if they could tell you the name of a woman on the world stage who does it exactly right.
There is no standard of behavior that a female politician - or any woman - can hold herself to that will spare her from criticism. There is no way that any of us can please every taste, be liked by everyone, live perfect lives.
I met someone last year who dislikes potatoes. Potatoes! And yet I’m still scared that it means there’s something deeply, fundamentally wrong with me if I meet someone who dislikes me.
Living with the Conspiracy Theorist
All the intellectualizing, psychology, and reassurance in the world, however, can never quite save me from those nagging words that return again and again: “You’re actually not that smart, and you’re actually not that kind. Everyone can see it, and they’re all either annoyed by you or being nice to you out of pity.”
It’s like living with a conspiracy theorist, except instead of rants about lizard people or the moon landing, this unwelcome roommate comes up with increasingly absurd theories about my relationships with the people I care about the most. “People only invite you to parties because they feel sorry for you! All of your friends get together behind your back for weekly meetings where they complain about you! Your husband only married you out of politeness!”
It wasn’t until recently, however, that I realized that my own fears could inadvertently hurt the people I love the most. I was scrolling on TikTok late one night when I encountered a post that took my breath away:
One day I said out loud, ‘when we’re apart I think you must hate me, I picture you seeing my name when I text you and heaving this big sigh because I’m so annoying,’ and he quietly said ‘that’s a little mean, I wish you wouldn’t picture me that way’ and something clicked. That insecurity, the fear someone you love goes ‘ugh’ at the thought of you, we uses[sic] their image to punish ourselves.
We fear they see us as disposable, but what kind of person would so cruelly dispose of us, harbor such contempt for us, what kind of names are we calling them? What kind of painful is it when all you do is adore someone so openly just for them to passively accuse you of spouting empty sentiments for the sake of convenience? You pour your heart out telling them they make you believe in magic and they tell you you’re just placating them.
I realized later that I’d been so caught up in insisting that I am too damaged and misshaped to love, justifying any perceived failure to love me as not only natural but righteous, that I never considered how it feels to love someone who refuses to take you for your word.
I do not want to use the people I love as puppets to repeat the cruelest things ever said to me. They deserve more than to be vessels for my worst thoughts and fears about myself.
And so I fight back. I’ve started keeping go-to evidence around to debunk the conspiracy theorist: I jot down specific compliments in my Notes app. I keep particularly kind emails and texts in an “affirmations” folder. I save sweet notes from friends, take photos of spontaneous hangouts, frame art made for me by loved ones. My best friend and I got matching tattoos.
“It would be pretty weird to get a matching tattoo with someone just out of politeness,” I tell the conspiracy theorist. “In any of your scenarios, I don’t think I’m the weird one here. I’m sorry, but your theories just don’t hold water.”
He hasn’t gone away. He still grumbles and mutters from time to time. But the love is louder.
When it comes to being liked, what should I add to my syllabus?
I want to hear from you, whether it’s in the comments on this post or in emails to me directly at roschmansyllabus@substack.com!
This is a reconstruction of the sentiments of that conversation, which actually went on for more than twenty minutes and included multiple uses of the term “low-level thinker”! He definitely called me a bitch, though. I remember that clearly. No one had ever called me that before.
The same friend also bought both of us Taco Bell, and then promptly got food poisoning as a result. If that isn’t love, what is?
Apparently my class was both way too hard and “too easy, like a high school class.” You can’t win ‘em all.
Fun fact! I would not recommend heavily identifying with Leslie Knope, then googling “Leslie Knope Reddit,” then uncovering multiple (admittedly controversial) threads where Redditors complain that Leslie is annoying, overbearing, and wildly unlikable, thus confirming all of your deepest fears about yourself! Even if it is very on-brand, both for you and for Leslie Knope.
Rings so true. There are comments, particularly from close relatives, that sting to this day. I give them way too much credit. Time to assign them to the trash heap. You are awesome, Melodie. :)
Knowing our matching tattoos have been a reminder to you about how loved you are makes getting that tattoo one of the best decisions of my life! It is reassuring to know that these types of self-doubt are so universal that we are not alone, but it is also such a tragedy that so many people fight it all the time.