People-Pleasing Pleases Nobody
Perhaps you were raised in a household with a chronically and deeply inculcated ethic of self-effacement. Perhaps people quoted to you that vexing line of scripture, Proverbs 16:18: “Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall.” Maybe that was a gendered experience, in which girls and women were raised to people-please, as if their maternal function were the only legitimate contribution they could make to the world. Or maybe it was a message for men and boys, that male people must be regarded as toxic opportunistic jerks, until and unless they establish their own goodness through people-pleasing.
It’s true that people-pleasing and self-effacement are much better than the opposite extreme—where narcissists act as if the world owed them everything they could ever want, going through life exploiting others by deception, cheating, and entitlement. But there is a vast, wholesome, fertile middle-ground between these extremes.
The culture of masochistic self-effacement—particularly common in the American Midwest, but not rare elsewhere—involves an extremely important error about human nature. When you withdraw into yourself like a turtle in its shell, giving up your claim to social space, resources, and dignity, other people in general do not actually benefit. Unprincipled characters may avail themselves of your services without reciprocating; such opportunists do not generally deserve what you’re giving them. Warmer folks might welcome your generosity and actually repay you in kind, but this is actual mutual goodness—not people-pleasing. Those who have the self-confidence to meet their own needs are going to do so with or without your self-sacrifice. And those who lack that confidence may be cowed by your example and feel shamed into emulating it (especially if you are their parent).
Here are a few analogies, since the same principle applies in many other domains. Watching an anxious, apologetic musician perform is exhausting, whereas watching a confident and relaxed performer is energizing. When a singer is tense, tentative, inhibited, and nervous, the audience is drained by the performance and waits for it to end. When the singer is calm, expansive, centered, and open, the voice fills the whole space; the improvisation is playful and fluid; and the audience is captivated in delight.
Sociality tends to work the same way. The other people around you will benefit more from your loving self-acceptance than from your self-loathing. They are more likely to flourish if you flourish, than if you sulk, stagnate, or persecute yourself. It is not anti-social to love yourself. It is pro-social to love yourself.
As a brilliant Chinese political philosopher, Jiwei Ci, once observed: “In a world of perfect altruists [who only promote their neighbors’ interests, not their own], no one has any interests for his neighbor to promote.”
This same principle also applies to dating, where there are two major ways of being beautiful. One way is to absorb the standards of beauty that are tendered to you by the media and by your peers, and shape yourself to match those ideals as closely as possible. Some people will stop at nothing in pursuit of such external notions of aesthetic self-presentation, even at great personal expense, not all of it financial. Some will even inject their own faces with botulism toxin (“Botox”)—often at such youthful ages that there are not yet any wrinkles for the procedure to erase. The price is bigger than it seems, since the deactivation of facial muscles can make the human countenance less expressive, with serious possible consequences for emotional intimacy. Other forms of body modification have their risks, too. Fasting can have health benefits, or spiritual aspects, but starving oneself in pursuit of weight loss can constitute dangerous (even fatal) disordered eating. Working out in the gym can be a great enhancer of physical and emotional health, a rewarding and challenging part of self-care, and a venue for camaraderie. But it can also be the site of an “adonis complex,” where people toil for a missing self-respect that they associate with a highly muscular physique (this is a struggle often met with in some forms of Gay men’s culture).
Most people benefit from some moderate degree of participation in shared ideals of attractiveness, maintaining their appearance as part of the pleasure of self-care—without overdoing it, or falling prey to excessive anxiety about how they look. At that point, the other approach to beauty takes over: sheer genuine confidence. So long as I have met this basic standard of self-care, my confidence that I am beautiful—even if my beauty is unconventional—has a benign influence on the way other people perceive me. Whatever my age, gender, sexual orientation, or social position might be, my comfort within my own skin, my genuine belief that, odd or not, I am cute as hell—is itself part of the way observers see me. The visual dimension of my self-image is part of my charisma; it is self-fulfilling.
I’ve discussed musical performance and physical attractiveness as examples of the broader issue I raised at the beginning: my belief in myself is better for me—and for others—than my self-doubt. Put another way, other people will benefit more from my achievement of loving self-acceptance than they will from my continued self-denial and people-pleasing.
This applies to many more arenas than the few I’ve discussed here. For example, one of the best books I’ve read on sex is Male Sexuality: Why Women Don’t Understand It and Men Don’t Either, by psychoanalyst Michael Bader. He spells out the way that sex between men and women can go poorly if both people are entirely focused on the other person’s pleasure. Of course, it can also go poorly if they’re exclusively concerned with their own pleasure, but that problem is much more obvious, and much easier to discuss. Some generous attention to the other person is, of course, important, since sexual giving is both gratifying in its own right, and ethically salient—but so is some degree of embodied raw desire for stimulating experience of one’s own, without distraction, judgment, guilt, or ambivalence. When you share what’s yours, you’re sharing what’s yours.
As is said on every airline flight, and metaphorically repeated in myriad therapy sessions: put on your own oxygen mask first, because that’s the necessary preparation that makes it possible to help anyone else. If you do not start off by loving yourself (and it’s never too late for that), but instead regard yourself as a despicable sinner who must find ways to prove his or her own decency, then how do I know whether your kindness to me is a genuine gift, or just another impersonal effort to demonstrate that you’re a worthy human being? We generally prefer to receive kindness from people whose motive is not to escape hell (in this world or the next), nor to win entry into post-mortem paradise. We prefer to receive kindness as an authentic expression of somebody’s good nature, or, if we know each other well, as a communication about their feelings for us—not as a mere byproduct of their own secret wrestling match with a tyrannical conscience. Love yourself, and your love for others will mean more to them, not less.
Two thousand years ago, the great Rabbi Hillel said this unforgotten thing: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?”