When Being Nice Is Not Being Nice At All

Not long ago I ran into a neighbor I hadn't seen in quite a while. The two of us didn't hit it off this time any more than we had before, though I let it slide. I'd made an attempt at small talk and it went nowhere, so I moved on.

The encounter stayed out of my head until some of my family started discussing her, and specifically something she'd said at the gathering to a man who was still raw from being completely cut off by someone he'd been with for years. (I'm keeping the details vague, but you get the picture.)

What they described was hard to listen to. The guy had clearly shown up to the party partly to get his mind off the breakup, to stop circling the same loss for a few hours. Her voice, by every account, was gentle and warm. If you confronted her about it, I suspect she'd say she was only showing she cared.

My relatives didn't read it that way. They thought what she did landed wrong: it dragged the man right back to the thing that hurt and quietly flagged for everyone that he probably wasn't past it yet.

I shrugged it off at the time. Later in the day, turning the conversation over, it hit me that I'd never actually felt easy around her. More than once I'd come away with the sense that her kindness was put on, maybe even fake, whenever she worked at being nice.

The setup made it nearly impossible for the man to push back. Given how sweetly she'd phrased it, and given the room they were in, he couldn't very well tell her to drop it or that he didn't want to talk. By then it didn't matter. The sting had already registered.

So what's your read? You can probably guess mine. Call it judgmental if you want, but I take it as a case for trusting your gut. When something feels off even though the words sound fine, the feeling is often the truer signal. Was she performing concern? Was it passive-aggression, a small twist of the knife to make sure he felt the loss again?

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