if you want to change your life, change your friends
on the pleasures and pitfalls of being a pleaser and why friendships are worth working at especially if you're single
The other day I was chatting to my youngest son Frank about the importance of making new friends. He’s six and at that age, new people and social situations are more or less a constant. Frank is lucky (as am I by extension) because he’s optimistic and highly sociable by nature. A shrinking violet Frank is not.
He yearns for and seeks out positive attention and validation at every turn. New social situations are opportunity for him, rather than a chore. He approaches each new holiday camp, playground, birthday party or class full of strangers as a challenge. He is six. The world is his orchard. He wants to fill his basket to the brim!
“Everybody likes me Mummy,” he said, with characteristic modesty (!) “It’s because I’m cute and kind and funny and pretend to be curious even when people are boring.”
Frank has a high opinion of himself, but why shouldn’t he? I’m hardly objective as his mother, but all things considered, he’s pretty awesome. Liking oneself, after all, is very different from feeling superior. It’s good that Frank is socially confident, that he enjoys the challenge of winning people over. However the one danger of this abundant and optimistic worldview (as I tried to gently explain to him) is that it can often lead to being a pleaser.
The term “pleaser” is much abused at the moment. It’s fashionable to talk about it wholly as a negative. I don’t entirely agree with this — in part because I am one myself. Being a pleaser isn’t inherently bad but the instinct to please, if applied injudiciously, can lead to bad decisions, often in the form of unhealthy romantic attachments and toxic friendships. In the course of my life I have often sought to please people automatically, without first considering whether they ultimately pleased me in turn. I forgot to look at people objectively and think, ‘Is this relationship worth it?’ ‘Does it make me feel good?’ Instead I just charged in and tried win them over anyway I could.