Authenticity vs Good Manners

The 21st century has brought us tons of great stuff -- equality and empowerment are two of my favorites. As usual, our generation is trying to reconcile and marry the values of the past with the shiny new freedoms of the present. Sometimes they don't seem to go together very well.

Case in point. Good manners are considered good. They demonstrate a thorough, working knowledge of appropriate behavior in a variety of contexts. It's a mask we put on. We open doors for people, we bring wine to dinner parties, we're warm and polite to our partner's parents no matter how they treat us... These behaviors "mean" something about us, that we're "good." That we're properly socialized.

(But we all know that being properly socialized comes with baggage.)

In these glorious modern times, authenticity is also considered good. We are empowered to know and express our thoughts & feelings, to free ourselves from the old masks. Being self-aware and articulate is considered healthy. Evolved. Smart. Savvy.

So being polite and being authentic are often at odds. Luckily, there is a healthy middle ground. I'm going to call it integrity.

If you're just polite, wearing the mask and saying only the gracious, socially acceptable things, then people around you can't really trust you. They can't trust that what you present is who-you-really-are, and so they feel guarded. They feel subtly insulted, to have someone interacting with them out of a colorless, rigid old script. It's like they aren't worth the trouble of relating to spontaneously. Authentically.

On the other hand, if you're just authentic, sharing your thoughts & feelings freely without ample consideration for the feelings of others or the rules & mores of the context, then people feel guarded because who-you-are is a volatile quantity. There's no understood, common ground of how to express mutual respect. You might bite, at any time.

In between lies a balance between consideration for others and consideration for self. Integrity: the integration of social health with personal health.

Relationally, the issue is safety. Being worthy of emotional trust. Being a safe person to be around and interact with. How other people feel around you matters. It affects how they treat you and therefore how you treat them.

It's the magic of relationship: how my perception of what-you-think-of-me causes me to adjust my behavior, and then how my behavior affects what you think I-think-of-you and then your behavior. A feedback loop. A dance, in which we draw out different versions of each other, customized to each relationship.

The integrity I describe here makes it much, much easier to cut through the game-playing in relationships, so you can give & receive both consideration and truth.

Next time someone is behaving oddly or formally around you, ask yourself what you might be doing to put them on guard. Sometimes, people are just crazy, but sometimes, you might've started it.