Yet, gradually there emerged a more worldly, less exclusive, way of relating to strangers: what we might call a psychological ‘cosmopolitanism’. In the ancient civilisations of Greece and Rome, prompted by ever-increasing encounters between peoples who lived very different and mutually unfamiliar lives, thanks to developments in trade and shipping, an alternative to shyness developed. Greek travellers who worshipped human-like divinities learned that Egyptians revered cats and certain birds. Romans who shaved their chins met barbarians who did not. Senators who lived in colonnaded houses with underfloor heating encountered chieftains who lived in draughty wooden huts. Among certain thinkers, an approach developed that proposed that all these humans, whatever their surface variations, shared a common core – and that it was to this that the mature mind should turn in contact with apparent otherness. It was to this ‘cosmopolitan’ mindset that the Roman playwright and poet Terence gave voice when he wrote: ‘I am human: nothing human is foreign to me’, and that Christianity made use of in rendering universal sympathy a cornerstone of its view of existence.
Someone becomes a cosmopolitan not on the basis of having a buoyant or gregarious nature but because they are in touch with a fundamental truth about humanity, because they know that, irrespective of appearance, we are the same species beneath, an insight that the tongue-tied guest at the party or the awkward seducer in the restaurant are guilty of implicitly refusing.
The cosmopolitan is well aware of differences between people. They just refuse to be cowed or dominated by them. They look beyond them to perceive, or in practical terms simply to guess at, a collective species unity. The stranger may not know your friends from primary school, may not have read the same novels or have met your parents, may wear a dress, or a large hat and beard or be in their eighth decade or only a few days past being four years old, but the cosmopolitan won’t be daunted by the lack of local points of reference. They are sure they will stumble somewhere upon common ground – even if it takes a couple of false starts. All human beings (however varied their outward appearance) must – they know – be activated by a few basic dimensions of concern. There will be uniting likes, hates, hopes and fears; even if it is only a love of rolling a ball back and forth or a mutual interest in sunbathing.
The shy provincial is a pessimist at heart. The moderniser won’t – they feel certain – be able to talk to the traditionalist; the enthusiast of the left must have no time for anyone on the right; the atheist won’t be able engage with the priest; the business owner must get awkward around the socialist. The confident cosmopolitan, by contrast, starts from the assumption that people are endowed with wildly opposed views, but that these need never fatally undermine the rich range of similarities that will remain in other areas. Traditionally, rank or status has been a major source of shy provincialism: the peasant felt he could not approach the lord; the young milkmaid stammered when the earl’s son visited the stable. Today, in an echo of such inhibitions, the person of average looks feels they could never hang out with the very beautiful woman, or the modestly-off imagine they can’t talk to the very wealthy. The mind fixates on the gulf: my nose looks as if a child had modelled it out of plasticine, yours as if Michelangelo had carved it; I fear losing my job, while you fear that expanding your business into Germany won’t be as profitable as you’d forecast.
Shyness has its insightful dimensions. It is infused with an awareness that we might be bothering someone with our presence; it is based on an acute sense that a stranger could be dissatisfied or discomfited by us. The shy person is touchingly alive to the dangers of being a nuisance. Someone with no capacity for shyness is a scary possibility, for they operate with a dismaying attitude of entitlement. They are so composed and sure only because they haven’t taken on board the possibility that another person might rightly have a disenchanted view of them.
In most cases, we pay an unnecessarily heavy price for our reserve around people who might open their hearts to us, if only we knew how to manifest our own benevolence. We cling too jealously to our province. The pimply boy doesn’t discover that he and the high-school beauty share a taste in humour and similarly painful relationships with their fathers; the middle-aged lawyer never unearths a shared love of rockets with her neighbour’s eight-year-old son. Races and ages continue not to mingle, to their collective detriments. Shyness is a touching, yet ultimately excessive and unwarranted, way of feeling special.
4
Why Affectionate Teasing Is Kind and Necessary
It may not seem like it, but teasing done with affection and skill is a profound human accomplishment.
There’s nasty teasing, of course, in which we pick at a sore spot in someone’s life. But we’re talking here of the affectionate version, something generous and loving, which feels good to be on the receiving end of.
It may be lovely to be teased when, for example, you’re a teenager and in a grumpy, sullen mood, and your kindly dad nicknames you Hamlet, after Shakespeare’s Danish prince of gloom. Or when you’re 45 and pretty serious in business and your old university friends call you by the name they made up for you aged 19, the night you failed dismally in trying to pick up a German student who was in town.
All of us become a bit unbalanced in one way or another: too serious, too gloomy, too jokey. We all benefit from being tugged back towards a healthier mean. The good teaser latches onto and responds to our distinctive imbalances and is compassionately constructive about trying to change us: not by delivering a stern lesson, but by helping us to notice our excesses and to laugh at them. We sense the teaser is trying to give us a useful shove in a good (and secretly welcome) direction and therefore know that, at its affectionate best, teasing is both sweet and constructive.
The English literary critic Cyril Connolly once famously wrote: Imprisoned in every fat man a thin man is wildly signalling to be let out.
This is a general idea with multiple variants: inside the fussy, over-formal individual there’s a more relaxed person looking for an opening; there’s an ambitious, eager self quietly despairing within the lazy man; the gloomy, disenchanted cynic harbours a more cheery, sunny sub-self in need of more recognition.
The teasing remark speaks over the head of the dominant aspect to the subordinated side of the self, whom it helps to release and relax.
There’s a moment in The Line of Beauty – a novel by Alan Hollinghurst, set in the 1980s – in which Nick, the charming young central character, is invited to a grand party and meets the British prime minister, Margaret Thatcher. Everyone is slightly terrified of her, but Nick warmly and teasingly suggests that she might like to dance to a pop song. The other guests are horrified – she’s meant to be obsessed by stringent economic reform and hard-nosed politics – but, after a brief inner struggle, she replies with a smile: ‘You know, I’d like that very much.’ (Perhaps if, in reality, there had been more people to tease her, the pop-loving, dancing side of Mrs Thatcher might have played a greater role in national affairs – and history would have been different.)
When we enjoy being warmly teased, it’s because the teasing remark emerges from a genuine insight into who we are. This person has studied us and put their finger on a struggle that’s going on in us; they’ve taken the part of a nice – but currently under-supported – side of who we are. It’s pleasing because normally others don’t see much past the front we put on for the world. Typically, the world just thinks we are gloomy, or stern, or intellectual, or obsessed by fashion. The teaser does us the favour of recognising that the dominant front isn’t telling the whole story; they’re kind enough and perceptive enough to see past the surface.
Perhaps the most instructive question we can ask – the one that teaches us most about the value of affectionate teasing – is simply: what do I need to be teased about?
5
How to Be Warm
While politeness is of course always preferable to rudeness, there are ways of being polite that badly miss the mark and can leave us feeling odd
ly detached and dissatisfied. Picture the person who ends up, despite their best efforts, seeming what we can call coldly polite. They may be keen to please those they are seeing, they obey all the rules of etiquette, offer their guests drinks, ask them questions about their journey, suggest they might want a little more gravy, remark on the interest of a recent prizewinning novel – yet never manage to make their hospitality feel either engaging or memorable. It may be a long time before another meeting with them is suggested.
By contrast, there is the person we recognise as warm, who follows the cold person in the basic principles of politeness, but manages to add a critical emotionally comforting ingredient to their manner. They might, when we have an evening planned with them, suggest making toasted cheese sandwiches at their place rather than going out to a restaurant; they might chat to us through the bathroom door; put on the songs they loved dancing to when they were 14; plump up a cushion and slot it behind our back; confess to feeling intimidated by a mutual acquaintance; bring us a posy of daisies or a card they made; call us when we’re down with the flu and ask how our ears are feeling; make encouraging ‘mmm’ and ‘ah’ sounds to show sympathy and interest for a story they’ve teased out of us about our insomnia; give us a sly conspiratorial wink when they notice we’re finding someone else at the table attractive; mention they like our haircut, and then, when we spill something or fart by mistake, exclaim: ‘I’m so glad you did that! Usually it’s me.’
Beneath the difference between the warm and the cold person lies a contrasting vision of human nature. Broadly, the cold person is operating with an implicit view that those they are attempting to please are creatures endowed only with the highest needs. As a result, all kinds of assumptions are made about them: that they are interested exclusively in so-called serious topics (especially art and politics); that they will appreciate a degree of formality in dining and sitting; that they will be strong, self-contained and mature enough not to have any hunger for reassurance or cosiness; and that they will be without urgent physical vulnerabilities and drives, which might prove deeply offensive if they were mentioned. These higher beings would, the cold host believes, wince if someone suggested they curl up on the sofa with a blanket or handed them a copy of a magazine about film stars when they headed for the bathroom.
Yet, the warmly polite person is always deeply aware that the stranger is (irrespective of their status or outward dignity) a highly needy, fragile, confused, appetitive and susceptible creature. They know this about the stranger because they never forget this about themselves. Warmly polite people have much in common with the character Kanga, the tenderly maternal kangaroo in A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh books. In one of the stories, the animals are disconcerted by the arrival in the Hundred Acre Wood of Tigger, who is very big, very loud and bouncy and assertive. They treat him with caution and are – we might say – coldly polite. But when Tigger finally meets Kanga, she is immediately warm with him. She thinks of him in much the same terms as she does her own child, Roo: ‘Just because an animal is large, it doesn’t mean he doesn’t want kindness; however big Tigger seems to be, remember that he wants as much kindness as Roo,’ says Kanga, in what might be a definition of the philosophy of warmth.
Sometimes it is deeply generous to think that another person may be more elevated than us. Collectively we’ve taken this thought very much to heart. We have internalised distance and learned caution, moving on from the naivety of the small child who wonders sweetly when you are sad whether you might like to sniff their grimy blanket.
This has given rise to a touchingly sad possibility that the other is much more involved in our kind of vulnerabilities than they let on or that we dare to suppose. Two people may be secretly yearning for the same modest thing while each being too polite (that is, too under the sway of a cold interpretation of human nature) to properly recognise or act upon their desires.
The warmly polite person may not hold to an explicit theory of what they are doing, but at root their conduct is based on an understanding that however solid and dignified someone appears on the outside, behind the scenes there will inevitably be a struggling self, potentially awkward, easily bemused, beset by physical appetites, on the verge of loneliness – and frequently in need of nothing more subtle or elevated than a cheese sandwich, a glass of milk and a hug.
6
Why Flirting Matters
Flirting has a bad name. Too often, it seems a form of duplicity, a sly attempt to excite another person and derive gratification from their interest without any corresponding wish to go to bed with them. It looks like a manipulative promise of sexual affection that, at the last moment, leaves its targets confused and humiliated. In our sadness, back home alone after the nightclub or the party, we may rail against the flirt for ‘only’ flirting, when it had appeared there might be so much more.
But this pattern represents only one, unedifying and regrettable, possibility around flirting. At its best, flirting can be a vital social process that generously lends us reassurance and freely redistributes confidence and self-esteem. The task is not to stop flirting, but to learn how better to practise its most honourable versions.
Good flirting is in essence an attempt, driven by kindness and imaginative excitement, to inspire another person to believe more firmly in their own likability – psychological as much as physical. It is a gift offered not in order to manipulate, but out of a pleasure at perceiving what is most attractive in another. Along the way, the good flirt must carefully convince us of three apparently contradictory things: that they would love to sleep with us; that they won’t sleep with us; and that the reason why has nothing to do with any deficiency on our part.
Good flirting exploits – with no evil intent – an important truth about sex: that what is often most enjoyable about sex is not the physical process itself so much as the idea of acceptance that underpins the act; the notion that another person likes us enough to accept us in our most raw and vulnerable state and is, in turn, willing to lose control and surrender aspects of their own everyday dignity. It is this concept, far more than the deft touching of skin, that contributes the dominant share of our pleasure as we undress someone for the first time or heed their request to call them the rudest words we know.
The good flirt knows this and is therefore spared a guilty sense that they might not be in a position to offer their lovers anything valuable. They are wisely convinced that it is eminently possible, simply over a dinner table or in the kitchen at work, to gift a person just about the most wondrous aspect of sex itself – simply through the medium of language.
The good flirt is an expert too in how correctly to frame the fact that there won’t be sex. By a deeply entrenched quirk of the human mind, it is generally hard for us to hear such news without reaching one overwhelming and crushing conclusion: that the seducer has suddenly found us deeply and pervasively repulsive. The good flirt loosens us from such punitive narratives. They powerfully appeal to some of the many genuine reasons why two people might not have sex that have nothing to do with one person finding the other disgusting: for example, because one or both of them already has a partner, because there is an excessive age gap, a gender incompatibility, an office that would disapprove, a difficult family situation or, most simply, a lack of time.
Freed from the rigid and blunt supposition that flirting has to be a prelude to actual sex, the good flirt can artfully imply how different things might have been if the world had been more ideally arranged. The recipient of the flirt can, with equal grace, assent to the story without a need to twist it through self-hatred.
We all need reminders of what is tolerable and exciting about us. It is a desperate foreshortening of possibilities to insist that such reawakening can only be justified by actual intercourse. Understood properly, flirting can beneficially occur across the largest gulfs: gulfs of political belief, of social, economic or marital status, of sexual inclination and (with obvious caveats) of age. The 26-year-old corporate lawyer and the 52
-year-old behind the counter of the corner shop can flirt; and so may the cleaner and the CEO. It is all the more moving when they do so because it signals a willingness to use the imagination to locate what is most attractive about another person who lies very far from one’s own area of familiarity. The question of what, if I considered someone, anyone sexually, I would find charming is one of the most intimate, interesting and necessary questions one can ask.
The good flirt needs skill to home in on the less obvious, but still very real, ways in which everyone can be attractive. They might draw attention to a nicely shaped elbow or to a characteristic intelligent tilt of the head. They must actively search for the location of another person’s sexual allure, piecing together a portrait like a great novelist gradually revealing the hidden charm of an apparently ordinary character. Like Jesus, they are giving attention to the secret goodness of someone who (to the hasty glance of others) will appear an outcast or a sinner unworthy of love.
We have for too long been warned against flirting by an unfortunate Romantic ideal of total coherence, one that implies that either we are completely sincere in flirting and so must make love or we are, in effect, liars. In many Romantic novels of the 19th century, ‘flirt’ is, therefore, a term of abuse. No hero or heroine could ever adopt a playful, semi-erotic tone with anyone except their true love. But they would thereby miss out on an important enlargement of their sensibilities.
The ideal flirtation is a small work of social art co-created by two people; a civilised artifice that acknowledges limitations, worries about consequences and knows the importance of not letting momentary impulses damage long-standing commitments. It knows that avoiding sex is usually wise, but is intelligently invested in sharing some of the benefits of sex without the act itself.
On Being Nice Page 4
