Imagine that you choose to join humanity rather than isolating yourself. How can you maintain your position within the tribe? People differ. Your combination of wishes, passions, opinions, preferences, and desires is unique, and it will be easy for others to view it as deranged, depraved, or simply inadequate. Even if you were entirely like the others with whom you socialize, some resources are finite. If everyone wants to be the center of attention, someone has to be the audience.
In every relationship between two people, there are two sets of expectations: yours and your friend’s. Which should govern your behavior?
One option is to forget all about their priorities and pursue your own without care for what your friend might prefer. Getting little nourishment from interacting with you, however, he will soon leave you solitary once more—and before departing, he will probably dispense a litany of painful criticism. This is one path to misery.
The other option is to set your opinions, wishes, and priorities aside as irrelevant and adopt your friend’s instead:
Become adept at delaying your reply when (or if) he asks your opinion—at least until you have divined his. Then simply express his preferences as though they were your own. Become what object-relations theorists call a mirror object, reflecting back to your partner what he most hopes to see: himself.
This sounds generous and winning—not at all a path to unhappiness—but it is quite effective. For one thing, no matter how much people enjoy looking in mirrors, eventually they get bored and look away. Your friend, colleague, or spouse will realize that she doesn’t need to ask your point of view—for some reason, it always mimics hers. Talking to you is like talking to herself, and sooner or later she will need more stimulation than you seem able to provide. Having sacrificed yourself on the altar of her regard, you will find that she has simply lost interest.
In addition, the part of you that requires the nourishment of having your needs met will wither away, leaving you resentful and unhappy. You can relinquish your interests, suppress your point of view, and neglect your needs for an evening, perhaps even for a week. But you cannot do so forever and have your mood sustain itself. Invisible behind the mirror you hold up to the world, you will get no real benefit from the social approval you achieve. It will be like attempting to get a suntan behind a lead shield.
An example often seen in therapy is the young gay or lesbian individuals who go out, socialize, and become involved in the world but stay carefully in the closet, displaying a falsely heterosexual self to others. They may get warm approval for much of what they do, but the heat never quite penetrates to the heart. They sense the affection they would receive if they really were the person they pretend to be, but knowing they are not, they cannot feel the benefit. Hence the value of coming out: as gay, as opinionated, as political, as religious, as atheist, as flawed, as whatever and whoever you happen to be.
We all play roles in the world, and none of us reveals everything. But the more you adopt a disguise, the more you deny yourself; and the more you pretend to be something other than what you are, the more unhappy you are likely to become. In some ways, this can be more painful than simple isolation. Rather than sitting alone at home with a bare cupboard, you find yourself hungrily eyeing a heavily laden smorgasbord locked behind glass.
So think. What are all the aspects of yourself that you could practice hiding away when company comes?
Lock them all away and reveal them to no one, even when you suspect they would not give offense.
Make it your mission to melt into the wallpaper, showing the people in your life only what they see in themselves. Reinforce their points of view. Go along with them like a puppy on a leash. Tell yourself that by stingily withholding your reality, you are being generous, providing them with the space and room to be themselves.
You may sense that you cannot do this forever. You’re right about that—you can’t. But it doesn’t matter. They won’t stick around anyway.