Social Rules I Still Don't Understand
I've worked very hard to learn social cues, but some rules still make no sense to me. I'm putting them up to a vote.
As I’ve written about many times before, I have not always understood social norms the way other people do. When I was fifteen, the therapist who diagnosed me with ADHD noted my “missed social cues” immediately in our first session, leading me to wonder (for twenty years and counting) what social faux pas I had committed to a therapist in just a few minutes.
It’s likely that I was born this way, but I was also raised in a slightly unconventional family where being a kind person was deeply valued but following particular rules of etiquette was not as important, or at least not as drilled into us. (There were some exceptions though—when a kid told me I did a good job in the second grade school play and I said “I know,” my parents kindly reminded me that I should have said “thanks.”)
But other rules escaped me until adulthood. For example, I somehow made it to age nineteen before realizing that I should thank people who pay for a dinner. Up until then, almost all my dinners out were with my parents, who, it seemed, did not expect me to thank them for feeding me, especially given that I was a kid. Perhaps someone else would have picked up on the fact that if someone other than your legal guardian pays for your food, you should thank them (and perhaps other families required that children thank their parents for meals). But I did not. It wasn’t until I had been dating my husband for a few weeks when he asked me why I never once thanked him for paying. My only explanation was, “Well, I did offer to split it.” Once I realized my error, I was humiliated and horrified, so immediately the next time I was out to dinner with my dad and he offered to pay, I thanked him in such a formal manner that he looked slightly taken aback.
Aware that my brain was missing either some key information (or some key pieces), I started asking my husband to give me feedback after we had been at a party or gathering, so I could understand if I said or did anything off-putting. He agreed to do this, and there were times when I discovered I was breaking other social norms too. And now, thanks to a controversial Twitter post, I’m discovering that many of the well-meaning things I’ve done to show empathy in the past are actually also bad.
So for this post, I’d like to sort out the social rules that I still don’t fully understand, and have the great people of Substack weigh in to vote on them.
Is it “demanding emotional labor” to give gifts?
Recently, a woman (who I won’t link here because I don’t want to pile on) went viral on Twitter for gifting a new friend a few pages of poetry she wrote, among a few other small things, after hearing she was “going through something.” The friend—who may have been more of an acquaintance—rebuffed this gesture and called it weird, deeply shaming the OP. (My take: they are equally weird and deserve each other. Everyone knows the acceptable thing to do is say, “wow, thanks!” and then slowly fade away if it really freaked you out.)
