A few years ago a friend sent me a vase for my birthday, which arrived smashed in the post. What would you do in that scenario? Tell her what had happened? Lie and hope she never asks to see it in situ? Or the third option: piece it back together, do a Google image search, contact the manufacturer to find it is now sold out, spend weeks tracking down the same vase on eBay and pay three times the original price to have it shipped over from the Czech Republic? No, my friend has never asked to see the vase in situ.
It has become fashionable to be a people-pleaser. A cute little humblebrag, one rung below being an “empath”. According to a 2022 YouGov poll, about half of American adults self-identify as one. But true approval junkies like me are a ridiculous breed, and we recognise our own.
When I asked people on social media the wildest things they had done out of politeness, stories poured in. They ranged from entry-level passivity — allowing someone to call you the wrong name for years; getting married with a hairdo you hate — to advanced, such as the person who invented a fake daughter rather than tell a woman in a shop that she’d misheard them. Some were both comforting and troubling: “I drank a whole glass of wine that had clumps of cat hair in it”; “I tipped a beautician who waxed off both my eyebrows completely”; “I got engaged.”
My new novel, Probably Nothing, is a cautionary tale of people-pleasing taken to bleakly comic extremes. When the protagonist Bryony’s casual hook-up suddenly dies, she discovers he has told everyone they were a serious couple. Unable to admit the truth, she goes along with the charade: speaking at the funeral, grieving with his family, becoming a part of their lives. A far-fetched premise, some might say; totally understandable behaviour, others might be thinking.
My own people-pleasing has cost me — emotionally and financially. As well as rebuying vases, there have been all the presents I’ve wildly overspent on and the bills I’ve split despite drinking none of the booze, and all the overpriced candles I’ve bought in empty boutiques because the owner said they liked my hair. Sometimes I can almost hear the ghost of the words, “Actually, I think I’ll leave it,” rattling in my throat as I’m tapping my card to the reader.
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Besides the money wasted, it feels as if there’s also something darker and more gendered at play with people-pleasing. It’s startling how many replies I got from women who had been on dates with men they weren’t interested in because they felt “too awkward” to decline. One went out with a guy for two years “to be polite”; another admitted she’s still married out of politeness today.
Women are more likely to identify as people-pleasers than men, with almost half saying they “often feel responsible for how other people feel” compared with only 35 per cent of men who do. This will come as little surprise to those of us who have ever, say, been on a group holiday or experienced Christmas. My husband is a kind man, but he has none of my people-pleasing urges.
I worry about the example I’m setting to my 18-month-old daughter: I want her to grow up feeling confident enough to stand her ground. I do not want her nodding mutely while a colleague asks if she minds picking up everyone else’s work, then calls her “a hero”.
I fear people-pleasing has held me back professionally too. I’ve been so afraid of being “difficult” to work with that I’ve undervalued myself — often literally — and failed to push back on unreasonable demands (“We’ve changed the brief! Can you completely rewrite this in the next two hours for no extra money?”). I have wasted time on opportunities I didn’t want because I felt I should be grateful to be offered them.
And I fret over the impact it may have on my health. I often eat meals I know I can’t digest because it seems easier to stockpile Gaviscon than kill the vibes by being “fussy”. Even my greatest feat of assertiveness to date — asking for a caesarean section rather than continuing with an induction that wasn’t working — came after hours of apologetic sobbing.
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Are people-pleasers better people? Not necessarily. For one thing, we wildly overcommit. We’ll leave your party early because we’ve got another one to go to, and our mortal fear of cancelling plans can be bad for other people’s health. Last Christmas I unwittingly gave two people Covid.
In fact our urges can be more self-absorbed than selfless. As the psychotherapist Emma Reed Turrell puts it in her book Please Yourself: How to Stop People-Pleasing and Transform the Way You Live, “On the surface, we please to make other people happy. Underneath, we please to get something in return.” We can end up resenting the people we’re trying to keep happy. This is not to say people-pleasers can’t be truly generous — it’s just hard to call acts of service your “love language” if you’re doing it through gritted teeth.
We often end up in lopsided friendships, trapped in cycles of endless plans because we can’t work out how to say no without hurting someone’s feelings, or making all the effort to keep the relationship alive. Two people-pleasers together can become a hellish circle of “I don’t mind!”, where nobody ever orders the wine they actually want and it takes half an hour to walk through a door.
To be clear, I refuse to believe things would be better if people ran around saying what they think all the time, or pleasing themselves at the expense of others (see global politics). But as I get older I want to invest my time and money wisely, not waste them on pushy sales assistants. There are certain people for whom I’ll always choke down a glass of cat hair, and I may never quite accept the idea that “No” is a full sentence. But I hope I’m entering an era where “No, thank you, sorry!” could be. And if I can say it out loud with both eyebrows intact, that’s progress.
Probably Nothing by Lauren Bravo (Simon & Schuster £20). To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members
Are you a people-pleaser?
If you answer yes to most of these questions, says the clinical psychologist Dr Daniel Glazer, then you probably do
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• Do you say yes to plans with friends even if you are already feeling overloaded?
• Do you often remain silent or outwardly agree when people express opinions that you internally disagree with?
• Do you change personality depending on who you are with in order to fit in?
• Do you go out of your way to avoid conflict with others?
• Do you feel disproportionately anxious about how saying no to someone might upset them?
• Do you feel you lack self-confidence?
• Do you overapologise, often saying sorry for things outside your control?
• Do you ignore your own feelings to avoid “making a fuss”?
• Do you say yes to taking on more work even if it will have a negative impact on your wellbeing?
