There’s a woman that has recently started to treat me poorly, and I can’t figure out why. I would like help in designing the most efficient social experiment that helps me to solve this riddle. If it’s not clear from the disclaimer above, this post is about a personal situation and contains details about the two persons involved and their feelings.
Some possibly useful background info: it’s about a year that we dance regularly together. I like her a lot and some months ago I have told her so, trying to be as level-headed as possible. She replied that she is still in love with the guy from her last relationship. We also talked about the fact that I’m polyamorous while she is strictly monogamous, so this situation could never evolve into a relationship. Aside from the occasional remainder that I like her and I find her attractive, there were no apparent ripercussions of those talkings: we kept on dancing together and being casual friends. In her own words, I’ve never made her feel uncomfortable.
However, it’s two weeks that I sense that she is treating me with contempt, and I have no idea why. It seems to me that nothing in our relationship has changed, and this tells me that my model of the situation is way off-track.
There were two specific occasions that triggered my self-respect alarm: in the first one, while we were dancing she said something like “I tripped and almost fell on you. Oh but you would be happy if I accidentally fell on you, right?”. In the next occasion: while we were sorting for costumes provided by our dancing schools, I said “I’m going to need an XL size, the L size just doesn’t fit” to which she interjected “Oh no, you’re going to need a triple X size.”
These are some possible explanations:
she is not really treating me poorly. I’m being oversensitive and in her mind these were unrelevant remarks, or this is just some bizarre way of flirting or attracting my attention.
She is treating me poorly, but there’s no systemic reason behind: something totally unrelated put her in a bad mood on two occasions, and I just happened to be around.
She is treating me poorly, there’s a systemic reason behind, but it’s not related to me: the systemic version of the one above. She is in a bad mood for a recurring cause, wether it’s the tension for the incoming school performance or something else unrelated and for some reason I’m her preferred punching ball.
She is treating me poorly, there’s a systemic reason behind, and it’s related to me: I’ve read that a woman with low self-esteem may start to despise a guy who likes her. The reasoning goes along this line: “I’m worthless and he likes me, so he likes worthless things, he must be worthless too.”
Something else totally alien: an unkown variable or a constrain of the system I’ve never thought about, an “unknown unknown”.
I’ve layed the conundrum at your feet, let’s see if you can suggest a way to unravel it. If you need more information ask here or in private and I’ll do my best to answer you.
Here’s an intervention, rather than a test: If she says something that hurts your feelings again, just say, “I know you’re joking around, but that kind of hurts my feelings.”
If it were me, I would just assume she was lightheartedly teasing. If that’s the case, the course of action would be to tease back, but also in a lighthearted way. Either that, or reply with an extremely exaggerated form of self-deprecation; agree with her teasing but in a way that exaggerates the original intent. Even if that’s not the case, and she’s being vindictive, I think responding as though she were teasing would be ideal anyway.
Examples:
“I tripped and almost fell on you. Oh but you would be happy if I accidentally fell on you, right?”
(tease back): “Clumsy people don’t really do it for me”
(exaggerate): “That’s because I have never had a woman touch me before in my life”
“Oh no, you’re going to need a triple X size.”
(tease back): “I think you just like saying ‘triple X’. Get your mind out of the gutter, thanks”
(exaggerate): “I’m going to cry myself to sleep over my size tonight ”
If she laughs and/or plays along with these responses, she’s probably just teasing. If she gets even more cruel in her response, then she’s probably being intentionally vindictive.
I am far from an expert in these matters, but would advise against both teasing back and saying explicitly that you interpret the teasing as “treating me worse than usual”.
[EDITED to add: To be clear, I mean “don’t do both of these together” rather than “both of these are individually bad ideas”.]
Because one is playful and the other feels hostile. Doing both at once won’t give you a clear sense of what her response is to either. Do them in separate encounters.
Apparently even with my edit I wasn’t clear enough. Letting A be “tease back” and B be “mention that she seems to be treating you worse recently”, I wasn’t saying
If you ask her a direct question, I would take into account that this would more than likely engage her press secretary and might not get the logical answer you are looking for.
Yeah, I explained myself poorly. By ‘logical’ I meant the ‘rationalized’ explanation. It should at least tell me if she’s aware of the behaviour or not.
Really? Because if someone told me I wasn’t treating them well, I would apologize and make nice regardless of whether I’d been doing it intentionally. I think you are overestimating how well confronting her will work to inform you.
Think about (ahead of time) what response(s) you’d expect if it were all a misunderstanding and what response(s) you’d expect if it were deliberate. If there’s a lot of plausible overlap between the two worlds, you won’t learn very much, but you may make the whole thing more awkward by drawing attention to it.
I think you’re right: telling her is not especially informative, plus would surely modify her model of me and muddle the waters even more (I forgot to apply the principle that you disturb everything you measure). I think I’ll just tease her back and resort to telling her if and only if this escalates in a bad direction.
Y’know egocentric bias? Where people think the world revolves around them more than it does? I find that I often see my friend’s actions in terms of what they think of me, but I imagine that they’re in fact focused on me a lot less, so I would advise trying to discount that idea strongly. If it bothers you more, then just look at your options e.g. Mention it to her, don’t mention it to her, think of an experimental test for the hypothesis, etc. Then pick one. Otherwise… Worrying is of course useless if it isn’t motivating a useful action, so attempt not to.
Mention it to her, don’t mention it to her, think of an experimental test for the hypothesis, etc. Then pick one. Otherwise… Worrying is of course useless if it isn’t motivating a useful action, so attempt not to.
Yes, an experimental test is just what I want to create. That should be the useful action motivating my question.
I understand that not discounting for egocentric bias is a form of reduced Pascal’s wager: the small chance of a correlation of her behaviour with me specifically has a huge payoff, so I better devote careful effort to discern the probability of this being the case.
However, if the pattern continues, I think that the correlation becomes more and more probable.
I still think that people worry about what other people think of them more than is healthy, which is why I think the egocentric bias fix is important. If you can think of a test, try it if it worries you, but… Well, I don’t know. Perhaps I’m Other-Optimising too much.
There’s a woman that has recently started to treat me poorly, and I can’t figure out why. I would like help in designing the most efficient social experiment that helps me to solve this riddle.
If it’s not clear from the disclaimer above, this post is about a personal situation and contains details about the two persons involved and their feelings.
Some possibly useful background info: it’s about a year that we dance regularly together. I like her a lot and some months ago I have told her so, trying to be as level-headed as possible. She replied that she is still in love with the guy from her last relationship. We also talked about the fact that I’m polyamorous while she is strictly monogamous, so this situation could never evolve into a relationship. Aside from the occasional remainder that I like her and I find her attractive, there were no apparent ripercussions of those talkings: we kept on dancing together and being casual friends. In her own words, I’ve never made her feel uncomfortable.
However, it’s two weeks that I sense that she is treating me with contempt, and I have no idea why. It seems to me that nothing in our relationship has changed, and this tells me that my model of the situation is way off-track.
There were two specific occasions that triggered my self-respect alarm: in the first one, while we were dancing she said something like “I tripped and almost fell on you. Oh but you would be happy if I accidentally fell on you, right?”.
In the next occasion: while we were sorting for costumes provided by our dancing schools, I said “I’m going to need an XL size, the L size just doesn’t fit” to which she interjected “Oh no, you’re going to need a triple X size.”
These are some possible explanations:
she is not really treating me poorly. I’m being oversensitive and in her mind these were unrelevant remarks, or this is just some bizarre way of flirting or attracting my attention.
She is treating me poorly, but there’s no systemic reason behind: something totally unrelated put her in a bad mood on two occasions, and I just happened to be around.
She is treating me poorly, there’s a systemic reason behind, but it’s not related to me: the systemic version of the one above. She is in a bad mood for a recurring cause, wether it’s the tension for the incoming school performance or something else unrelated and for some reason I’m her preferred punching ball.
She is treating me poorly, there’s a systemic reason behind, and it’s related to me: I’ve read that a woman with low self-esteem may start to despise a guy who likes her. The reasoning goes along this line: “I’m worthless and he likes me, so he likes worthless things, he must be worthless too.”
Something else totally alien: an unkown variable or a constrain of the system I’ve never thought about, an “unknown unknown”.
I’ve layed the conundrum at your feet, let’s see if you can suggest a way to unravel it.
If you need more information ask here or in private and I’ll do my best to answer you.
ETA: changed “girl” to “woman”.
Here’s an intervention, rather than a test: If she says something that hurts your feelings again, just say, “I know you’re joking around, but that kind of hurts my feelings.”
Instead of informing your model, inform hers.
That is a simple and worthwhile point of view. It made me change my mind, as per comment above, so upvoted!
If it were me, I would just assume she was lightheartedly teasing. If that’s the case, the course of action would be to tease back, but also in a lighthearted way. Either that, or reply with an extremely exaggerated form of self-deprecation; agree with her teasing but in a way that exaggerates the original intent. Even if that’s not the case, and she’s being vindictive, I think responding as though she were teasing would be ideal anyway.
Examples:
“I tripped and almost fell on you. Oh but you would be happy if I accidentally fell on you, right?” (tease back): “Clumsy people don’t really do it for me” (exaggerate): “That’s because I have never had a woman touch me before in my life”
“Oh no, you’re going to need a triple X size.” (tease back): “I think you just like saying ‘triple X’. Get your mind out of the gutter, thanks” (exaggerate): “I’m going to cry myself to sleep over my size tonight ”
If she laughs and/or plays along with these responses, she’s probably just teasing. If she gets even more cruel in her response, then she’s probably being intentionally vindictive.
I’ll implement the ‘tease back’ strategy, plus I will also mention that I’ve noticed that she’s treating me worse than usual lately.
This way I’ll gather intel both from her emotional and logical reactions, and will try to make up a single model of the situation.
I am far from an expert in these matters, but would advise against both teasing back and saying explicitly that you interpret the teasing as “treating me worse than usual”.
[EDITED to add: To be clear, I mean “don’t do both of these together” rather than “both of these are individually bad ideas”.]
Why not both? What could go especially wrong?
Because one is playful and the other feels hostile. Doing both at once won’t give you a clear sense of what her response is to either. Do them in separate encounters.
Why is teasing back a bad idea?
Apparently even with my edit I wasn’t clear enough. Letting A be “tease back” and B be “mention that she seems to be treating you worse recently”, I wasn’t saying
“don’t do A, and don’t do B”
but was saying
“don’t both-do-A-and-do-B”.
If you ask her a direct question, I would take into account that this would more than likely engage her press secretary and might not get the logical answer you are looking for.
Yeah, I explained myself poorly. By ‘logical’ I meant the ‘rationalized’ explanation.
It should at least tell me if she’s aware of the behaviour or not.
Really? Because if someone told me I wasn’t treating them well, I would apologize and make nice regardless of whether I’d been doing it intentionally. I think you are overestimating how well confronting her will work to inform you.
Think about (ahead of time) what response(s) you’d expect if it were all a misunderstanding and what response(s) you’d expect if it were deliberate. If there’s a lot of plausible overlap between the two worlds, you won’t learn very much, but you may make the whole thing more awkward by drawing attention to it.
I think you’re right: telling her is not especially informative, plus would surely modify her model of me and muddle the waters even more (I forgot to apply the principle that you disturb everything you measure).
I think I’ll just tease her back and resort to telling her if and only if this escalates in a bad direction.
Y’know egocentric bias? Where people think the world revolves around them more than it does? I find that I often see my friend’s actions in terms of what they think of me, but I imagine that they’re in fact focused on me a lot less, so I would advise trying to discount that idea strongly. If it bothers you more, then just look at your options e.g. Mention it to her, don’t mention it to her, think of an experimental test for the hypothesis, etc. Then pick one. Otherwise… Worrying is of course useless if it isn’t motivating a useful action, so attempt not to.
Yes, an experimental test is just what I want to create. That should be the useful action motivating my question.
I understand that not discounting for egocentric bias is a form of reduced Pascal’s wager: the small chance of a correlation of her behaviour with me specifically has a huge payoff, so I better devote careful effort to discern the probability of this being the case.
However, if the pattern continues, I think that the correlation becomes more and more probable.
I still think that people worry about what other people think of them more than is healthy, which is why I think the egocentric bias fix is important. If you can think of a test, try it if it worries you, but… Well, I don’t know. Perhaps I’m Other-Optimising too much.
My probabilities for each scenario: 0.1 − 0.2 − 0.3 − 0.4 − 0.
After adjusting for egocentric bias, I’d say 0.2 − 0.2 − 0.3 − 0.3 − 0, even if this rings extremely wrong to my emotional brain.
In my experience, explicit declarations never work. You need to convey attraction subtextually.
Because of plausible deniability or some other factor? If I’m not mistaken, there were studies that showed we tend to like more people who like us.