I believe that the only people who are completely comfortable with society are narcissists or sociopaths. After all, the easiest way to get through life with a feeling that your behavior is acceptable is not to care at all. On the other side of the spectrum are those who are too much; they can become paralyzed with fear when they are in situations where they are not sure what to do. How do you decide?
One guy that I know went to a wedding that had a 40s swing era theme. I was also there and had spent a couple of years practicing my swing dancing so I wasn’t particularly concerned about making an utter fool of myself. That was good, because there were some competition swing dancers among the guests – anyone who was going to get in a battle of egos was going to be crushed. When the music came up and everyone started lindyhopping their brains out, my friend proceeded to go out, with perfect aplomb, and do some weird mix of tango and lindyhop and god knows what else. I realized in an instant that he simply did not give a shit; for him “fun” was dancing not dancing the way he was expected to. I still wonder about that – was that a demonstration of sociopathic behavior, or was it extreme self-confidence? All the mean while, I was worrying about staying on the beat, not slamming into someone, not falling over – the basic stuff. I was not having fun at all; I was working hard.
I want to say I learned a lot from that experience, except really I came away with more questions than answers. Like: what is the purpose of doing this at all? Why do we want to ‘be good at’ things where ‘being good at’ the thing may not matter at all? Does the attendee of a party have a duty to conform with the expectations of the host? I know some people who have social anxiety that is so extreme that they would never be able to dance in public. This stuff is not hypothetical to them, at all – the potential ‘fun’ is dwarfed by the fear of the potential cost of failure. But what is ‘failure’ in the context of drunkenly dancing at a wedding?
All of that said, this is one of my favorite pieces of music, ever. It’s deliciously “meta-” and the performance is really good, but mostly it’s sweet, and fun, and interesting. And it’s actually a pretty dance-able waltz! When I used to waltz, my partner and I practiced to this one all the time. I hope you enjoy it: Waltz of the Wallflowers by Small Potatoes.
There are a variety of performances of this song on youtube but I think that the studio recording is the best. I’ve always wanted to see a couple of top-notch ballroom dancers do a rendering of it.
The subtitle of the song is “A Dysfunctional Duet” but wouldn’t someone who was truly dysfunctional not care what other people thought? I see social anxiety as a matter of caring too much; I’ve known people with social anxiety (I have a fair bit of it myself, which is why I was studying swing dance in the first place!) and it seems to me that often they are hyper-concerned with things that other people don’t worry about at all. One of the things I have noticed is that most people hardly notice the people around them, so worrying too much about what others think about you is wasted effort.
Her: “I hate this scar on my forehead. Do you think I’m ugly?”
Me: “No. I have this great big scar on my forehead, and two big lines of stitches on my chin. Do you think I’m ugly?”
Her: “It’s different because you’re a guy.”
Me: “Why?”
Perhaps social anxiety is what makes civilization work.
I’m just glad this particular song has a happy ending.
I know from experience that being able to dance freely like that isn’t just a personality thing, context matters a lot too. When I’m out with friends I get all of those same anxieties you describe and I get much more of my enjoyment from the company than the dancing. But when I go out alone, to some place where I don’t know anyone, all of that stops mattering and I don’t care anymore, I’ll dance just the way I like it and I’ll love every minute of it.
I’m definitely on the lower half of the confidence scale, and I’m pretty sure I’m not a sociopath, but I can still dance like that given the right circumstances. That realisation has led me to a lot of interesting parties over the years, I can tell you that!
After all, the easiest way to get through life with a feeling that your behavior is acceptable is not to care at all.
Interesting thought. I suffer from the same social conformity issues ( One never wears brown shoes with a blue suit) but on somewhat larger issues, say gay marriage, my response is “Je m’en fous”.
I used to worry about looking like a fool dancing at clubs/ weddings/ etc. until I realised that unless you’re in a room of people who all know the steps to a dance, then everyone looks a little foolish. Now I dance what feels fun and don’t worry about looking like a fool.
Of course, context matters, and if the dancing is the focus of the event, then I’ll sit back and let the trained dancers go at it, but generally at a wedding or at a club, the dancing isn’t the important thing, having a good time is.
“was that a demonstration of sociopathic behaviour”
No, because he wasn’t doing the equivalent of wearing bright pink polka dots to a funeral, what he was doing sounds entirely in line with the expectations of the event. It’s a wedding, the expectation is that you have a good time. The 40s dance theme is just to give a broad outline to the fun.
The song is great. That’s really clever.
I’m not a dancer but I have an out. Since the Partner is a professional musician, whenever I go to hear live music I nearly always have also helped haul the equipment and set it up, sometimes even tuning guitars etc. That means people identify me as “the roadie” or sometimes just “with the band”. I usually get free drinks and can sit and read about genetics or knit or whatever and enjoy things from the wall. That, I can handle with aplomb, unlike dancing.
I think my biggest social anxiety thing these days is that some idiot will take a picture of me and turn me into a nasty internet meme.
On the dance front, I guess I worry about being viewed like Elaine’s dance on Seinfeld, so I don’t dance. On the other hand, one of my most memorable nights out was watching this utterly uninhibited lesbian couple dancing. It was a slow dance, and all the other couples were dutifully performing the expected two-step zombie sway. But these two were double-timing it, still perfectly with the beat, but like they were dancing to the Pointer Sisters’ Neutron Dance, leaping and kicking, arms and legs flailing with coordinated abandon (they were very good dancers). It was an absolute joy to watch them. But there’s no way I’d ever be able to do such a thing myself.
Not knowing your friend, I cannot answer about him, but I am also the kind of person who does the same, and I can explain how it was for me.
Some years ago I used to be just as self-conscious as everybody else. I used to worry what others thought about me. Then I experienced various events that forced me to adapt—I had to get used to humiliation to the point where I stopped caring about social norms or how others perceive me. After moving to Germany, I immediately joined my new university’s debate club. At that time, I couldn’t put together a grammatically correct sentence in German. I even struggled to get my ideas across. And of course, all the debates were in German. Up until then I was very competitive about debating, I wanted to win. In Germany, I immediately realized that winning debates was impossible for me, because I had to debate in a language that I didn’t know particularly well at that time. That’s when I decided that I will be debating for fun instead. I had to stop caring about sounding clueless and making stupid mistakes. And it wasn’t just debating. If I wanted to have a social life (I did), I had to accept that I was going to routinely make a fool out of myself by trying to communicate in a language that I barely knew.
After living in Germany for two months and getting using to sounding clueless every single time I opened my mouth, I realized that I don’t want to live as a woman any longer. The first time I entered a men’s clothing store, I was very nervous and self-conscious. After a while I just got used to it. I was wearing the wrong clothes, looking totally inappropriate for the gender I was assigned at birth, every day I butchered the language I had to speak. Ultimately behaving inappropriately just became normal for me after a while. I started doing it more often, also in the kind of situations where I wasn’t forced to break some social norm, instead I did that as a choice. Whenever guests visit me at my home, I don’t provide any food for them, instead I warn my friends in advance to bring their own snacks with them. I totally disregard the dating etiquette, instead I just directly ask for sex when I want to. And so on.
By now, I have developed both extreme self-confidence and on top of that I have also partially stopped caring what other people think about me. For example, many women who have hairy legs wear pants all the time in order to hide their body hair. I used to do exactly that some years ago. Nowadays I regularly wear shorts during summer. I know that some people perceive hairy female legs as disgusting (they also perceive crossdressing as wrong and being genderqueer as evil). The knowledge that some people who see me perceive me as disgusting does not bother me. I have stopped caring about that. I don’t know whether it’s appropriate to call my attitude “sociopathic” though. On top of that, there’s also the self-confidence—I am comfortable with who I am and my sense of self-worth isn’t going to get dented by another person disapproving of my behavior.
Not worrying about how others perceive me seems like the rational thing to do for me. Dancing isn’t my thing, but when I’m hanging out with other people I primarily care about enjoying myself. During social interactions I will do what feels comfortable for me. If somebody disapproves of my behavior, that’s not a big loss, because I don’t want as friends people who are prejudiced or judgmental. Instead I will just spend my time with friends who are fine with who I am. I worry about how other people will perceive me only when I’m at work. My clients or employers liking me is important, because otherwise I won’t get their money. Other than that, whatever. You are already retired, you literally don’t need to worry about other people liking you enough to hire you.
By the way, my bet is that people who observed your friend’s crazy dancing skills didn’t look at him with contempt due to his bad dancing, instead they were admiring his self-confidence. At least this is how most people reacted to my miserable attempts to debate in German.
If I attend some party for the sake of having fun, then a “failure” would be spending an evening without having fun.
If I attend some party for the sake of selling my art to prospective clients, then a “failure” would be not being liked by any of the people I needed to impress.
Yep, it’s so true that other people generally do not care about you.
When I realized that I wanted to live as a guy, I first agonized about what will happen with my social life. I also feared that I won’t be able to get laid. In retrospect, I see my worries as silly. Heterosexual men aren’t picky. They will jump on anything that even remotely resembles a human female. Women obsessing over their looks is such wasted effort. Sure, online lots of men make proclamations like “I like big boobs,” or “I like women who wear dresses and high heels.” Maybe a few of them really are that picky. But in practice it turned out that my absolute lack of femininity in no way interfered with my ability to get laid. Why was I even worrying?
Moreover, people in general do not pay much attention to others. Usually nobody cares about my fashion choices, the flaws of my body, my dancing skills, or whatever else. I used to fear that crossdressing could cause me problems due to people not accepting my lifestyle choices, but it turned out that nobody is paying attention.
@Andreas Avester, #6: your story reminds me of a neighbor I once had. She had problems with her teeth so she went to a dentist and had every last tooth in her head pulled. Then she got a full set of dentures. However when I was talking to her, after her recovery, she kept holding her hand in front of her mouth as she talked and I asked her why. She told me that these days, people expect you to look good, and she felt her dentures did not look good and people would be offended. I told her, what everyone is thinking about is what they are going to say next, and NOT about whatever the person they are talking to looks like and in fact sometimes fail to take in what they look like. No one will care about your teeth, I said. They will only care about how *they* will seem to others. I don’t know if she took my advice as shortly afterwards we moved very far away from that area and I have never spoken with her again. But I stand by what I said: people are obsessed with how *they* appear and a surprising amount of time, they don’t pay the slightest attention to how other people appear.
kestrel @#7
My own teeth are crooked. My mother wanted me to get braces and straighten my teeth, but I didn’t like the idea of enduring pain. As a teen I adamantly refused having my teeth straightened, because I just didn’t want to be in pain. By now I have developed a personal principle that I refuse to endure pain for the sake of beauty. Even back when I was still living as a woman I refused to wax my legs, because that’s painful. I reluctantly shaved my body hair when I needed to appear in public in a dress, but waxing, hell no. The idea of suffering pain for the sake of pleasing other people just seemed very wrong for me. Anyway, not having straight teeth in no way disturbs my daily life, it’s not like I have a problem with chewing. I don’t even see my teeth that often, because, in general, I don’t spend much time in front of mirrors. Therefore, if I did get my teeth fixed, that would be purely for the sake of pleasing others. And, well, I just don’t care that much about pleasing others. Anyway, having crooked teeth feels like a trivial problem for me right now, because I have another much bigger problem with my body—it is too damn feminine, and I don’t like it.
This reminds me another story. I have done some photography for a living. Once I was hired by a 32 years old guy who needed a portrait photo (for his job). He looked perfectly normal, just an average young man. After the photo session we were reviewing images, and he kept pointing out how in most of the photos his ears looked too large. My only reaction was, “WFT? Your ears are perfectly normal.” Nonetheless, I still used Photoshop to make his ears smaller just to make him happy.
Something bugged me about your formulation here, and I realized what exactly it was only now.
Both narcissists and sociopaths do care about whether other people see their behavior as acceptable. A narcissist, by definition, wants everybody else to admire them. This means they care about how other people perceive them. A sociopath, on the other hand, wants to manipulate and abuse everybody else. Manipulating other people requires first making sure that they like you, it requires maintaining a likeable façade.
Here’s the problem, whenever you worry about whether your dancing skills are good enough for dancing in public, when you worry about that ugly scar on your face, when you worry about others noticing your crooked teeth, you aren’t worrying about hurting their feelings. We all know well enough that the sight of bad dancing or a facial scar isn’t going to hurt another person. At the core of social anxiety isn’t a worry that you might accidentally hurt or offend another person. Instead it’s worrying about how you might accidentally damage your own reputation in other people’s eyes. Will others think less of me, because I’m a bad dancer? Will others perceive my body as ugly or disgusting? Will they dislike me? All of these worries aren’t about other people’s wellbeing. Instead, this is an essentially narcissistic desire to be liked by other people. It’s a desire to be respected, to be seen as a worthy member of your tribe, a desire to belong.
By letting go of my social anxiety I didn’t become more sociopathic. I didn’t stop caring about other people’s wellbeing. Instead I stopped caring about how I look in their eyes.
How do I decide whether my behavior is acceptable? Is that action I’m contemplating doing going to hurt another person? Some actions (like murder or bigotry) are harmful for other people. If I conclude that I might actually hurt another person, I try to not do said action. Me dancing in public despite being a bad dancer isn’t going to hurt other people. Same goes for me wearing male clothes. Or me living with crooked teeth. These actions cannot actually hurt another person, they can only damage another person’s perception of me. Therefore it’s not that I don’t care about others, instead it’s just that I don’t worry about how they perceive me. Here’s why I stopped caring: (1) if some person looks down on me because of superficial things like my fashion choices, then they are a shallow or bigoted person whose opinion I don’t need to take into consideration; (2) I have enough self-confidence that my self-image and self-esteem won’t get dented by somebody disliking me; I can survive a bit of social disapproval.
The way the OP is written, it’s as if it were imagining everyone dances somehow, sometime.
Nope. Not everyone.
(Dancing is silly)
Andreas,
To others?
Easy.
After the fact, you can determine whether or not it was accepted. Simple.
Before the fact, you have to extrapolate from circumstances and previous experience.
Doable, mostly.
John Morales #11
You are so weird.
I know, chigau. Normal people paint their faces, carry bits of metal or of stone for decoration, perfume themselves (!), and so forth. And they dance.
Just pointing out not doing so may have nothing to do with social anxiety.
[levity]
This is how I see dancing.
(love that scene; a better one would be the “happy happy joy joy” Ren & Stimpy episode, but too oblique)
I’m with John Morales, I can’t see a point in dancing. Whenever it comes up I don’t know what I’m doing, why I’m meant to be doing it, or how to do it. Plus everyone else is usually drunk, which makes it worse
Anyway, as heavily tattooed queer trans woman most people who care too much about social conformity already don’t want to deal with me. The non-arseholes just excuse weird behaviour provided it doesn’t hurt anyone
The reason I dance is because it feels good, for me some music seems to go with some moves and putting the two together just feels good.
Jazzlet, exactly. If it feels good, do it. If it feels silly, why do it?
(I mean, I could goose-step around were it to feel good, but it also feels (and looks) silly)
Thanks. That’s a fabulous song.
I love to dance, but I have 2 left feet. I’ve taken dancing lessons twice in my life. Once in my early twenties and then again, with my husband, in my 40’s. Both times I really couldn’t get it.
But I love to dance, so I do. Mr. V has mostly learned to escape my stumbling feet on the slow stuff and on the fast stuff I just keep with the beat and let myself go. I consider that uninhibited, not sociopathic. It’s a different kind of not caring and it’s probably related to self-confidence and possibly related to personality type.