The Truest Thing I Think About You, I've Only Said to Strangers
Beneath the Surface · By Ali Daudji ·
I can give a stranger a fluent, specific account of why my oldest friend is a remarkable person. I have done it at dinners and in passenger seats, to people who will never meet him. The words arrive without effort. He notices when a room has gone still around someone and moves toward that person before anyone else has clocked it. He remembers the name of your dog and the year your father was sick. I could go on.
I have never said a word of it to him.
Not because I don't mean it, and not, if I am honest, because I assume he already knows, though that is the line I would reach for if you pressed me. The real reason is smaller and less flattering. In the second it would take to say the thing to his face, something happens that does not happen when I say it to a stranger. I get self-conscious. Will it come out right. Will it sound like I am angling for something. Will he do the deflecting thing people do, so that we both end up standing in the wreckage of a sentence that landed a little wrong. And so the compliment finds its way to everyone in the world except the person it is actually about.
Two researchers went looking for why we do this. Erica Boothby and Vanessa Bohns, in a set of studies published in 2021, sent people out to pay a small, genuine compliment to a stranger, and asked them first to predict how it would go. The predictions were wrong, reliably, in the same direction every time. People underestimated how good their compliment would make the other person feel. They overestimated how awkward and bothered the other person would be to receive it. In one study the people receiving the compliments put their discomfort at about two and a half on a seven point scale, down near not at all. The people giving them had guessed a four. The bad reaction we go silent to spare someone is, most of the time, a thing we are inventing on their behalf.
Then Boothby and Bohns added a second group. Outside observers, people who would not be giving any compliment themselves, only guessing how the recipient would take one. The observers were right. They came very close to what the recipients actually felt. It was only the person actually about to speak who guessed low. And what threw that person off, the researchers found, was not a lack of information. It was their own nerves.
The gap between a right guess and a wrong one had nothing to do with knowing the other person. The observers knew less. The difference was that one of them had to do something and the other only had to watch. When you are the one who has to say it, you stop thinking about the other person somewhere around the word "you," and start thinking about yourself. Am I doing this well. Is this weird. We get preoccupied with our own competence, with pulling the compliment off cleanly, while the person on the receiving end was never grading our delivery. They were just standing there being told something good about themselves, which is one of the rarer things that happens to a grown adult.
With my friend, I lose my nerve and call it tact. He is nowhere in that decision. A stranger with nothing at stake can see straight through to what I cannot: that the sentence I am swallowing would be the best thing to reach him all week.
He has never heard any of it. He does not know that he is, to me, the one who moves toward whoever a room has gone still around. That is a strange thing to be to someone, and never be told.
He is only the clearest case. It gets worse the closer you are, not better. With the people closest to us we lay a second, more confident error on top of the first. We tell ourselves they already know. Of course she knows I think she is the funniest person I have ever sat beside. Except I would have to go back years to find the last time I said so. "They already know" is the most comfortable guess we make, because it asks nothing of us, and like the others it is usually wrong. The people we have loved longest are often running on the oldest information, a thing said so many years ago it has faded the way a sign fades once you have stopped reading it because you pass it every day.
A plain, accurate compliment does something the flattering kind never does. The flattering ones slide off. The accurate ones name a thing you cannot see from the inside, and they stay for years. Someone tells you that you explain things as though you actually want to be understood, not to look clever, and you find yourself returning to it long after you have forgotten who said it. What we withhold when we withhold the admiring thing is a piece of a person's self-knowledge that only we are standing at the right angle to hand them.
So I have started to treat the urge to say nothing as the tell it is. When I catch myself describing someone's best quality to a person who will never meet them, I take it as the signal that the sentence is ready and aimed at the wrong face. Whoever once named the thing I could not see in myself will probably never know how far the remark traveled, or how often I have gone back to it. It costs the person saying it a few seconds of nerve. It gives the person hearing it a fact about their own life they had no other way to reach. We keep deciding the nerve is the expensive part.