Friendly Competition May Help All
Dear Miss Manners: Our family is a selfish, self-centered bunch. I feel we don’t know how to go out or come in our home. It is a constant pattern of stress and conflict. I feel we don’t know how to be civil. And I see this all as a repeat pattern from my own childhood. It seems whenever I enter the house, I start issuing orders: “Pick up… Put away… Do… Do… Do…”
If the children ask a question and get an answer they don’t like, they nag, whine, complain and even threaten disobedience. I know it is learned behavior. We too often give in.
My husband and I are in competition almost all the time. We disagree about many things concerning the kids, and we often do this in front of them. All of this may stem from reacting, rather than thinking and taking time to talk to each other first.
The strange thing is that we are a solid, one-marriage family. Our kids are approaching college age - that is how long we have been married.
On one hand, I think it is too late to change so much (our table manners are awful); on the other, we can change anything if we want to, can’t we? Can I? How can I learn new mannerly ways of behaving with a group of people who will resist? How can I practice and remember and keep from being sucked back into my old bad habits? I really want to change the very fabric of our chaotic life.
Gentle reader: Miss Manners would imagine that you do. Your household, as you describe it, cannot be a warm refuge from the vicissitudes of life, although she trusts that there are compensating pleasures you have omitted from this account.
Oddly enough, your own behavior, which prevented you from teaching them manners when they were small, could encourage them to learn with you now. An admission that you are all to blame, and you all also suffer from the resulting atmosphere, is the basis on which to suggest that you make a joint fresh start.
What will overcome their resistance is the anxiety you can stir up about the near future. Suppose their college roommates refuse to put up with them? Suppose they get on the nerves of the people with whom they fall in love? And suppose you and your husband are left alone in unrelieved disharmony?
The greatest incentive will be to outdo one another in the new behavior, and to catch one another’s mistakes. Miss Manners therefore urges you to make your first household etiquette rule a polite and sportsmanlike way of pointing out violations of the other rules.
Dear Miss Manners: I find almost all the residents in my luxury apartment building cordial and polite, but there is one woman who has unnerved me.
It began three years ago, when I was new in the building. I stepped into the elevator and said hello and she simply glared. Although I seldom see her, when we do meet she offers the same treatment.
My conduct on an elevator is to speak and then move to the back and stare at the floor until I reach my destination, but this woman stares at me for the entire ride and never speaks, coming or going.
I have thought of all types of responses - whistling or humming to myself, staring back, clearing my throat, scratching - but so far, I have limited myself to “no recognition” - head high, simply looking into space.
What would divert her attention from me without my being intimidated or feeling foolish?
Gentle reader: What would intimidate her is the type of response you have not tried for the last three years - a polite greeting. Miss Manners suggests a firm and pleasant “Good morning, Mrs. Whifflepoof,” after which you will turn your attention away from her, whether or not she replies. Two or three doses of this, and she will either murmur a reply or start using the stairs.