The Everyday Complexities Of Saying Hello

It’s a familiar scene.  Man and woman go to a pub / restaurant / shoe shop.  They are served by another woman.  The man is friendly to the barmaid / waitress / assistant at first, but as their conversation continues this quickly turns to brusqueness, and ultimately he becomes distracted and almost uninterested.  As the couple sit down with their drinks / wait for their food / leave the shop, the first woman asks him what the hell’s wrong with him.  He protests that there’s nothing wrong and denies acting in any way strangely.  Things might escalate from here, or the incident may be filed away for later referral, or it may even be forgotten – but whatever happens, the man will insist that he was not acting strangely.  And in a way he wasn’t – he was just trying to deal with the situation.

Whenever a man is out with a female significant other and they come into contact with another woman, he has to balance three factors in his mind.  Firstly, this other woman is … well, a woman, and men generally behave differently with women; that’s just how it is.  Men will usually be a bit nicer, better behaved, and less likely to swear, burp or scratch themselves.  Secondly, the man will be aware that the significant other is there, witnessing his behaviour.  If she wasn’t, there would be much less of a problem.  Not because he wants to chat this barmaid / waitress / assistant up or say anything he shouldn’t – he just becomes very aware that she’s there and, naturally, instinctively and even unconsciously, evaluating his comportment with this woman.  So he knows that if he’s too friendly, this may not be appreciated.  Similarly, if he’s not friendly enough, it might be supposed that he’s hiding something, or even that he’s just being plain rude.  If he looks anywhere but in her eye, this could be construed as ogling.  But if he looks too much into her eyes, he may look robotic, as if trying not to ogle – or he may even seem to be captivated by her presence.

And this is where things start getting complicated.  There is the added third level of complexity.  Significant Other knows that he knows she’s watching him – and he knows that she knows that he knows this.  So anything he does, from the first thing he says to the barmaid / waitress / assistant, can need adjustment in several directions simultaneously.  And these directions can cancel each other out, or amplify each other, or take the whole thing in another direction.  The man can say hello in too polite a way, realise this and make his next utterance surly to compensate, only to realise his interlocutor is foreign and didn’t quite understand, so he feels bad and asks again more politely, then panics and pretends to check his watch.  And then there are the exogenous factors – what mood the barmaid / waitress / assistant is in, who else is in the bar / restaurant / shoe shop, whether the Significant Other has had her hair cut recently and how she feels about it.  All these have to be borne in mind with each move.  This is no longer a trip to the pub, restaurant or shoe shop – it’s monitoring a melting nuclear reactor, and there’s a poor chimp, on a unicycle juggling a tea-set, at the controls.

So next time your other half gets tongue tied over a pair of brogues, or orders a lager and lime for the first time ever, or chooses a vegetarian main course, remember – it’s not strange or suspicious, and it’s not indicative of anything but an average human mind trying to do the equivalent of three Rubik’s Cubes and a game of Vulcan 3-D chess simultaneously.  And have some sympathy.

Contact the author here: thewhy@morningquickie.com