Let’s talk about people who pretend to like things they don’t actually like

January 19, 2022

Let’s talk about people who pretend to like things they don’t actually like. I’ve been writing an article about why we downplay our successes recently, and it sent me off on a tangent. We’ve all done it, right? We’ve pretended to like something we don’t for the sake of conversation.

I’m not talking about telling a friend you like their outfit or your Grandad you like his new glasses. I’m talking about altering your personality to “fit in”. It’s something I used to do a lot more when I was younger. I think my entire taste in music is made up of bands I pretended to like (and then subsequently did end up liking) as a result of one boy or another.

Parenting reignited the need to “fit in”

As a parent, I sometimes find myself falling into that pattern again. I sway towards reading articles entitled “How much daytime sleep should your one-year-old be having?” or “What cup should my one-year-old be drinking out of?” Ultimately, I read these articles to make sure I’m doing the same as everyone else. I want to crowdsource the general consensus on which cup Isaac should be drinking out of and then follow it. Because, god forbid I select the wrong cup and everybody sees my poor child drinking from it at the next soft play meet-up.

I won’t be invited back. I’ll become that Mum who lets her son drink out of a cup designed specifically to rot children’s teeth.

It’s funny that it’s having children that reignites this feeling, because it’s probably as children ourselves that we first have this need to be like everyone else. If only I listened when people said it was really ok not to fit in.

Fitting in at school

When I was 13, my mum sent a letter to the coach driver (yes, I went to a fancy school) of the coach I got to school telling him I had to sit at the front because I got travel sick. Yes, this is true but GOOD LORD. In hindsight, it was mortifying. I sat at the front of the bus every single day with all the other unwanted teenagers. Somehow, I managed to find myself a boyfriend, who, after two days, dumped me because he found a girl he liked more at the back of the bus.

You cannot write this childhood melodrama.

Over the summer between year 8 and 9 I vowed to go back to school a different person. No more Miss front of the bus. I would sit at the back whether I was sick or not. I informed one of my more popular friends of my plan to sit with her at the back of the bus and even “get off of the coach at the boys school”, something only the cool girls did.

On my first day back in year 9, I sat at the back with my shorter skirt and my new found bravado and within minutes the coach driver halted the bus, came upstairs to find me and said: “your mum told me you need to sit at the front, come on…”

“No,” I exclaimed, because I was rebellious now and no more was to be said about it. I was cool now, and cool girls were not told what to do.

And so it began…

I was popular in school. I can say that now and hopefully it doesn’t sound like I’m blowing my own trumpet because I’m 31 and have since realised that being popular in school means absolutely bloody nothing. If I could offer any advice to the teenagers of today it would be to strive towards the opposite. Go and do whatever you like without the social conventions of being popular holding you back.

That need for acceptance is a basic human instinct, but it’s one that I valued above a lot of others. My love language is words of affirmation – what do you expect?

The ‘edition’ of myself at school was the cool girl, but at home I would play Titanic: Journey Through Time (the best computer game ever made FYI) for hours, I’d wrestle my brother (yes, we even made a wrestling ring), I’d listen to Blink 182 and Good Charlotte and mournfully glance at my baggy jeans (complete with chain) from a past life.

I joke, well, I did do all of those things but I wasn’t mournful about my previous exsistence. I wasn’t particularly unhappy with my choices at school, but I certainly presented a version of myself that wasn’t the same as the at home version of myself.

Is it ok to have different versions of ourselves?

The older I got, the more versions of myself appeared, and I started to see them less as a fake version of who I was, but more as nuances of my personality.

While having to change your likes for a boyfriend is not particularly healthy – or sustainable – going into a work meeting and acting more confident than you feel isn’t such a bad thing.

I suppose that’s what I’ve learnt over the years. It’s ok to have different versions of myself, as long as they aren’t making up large portions of my day and as long as they’re branches of my personality rather than entirely different trees. If you’re having to pretend to like things you don’t like to your partner – or really, anybody you live with – then you’re having to pretend for an awful lot of your day. If you’re nodding along in agreement when somebody tells you how much they like Succession (it’s me) when you in fact don’t like Succession (it’s my husband) then I think you’ll be ok.

What happens when you refuse to placate a situation?

We’ve all met people who unashamedly “tell it as it is”. I typically don’t get on with people like that. In some situations it’s great to tell it how it is, but also sometimes it’s nice to have a conversation without somebody disagreeing vehemently with every word you utter.

I guess what I’m saying here is that there’s a balance.

Being self-assured is a good trait, but bulldozing other people’s opinions because you feel so strongly about yours is not.

I read an interesting excerpt of a book called The Trouble with Goats and Sheep by Joanna Cannon lately: “As a society, we struggle to deal with the unusual and the unknown. We choose the ordinary over the extraordinary. In the quest for familiarity and reassurance, we reject those who highlight our differences, because those differences question our own choices and our own sense of belonging that we’ve been working on since the playground.”

There’s probably a little bit of “unbelonging” in all of us, Cannon says, but most of us attempt to disguise it.

My unbelonging

As I’m getting older, my aim is to let a little bit more of my unbelonging show. I think it’s empowering to embrace the differences we have. I love being a mum more than I love working, I love Taylor Swift and Blink 182 in equal measures (and yes, that is absolutely ok, school boyfriend and music snob), I would rather read a romance novel than a book that requires me to think.

Give me Paige Toon’s back catalogue any day of the week, please and thank you.

I love the Xbox (sniping on Call of Duty is my one true love), I also love Sex And The City, I like football and I like fashion. I could go on and on, but I think what I’m trying to say is that nobody fits into one box. We all have areas of our personality that could be classified as unusual to certain friends and completely normal to others.

So there you go, 2022. The year I bring back Titanic: Journey Through Time. I think I’ll skip wrestling my brother, though. It’d be embarrassing to knee drop a 28-year-old man to the floor.