Respect Zoned

You don't necessarily get respect by being "nice". It is a bit like being friend-zoned

I clearly remember my aunt once telling me about another (more distant) relative, “yes, she may not be very intelligent. But by nature she is a very nice person”. “That is all alright”, I remember replying, “but I just can’t get much respect for her”.

This is NOT a post about intelligence. This is about niceness and respect, that stemmed out of a discussion with my wife earlier this evening where we were speaking about a lot of people we know.

What I realised through the discussion was that the amount of respect I have for someone is not at all correlated with their perceive niceness. Yes, if someone has been nasty to me, I have no respect for them at all, but apart for this (not insignificant) boundary condition, that someone is generally considered nice doesn’t make me respect them more.

In some sense, this is similar to schoolboy romances. The amateur boys (I was admittedly one such for a very long time) assume that simply being nice to a girl will make her like you. They have been misled by a multitude of movies where the nice hero wins over the girl while the more flashy, but occasionally nasty, villain loses out. However, this is not how it ends up in real life - there is only one place where the nice guy ends up - in the “friend zone”.

Similar to friendzoning in “young relationships”, you have the respect zone (I don’t like this phrase - it ‘s actually the opposite, but it’s too late in the evening to rephrase now) when it comes to all kinds of interactions. Like in a romantic relationship where simply being nice is not enough to get someone’s “love”, in all other kinds of bilateral interactions, simply being nice is not enough to get the other person’s respect.

Respect is given when the other person has been seen as “having done” something. This could be a professional achievement. This could be pulling through a tough situation in the face of adversity. This could simply be taking good care of yourself and appearing sorted in life (where you have “achieved” the task of putting yourself in a good situation).

A reputation as a “nice guy” does not amount to having done anything in particular. And in the absence of any clear or tangible “achievements” (note that I’m using this word loosely here, including things like self-care), just being a nice guy does not get you respect.

There is this school of thought, again possibly fuelled by popular literature and media, that glorifies sacrifice. Some people might think that doing stuff for others, at their own cost, ought to get them respect. However, the issue with this is that rather than respect, this kind of selflessness can also drive pity. And once you’ve felt pity for someone it is absolutely impossible to feel respect for them.

Again this is similar to romantic relationships! The moment someone has felt pity for you, you can be assured of your place in their friend zone.

So, if you find that you are not getting someone’s respect, or romantic attention, being nice to them is not going to win you any favours. This is NOT to say that you should be nasty - since that assures that you’ll neither be respect-zoned nor respected, but that niceness won’t help. What helps is to show that you have “done something”, which could be as simple as taking care of yourself.

On a tangent, people massively underestimate the value of taking care of themselves. Again, people think that sacrificing their own interests might make them “noble”, without realising that this doesn’t necessarily get them respect!

PS: I’m sure I’ve written about this before, but I find it incredibly hard to get along with people with an overly “nice” reputation. I find incredible pressure to be (in turn) nice to them, which means I can’t “play my natural game” with them, and that makes it uncomfortable for me to hang out with them.