Respect Begins in Acknowledging the Mystery of the Other

By guest writer Anna O’Neil

I’m the kind of woman who gets approving nods for being just the right kind of feminine. I’m not loud or pushy, and I’m confrontational only when my life literally depends on it. I dress in a way that renders me nearly invisible, and I’m a young looking, stay-at-home, visibly pregnant wife. Who does crafts.

I used to think I was just naturally virtuous for having traits like these. Everybody else seemed to think so, after all. Turns out, it’s just my personality, and it comes with challenges of its own. Where I’m not confrontational, I can be repressive. Where I’m not opinionated, I can be co-dependent. There’s no one personality that’s inherently better than another, and when I’ve tried to be somebody else, I’ve had no success at all.  So if I’m going to have any self-respect, it has to be grounded in who I am. I’m still trying to figure out who that is.

Anyway, people size me up pretty quickly when they meet me. I’ve had a number of contractors at my house in the past few weeks, and they’ve made it pretty clear who they think I am.

One of them joked, “I don’t usually try to explain things to wives!” He wanted to know about my plans for our family’s size. “Oh, a boy and a girl! Will you be done after this one?” One of them repeatedly called me honey, and only talked to me about my baby bump or my toddler. Neither made eye contact.

The Power to Diminish

These men, they didn’t mean badly, or do anything egregious. They didn’t make me angry–although that may have been a healthier reaction. But they did leave me feeling–reduced, I guess is the word. When the boiler man left, he left me with a feeling that I probably couldn’t understand the inner working of my boiler, whether or not I tried. After each man left, I was surprised to find myself wishing my husband were home to field questions and be the adult.

It was subtle. I didn’t even realize how I felt, till I ran into somebody different. The first thing I noticed was that this fellow did make eye contact. Didn’t even reference my gigantic belly, except to say that we probably didn’t need any extra expenses these days. Didn’t constantly reference my husband, didn’t dumb down his language when he explained himself.  If you can believe it–I hardly could–he acted as though I was in charge of the decisions for the house, given that I was the adult who was home.

I’m sorry, I don’t know if this doesn’t seem like anything special to you. It’s borderline outrageous how special it was to me. I spent two days trying to articulate what was different, before I realized that all I’d encountered was basic human respect, and that I just…hadn’t been neatly labeled and boxed by a stranger. Who knew strangers mattered so much?

I recently found myself in a room full of educated, older men, at the end of a lecture I’d attended. I came into the conversation late, and they obligingly made room for my pregnant self on the couch. My hair wasn’t clean, and I was keeping half an eye on my toddler, so he wouldn’t knock the cracker tray over. I hadn’t been planning on joining the conversation. Like a lot of women, I’m pretty disinclined to draw attention to myself when I know I look like crap. But I could feel my self-confidence circling the drain, and knew exactly how I’d end up feeling if I gave in to that habit, so I spoke up anyway. I was startled by the subtle change in the room. People looked at me with surprise and respect. They started to make eye contact. Little changes, but real ones. For my part, I began to remember that my brain works even when my hair is greasy. I left that day feeling better about myself than I had in weeks.

Making Assumptions

I’ve seen other women go through real hurt on account of what strangers assume. One woman I knew, who was as gentle and sweet as everyone assumed I was, happened to have a large chest, and difficult-to-hide cleavage. Every guy who met her figured she was looking for a boyfriend. That other woman, who was heavy, but also quite tall? You could see the men stop listening when she spoke. I know women who can’t get their doctors to take them seriously, because they’re not articulate, or they have a strong local accent, or they commit the egregious sin of showing their emotions.

My own stories are from my experience as a young woman among older men, but this isn’t specifically a “men are like this” problem. It’s a human problem, because it’s a respect problem. I do exactly the same thing. I constantly catch myself making all kinds of ugly assumptions about people based on the most minimal external characteristics. I honestly don’t know how often I fail to notice those judgements, and who suffers for it, or how.

I get respect from the people in my life who matter most to me, and I’m grateful for that. But I’m starting to understand the dent that the attitudes of perfect strangers can make in my own self-respect. Sometimes it’s more than a dent. Sometimes it’s a smoking crater. It’s alarming how easy it is to internalize the assumptions of others.

It’s funny. These judgments are a habit we all struggle with, but the solution is hardly a head scratcher. Just humility, that’s all we need. The humility to look at a person and understand that you don’t know who they are, to acknowledge, even just to yourself, that the other is a mystery. It’s true of the people you pass on the street, and it’s true of your spouse, even true of your children.

Respect begins with an acknowledgement of this mystery, and anything less can do real and lasting damage to the human being across from you.

image credit: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Face_or_vase_7741.svg