When Being “Nice” Becomes a Problem

Being nice is generally a good thing. Most of us would rather move through the world as considerate people than as people who make everyone else's day more difficult. We help when we can, make accommodations for people we care about, overlook minor annoyances, change plans occasionally, and sometimes do things we would rather not do simply because they matter to someone else. Relationships would be fairly miserable if nobody ever inconvenienced themselves for another person.

The problem is not kindness. The problem begins when kindness slowly becomes a job.

It can happen so gradually that we barely notice it. We become the person who will probably say yes, so people learn to ask us first. We are good at smoothing things over, so we become the one expected to keep the peace. We don't want someone to feel left out, disappointed, angry, or inconvenienced, so we adjust ourselves before anyone has even asked us to. Eventually, we may become remarkably good at anticipating what everyone else needs while becoming surprisingly uncertain about what we need ourselves.

This is often described as people-pleasing, although I think that term sometimes makes a complicated pattern sound almost trivial. It can suggest someone who simply wants everyone to like them. Certainly that can be part of it, but there are many reasons people become highly accommodating. Sometimes it developed in a family where conflict was unpredictable and reading the room was useful. Sometimes approval was closely connected to being helpful or agreeable. Sometimes a person simply discovered that life went more smoothly when they did not object very often. And sometimes it grows out of genuinely admirable qualities: empathy, generosity, loyalty, and an ability to see another person's point of view.

None of those qualities needs to disappear.

What may need examination is the assumption that being a good person requires us to prevent other people from experiencing discomfort. That is a much larger assignment than kindness, and it is an impossible one.

Other people will occasionally be disappointed by us. They may disagree with our decisions, wish we were more available, prefer that we spend our time differently, or feel frustrated when we cannot provide something they want. In healthy relationships, those moments do not automatically indicate that someone has behaved badly. Two people can care deeply about each other and still want different things.

Yet for someone accustomed to keeping others comfortable, another person's disappointment can feel like a problem requiring immediate repair. We explain. Then we explain the explanation. We offer alternatives we do not really want to offer. We soften a no until it begins to sound suspiciously like a maybe. Sometimes we finally agree to the original request and tell ourselves it was easier that way.

It probably was easier, at least for the next ten minutes.

The difficulty is what happens when this becomes the usual way we manage relationships. Repeatedly ignoring our own limits does not make those limits disappear. Time remains finite. Energy remains finite. Patience, attention, money, emotional capacity, and the number of things one human being can reasonably accomplish in a day all remain finite. When we routinely promise more than those resources can support, something eventually absorbs the cost.

Sometimes that cost appears as resentment. We may find ourselves irritated with people for asking things of us even though we continue saying yes. That is an uncomfortable realization because the other person may not even know there is a problem. If we have consistently communicated that something is fine, they may reasonably believe us. Resentment can sometimes be an indication that another person is taking advantage of us, but it can also be useful information that we have repeatedly agreed to something we did not actually want to agree to.

That distinction matters because boundaries are not only something we establish in response to unreasonable people. Perfectly decent people can become accustomed to patterns that work well for them. We can participate in creating those patterns by agreeing, accommodating, volunteering, and making ourselves available. Changing the pattern does not necessarily mean someone has been the villain. It may simply mean an arrangement that once worked—or that we once tolerated—does not work anymore.

There is also an important difference between kindness and avoidance. Kindness considers another person's feelings because those feelings matter. Avoidance tries to manage another person's feelings because their discomfort makes us uncomfortable. From the outside, the two can look remarkably similar. Both may involve saying yes, compromising, helping, or remaining quiet. The difference is often found in what happens inside us: whether we are making a choice or trying to prevent a reaction.

Perhaps a useful question, then, is not simply, Am I being nice? It is whether we still experience ourselves as having a choice.

There will always be times when we choose to inconvenience ourselves for people we love. We may sit beside someone when we are exhausted, rearrange a day because somebody needs us, take on more than our fair share during a difficult season, or simply do something we do not particularly enjoy because it brings someone else happiness. Healthy boundaries do not require relationships to become a perfectly balanced exchange in which nobody ever gives more than the other.

They do, however, leave room for choice.

When kindness is chosen freely, it can be one of the best parts of being connected to other people. When it is driven primarily by fear of conflict, guilt, obligation, or the belief that everyone else's comfort is ours to maintain, it begins to ask something very different of us. Learning to recognize that difference may be one of the more important parts of setting boundaries, because the goal was never to become less kind. It was to make sure kindness did not require disappearing from our own lives.

~Chris