How to Love People When They Bug The Living Hell Out of You
A Sampling of Answers from Writers and Thinkers Who've Pondered the Problem
People annoy me.
I say this with shame, as I’m plenty aware that I’m plenty annoying. My family, for instance, can attest to how annoying it is when I provide loud and unsolicited commentary on whatever stupid TV show they happen to be watching. Friends and colleagues can tell you about my annoying penchant for always showing up ten minutes past any agreed-upon time. And I consistently annoy drivers with my hesitancy about turning left against traffic on a busy road (How many men have I hastened towards their first heart attack with my dithering? Legions.)
Quite frankly, I annoy myself. You’d think this self-awareness would make me scads more charitable towards my likewise-annoying fellow human being, yet it doesn’t. I’m like the person the Elder describes in The Brothers Karamazov: I love humanity in general, but not in particular.
Surprisingly, it’s not the bigger stuff that does me in. I’m able to love people despite their shows of temper or fits of pique, their self-absorption or tendency to despair. It’s the little flaws and quirks that slay me. For instance, I have this crazy Uncle Max who is compelled to tell whoever will listen about the last spy thriller he read – and when I say “about”, I mean recount it, from beginning to end, covering every minor plot point and throw-away character. Five minutes into one of his summaries and I feel something akin to murderous rage. I once volunteered for Meals on Wheels and, while the majority of those I served were wonderful, the remainder were so imperious, so nasty about when you arrived with their meals and so finicky about their temperature and consistency, that I came dangerously close to telling one granny exactly where she could shove the chicken pot pie I’d just delivered. It’s these small annoyances, experienced day after day, that I allow to chip away and erode not only my capacity to love, but my desire to love.
And yet I believe God wants me to love annoying people. How? As a kid, I tried to suss out the answer while attending services as an invited guest at my friends’ Evangelical churches. I heard lots of sermons about how, once you fully accept Jesus into your heart, you become so suffused, so replete with divine love that it spills from you like an overflowing fountain. Loving people, no matter how annoying, becomes as natural and effortless as water running downstream.
Well, that hasn’t been my experience, but that doesn’t mean a solution doesn’t exist. So, since it’s year’s end and I’m feeling introspective, I thought I’d examine the advice of a few writers and thinkers I’ve encountered re: how to love people when they bug the living hell out of you, with perspectives are drawn from stoic, Eastern and Christian traditions. Is the list exhaustive? Hardly – but it comprises some of the most enjoyable and valuable guidances I’ve managed to cull from my readings.
(Before we begin, I should add that I’ve drawn the question pretty narrowly as how to love the people who annoy you. As to how to love the people who’ve wronged you, or betrayed you, or intentionally caused you harm? Well – I’ll get back to you when I have an answer, if I ever do.)
Marcus Aurelius
In reading Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, I was pleased as punch to find that, like me, the Roman general and philosopher not only found people annoying as hell, but expected nothing less of them. As he advised:
When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: The people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly. They are like this because they can’t tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil, and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own—not of the same blood or birth, but the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine. And so none of them can hurt me. No one can implicate me with ugliness. Nor can I feel angry at my relative, or hate him. We were born to work together like feet, hands, and eyes, like the two rows of teeth, upper and lower. To obstruct each other is unnatural. To feel anger at someone, to turn your back on him: these are obstructions.
I very much like Marcus Aurelius’s recognition that we’re all part of the same human family, with each of us carrying a divine spark. And I very much like his idea that nature’s design is for us to work in tandem, as one body. But these are lovely, abstract ideas, less useful for when you’re seated next to crazy Uncle Max as he’s jabbering about the last Bourne book he read, and they’ve only just set out the hors d’oeuvres, and you feel the blood pounding against your veins like any helpless woodland creature with its foot caught in a trap.
Moreover, Marcus Aurelius loses me when he rationalizes people’s annoying qualities as by-products of their inability to “tell good from evil.” This requires me to be too generous with others: many know exactly when they are being annoying but choose to double-down on the behavior anyway (Not me, of course. I’d never do anything so childish. What’s that, you say? No, you really don’t need my husband’s confirmation on that. Just take my word for it and keep reading, m’kay?).
It also requires me to be too generous with myself. Maybe Marcus Aurelius was enlightened and above the mire, someone who clearly “saw the beauty of good and the ugliness of evil”, such that he could walk, unsullied and unperturbed, amongst the blind. As for me, I’m not particularly enlightened and lots of days, I’m slogging hip-deep through the mire, just a few mucky feet at a time. In other words, I’m as hopelessly flawed as everyone else, and so not always equipped to stand apart and consider others with the kind of emotional detachment he describes.
And emotional detachment is the point for Marcus Aurelius, isn’t it? In the above passage, he speaks of experiencing an absence of anger, an absence of hate for his fellow man. Even when he encourages himself to remember his “shared nature” with humanity, his stoicism is aimed at tolerating people, not loving them. And I want to know how to love.
David Foster Wallace
Every now and again, David Foster Wallace’s commencement address at Kenyon College, This Is Water, re-circulates online, and deservedly so. For the uninitiated, Wallace articulates our self-focused mindset as our “Default State”; by default, we prioritize our own wants, needs, desires, and even (or especially?) suffering above that experienced by others. This leads to all sorts of alienation and solipsism and the extinction of compassion towards those we find annoying.
But all is not lost. Wallace counsels that we can choose to override our Default State, such that we experience even the most taxing interactions with people “as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.” Here’s how he describes how that might work:
I can spend time in the end-of-the-day traffic being disgusted about all the huge, stupid, lane-blocking SUV’s and Hummers and V-12 pickup trucks, burning their wasteful, selfish, 40-gallon tanks of gas, and I can dwell on the fact that the patriotic or religious bumper-stickers always seem to be on the biggest, most disgustingly selfish vehicles, driven by the ugliest, most inconsiderate and aggressive drivers. And I can think about how our children’s children will despise us for wasting all the future’s fuel, and probably screwing up the climate, and how spoiled and stupid and selfish and disgusting we all are, and how modern consumer society just sucks, and so forth and so on. You get the idea.
If I choose to think this way in a store and on the freeway, fine. Lots of us do. Except thinking this way tends to be so easy and automatic that it doesn’t have to be a choice. It is my natural default setting. It’s the automatic way that I experience the boring, frustrating, crowded parts of adult life when I’m operating on the automatic, unconscious belief that I am the centre of the world, and that my immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world’s priorities.
The thing is that, of course, there are totally different ways to think about these kinds of situations. In this traffic, all these vehicles stopped and idling in my way, it’s not impossible that some of these people in SUVs have been in horrible auto accidents in the past, and now find driving so terrifying that their therapist has all but ordered them to get a huge, heavy SUV so they can feel safe enough to drive . . . I can choose to force myself to consider the likelihood that everyone else in the supermarket’s checkout line is just as bored and frustrated as I am, and that some of these people probably have harder, more tedious and painful lives than I do . . .
Most days, if you’re aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her kid in the checkout line. Maybe she’s not usually like this. Maybe she’s been up three straight nights holding the hand of a husband who is dying of bone cancer. Or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the motor vehicle department, who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a horrific, infuriating, red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness. Of course, none of this is likely, but it’s also not impossible. It just depends what you want to consider.
There is much to recommend to this approach, which is rooted in stoicism. If it makes you feel less stabby towards others, then great. If it prevents you from rear-ending the SUV in front of you in a fit of climate-change induced road rage, then it’s pure gold. But in the end, Wallace’s approach, like Marcus Aurelius’, only describes how to tolerate those who annoy you as opposed to loving them.
What’s more, to reach that level of toleration, Wallace advocates projecting one’s very own values and belief-systems onto others who may damn well not share them. Fair enough – but isn’t that a self-referential, self-centered way to coax yourself into tolerating people? If your Default State is that SUV drivers are selfish, consumerist planet-killers, then concocting a mental fiction about how the lady in the next lane is only driving a Range Rover because of horrible post-accident trauma is not transcending your Default State. It’s planting yourself firmly within it. It’s refusing to consider the possibility that the lady simply likes her big-ass car but is worthy of your toleration anyway.
I submit that self-serving acts of imagination are not how to experience “love, fellowship, [and] the mystical oneness of all things deep down.” They’re how to delude yourself while indulging your own biases. Which leaves me with my original question: How to love people not as we wish them to be, but as they are?
J.D. Salinger
Salinger’s Franny & Zooey comes closer to resolving the issue for me. In the book, Franny Glass, a college student and actress, experiences her fellow students, professors, and audiences alike as stupid, fake, egotistical. She despairs over her own egotism and her inability to know Christ – so much so that her spiritual crisis manifests itself in a nervous breakdown.
At home in her family’s Manhattan apartment, Franny’s older brother, Zooey, hears her out and gives her advice drawing from a variety of faith traditions. In the novel’s finale, Zooey reminds Franny of their brother Seymour’s past admonitions to “do it for the Fat Lady.” When young, the precocious Glass siblings participated in a televised quiz show called “Wise Child”; Seymour once ordered Zooey to shine his shoes before an appearance:
“... Seymour’d told me to shine my shoes just as I was going out the door… I was furious. The studio audience were all morons, the announcer was a moron, the sponsors were morons, and I just damn well wasn’t going to shine my shoes for them, I told Seymour. I said they couldn’t see them anyway, where we sat. He said to shine them anyway. He said to shine them for the Fat Lady. I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about, but he had a very Seymour look on his face, and so I did it. He never did tell me who the Fat Lady was, but I shined my shoes for the Fat Lady every time I ever went on the air again— … I don’t think I missed more than just a couple of times. This terribly clear, clear picture of the Fat Lady formed in my mind. I had her sitting on this porch all day, swatting flies, with her radio going full-blast from morning till night. I figured the heat was terrible, and she probably had cancer, and—I don’t know. Anyway, it seemed goddam clear why Seymour wanted me to shine my shoes when I went on the air. It made sense.”
Zooey then uses the metaphor of the Fat Lady to break through and shatter Franny’s despair:
“I don’t care where an actor acts. It can be in summer stock, it can be over a radio, it can be over television, it can be in a goddam Broadway theatre, complete with the most fashionable, most well-fed, most sunburned-looking audience you can imagine. But I’ll tell you a terrible secret—Are you listening to me? There isn’t anyone out there who isn’t Seymour’s Fat Lady. That includes your Professor Tupper, buddy. And all his goddam cousins by the dozens. There isn’t anyone anywhere that isn’t Seymour’s Fat Lady. Don’t you know that? Don’t you know that goddam secret yet? And don’t you know—listen to me, now—don’t you know who that Fat Lady really is? . . . Ah, buddy. Ah, buddy. It’s Christ Himself. Christ Himself, buddy.”
I value Salinger’s/Zooey’s counsel for its unvarnished honesty about who we are and the world we inhabit. He doesn’t posit a divide between enlightened humanity and the blind hordes, obligating the former to serve the latter because … well, because they can’t help it that they’re morons. Instead, he posits that all of us —“anyone, anywhere” – are gloriously imperfect Fat Ladies, improbably endowed with the divine. And he doesn’t suggest we spin an elaborate back-story in order to serve others. Rather, he says we need to take in everyone’s fat, fly-swatting, hugely annoying selves and serve them anyway, because this is how we serve Christ.
And serving is the cornerstone of Salinger’s advice, isn’t it? Not just tolerating people, not just refraining from going apeshit on them in the checkout lane at Target. But serving them in the real world – through offering artistic performances like Franny, or “consecrated” cups of chicken soup, like Franny’s mom. By shining our shoes as a show of respect, like Zooey – even when the gesture goes unnoticed.
Salinger says that by actively serving others we know God, and thus know love. Perhaps my one reservation is that his description of this process reads as so transcendent, so – as David Foster Wallace might put it – on fire with “the mystical oneness of all things” that, on a practical, human-to-human level, it seems elusive. Does performing acts of kindness while feeling very, very crabby towards the Fat Lady qualify as love? Do I need to – like Franny and Zooey – imagine Christ and see Him in every living being as a precondition to loving Him/them? Even when the living being in question is bitching about how the meal I drove across town to deliver contains a side of peas and carrots when she doesn’t like peas and carrots?
Anne Brontë answered this question, not only to my satisfaction but to my relief, in Agnes Grey.
Anne Brontë
Agnes Grey is a gem of a book, but it’s also a quiet one, and for that reason it gets overlooked. For a Brontë novel, it’s firmly grounded in the real and everyday. There’s no Heathcliff and Cathy, obsessively love-hating each other, no madwoman in the attic setting Thornfield ablaze. It lacks the tortured domestic and romantic drama of Anne Brontë’s second book, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. The plot isn’t nudged along with the help of the supernatural.
Instead, Brontë delivers a searing account of life as an impoverished English governess, drawing from her own experience working for two families. Despite the prosaic subject, it’s completely engrossing, and in unexpected ways. In what has to be one of the very first depictions of a child psychopath, one of Agnes’ charges relishes abusing animals; when Agnes finds him about to torture a nest of baby birds, she drops a stone on the nest in a pre-emptive (and very disturbing) mercy killing. And Brontë beautifully delineates the betwixt-and-between status of women paid to care for other peoples’ children. It’s a frustrating limbo in which one is not quite teacher and not quite mother, yet still expected to curb the moral excesses of children without the benefit of either carrot or stick. As Agnes described it:
“The girls, too, had some fear of their mother’s anger; and the boy might occasionally be bribed to do as she bid him by the hope of reward; but I had no rewards to offer, and as for punishments, I was given to understand, the parents reserved that privilege to themselves; and yet they expected me to keep my pupils in order.”
More pertinent to this discussion is Agnes’ feelings for Mr. Weston, the new curate at her employer’s church. Long story short, she falls for him, but not for conventional romantic reasons, which I love. It always bothers me that, in every Jane Austen novel, the heroine goes for the guy who’s conveniently loaded (especially craven is the scene in Pride and Prejudice where Lizzie Bennett starts to re-think her aversion to Darcy while visiting Pemberly and taking in his vast estate, refined taste, and devoted servants. Sure, bitch, now you like him.). It likewise bothers me that Jane Eyre pines for Rochester, the handsome and high-maintenance brooder who locks up his crazy wife (Thanks, Charlotte Brontë, for convincing generations of nerdy girls that, no matter how moody and messed-up the hot guy, he can be won over and saved through the superhuman mojo of their nerd-girl love.).
In stunning contrast, Agnes Grey doesn’t fall for Mr. Weston because of his looks (another character describes him as “ugly”) or his fortune (he’s of very modest means). Rather, she begins falling for him when she learns how he advises another parishioner on how to love people as God intended. Specifically, a frail and elderly churchgoer, Nancy, complains to Mr. Weston that she finds it impossible to love her neighbor as herself. As she relates their conversation to Agnes (and prepare yourself for some confusing Northern English dialect):
“Well, sir,” I said [to Mr. Weston], “ . . .I think I might well love God, but how can I love my neighbours when they vex me, and be so contrairy and sinful as some on ‘em is?”
“It may seem a hard matter,” says he, “to love our neighbours, who have so much of what is evil about them, and whose faults so often awaken the evil that lingers within ourselves, but remember that He made them, and He loves them; and whosoever loved him that begat, loveth him that is begotten also. And if God so loveth us that He gave His only begotten son to die for us, we ought also to love one another.
But if you cannot feel positive affection for those who do not care for you, you can at least try to do to them as you would they should do unto you; you can endeavour to pity their failings and excuse their offences, and to do all the good you can to those about you. And if you accustom yourself to this, Nancy, the very effort itself will make you love them in some degree, to say nothing of the goodwill your kindness would beget in them, though they might have little else that is good about them.” (emphasis added).
The very effort itself will make you love them in some degree. Mr. Weston is recommending that, in the absence of feeling love, we nonetheless perform acts of kindness and goodness – and, surprisingly, the feeling of love just might follow. Action, when repeated and purposeful, can engender emotion. It can alter the color of your thoughts and the contours of your heart. This is the essence of cognitive behavioral therapy and, like Agnes Grey, I find Mr. Weston’s words to be wise counsel. But hey – talk is cheap. How did that advice work out for Nancy? Well, as she says:
“I take a pleasure, now, in doing little bits o’ jobs for my neighbours, such as a poor old body ‘at’s half blind can do, and they take it kindly of me, just as he said. You see, [Agnes], I’m knitting a pair o’ stockings now: they’re for Thomas Jackson. He’s a queerish old body, an’ we’ve had many a bout at threaping, one anent t’other, an’ at times we’ve differed sorely. So I thought I couldn’t do better nor knit him a pair o’ warm stockings; an’ I’ve felt to like him a deal better, poor old man, sin’ I began. It’s turned out just as Maister Weston said.”
So our Mister Weston hit on an important truth: Love is active. Love is vigorous. Its genesis and life are in words and deeds. For that reason, the most accurate description of love, the real linchpin, has to be Matthew’s 7:12’s command to “do unto others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets.” How you feel, precisely, about those others simply doesn’t figure into this equation. It’s the Just Do It™ version of love. Just shovel the snow from the driveway, because the old lady inside is trapped – never mind she’s a harridan. Just stick up for the co-worker who’s being falsely maligned to management by another co-worker – never mind this co-worker’s annoying “Joker” laugh that makes your skin crawl. Just stop the gossip from being spread about the friend – that’s right, the free-loader friend who owes you, like, five dinners by now. By performing the motions of love, you might be graced with feeling it. Then again, you might not, but it’s okay. Just love – even reluctantly, even resignedly, even through sheer force of will – by doing.
For an easily irritated type like myself, this formula comes as a solace. No longer do I have to castigate myself for feeling “meh” about people. No longer do I have to sweat about failing to experience my “mystical oneness” with them. I only have to act out the goodness and kindness I’d like to receive. But there’s a catch: since I don’t need to wait to become awash in love for people to serve them, then I have no excuse for delay.
The New Year arrives tomorrow. It’s as good a time as any to get started.