Never Mind

Sabrina was always half an hour late.

She was my closest friend and my assignment partner. Waiting for her had become as much a part of university as deadlines. I would get annoyed, then she would arrive, and we would move on to whatever we had planned. By the time we were enjoying ourselves, bringing it up felt like spoiling the day.

So the next time we arranged to meet, I waited again.

That Saturday, we had a stretch of storefronts to photograph and sketch for a land-use assignment. It was sunny, and I had already resented giving up my Saturday. Now I was spending it at a bus stop.

A bus arrived, took its passengers, and left. No sign of Sabrina. Another came and left too. I checked the time, then the bus schedule, then the time again.

By the time she arrived, I had watched three buses come and go. My head was pounding from the sun.

This time, I lost my temper.

I spent the rest of the day replaying it, wondering if I had hurt her feelings. All that waiting, and somehow my reaction was the part I wanted to take back.

How often do you hide your feelings to spare someone else’s?

Letting something go can take effort. There is the irritation we soften before answering. The disappointment we decide to mention another day. The effort of sounding patient when patience has become something we are doing deliberately.

Sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild gave this management of feeling a vocabulary. Emotional labour describes it when it is part of paid work. In private life, the related term is emotion work. Both draw attention to the effort involved in meeting expectations about how we ought to feel or appear.

One part of that effort is keeping our feelings from showing. In a 2003 experiment, psychologist Emily Butler and colleagues paired women who had never met to discuss an upsetting topic. One woman in each pair received instructions about how to manage her reactions.

Some were asked to conceal their emotional expressions. Others responded naturally or reconsidered the topic in a way intended to reduce their emotional response.

Concealing emotion disrupted communication and increased blood pressure in the other person. A second experiment found increased blood pressure in both participants, along with reduced rapport.

The effort to keep a feeling off a face had consequences beyond that face. Even the person who had received no instructions was affected.

These were brief conversations between strangers, not established relationships. The experiments examined suppression, one possible part of managing an interaction. They do not establish that every act of restraint harms a relationship.

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Care can also strengthen a bond. In research following 1,932 heterosexual couples in Germany, emotion work was associated with greater relationship satisfaction later. Attending to another person’s feelings can be valuable to the life two people share.

But performing a feeling carries its own demands. A diary study of 80 dual-earner couples linked surface acting at home, displaying emotions one did not feel, with lower emotional energy and poorer relationship satisfaction for both partners. These were associations, rather than proof of cause and effect.

Being attentive to someone and concealing ourselves can happen in the same conversation. From the outside, both may look like patience.

Perhaps the person who seems to need less has become practised at asking for less room.

When someone listens patiently, we have evidence of their patience in that moment. We know much less about the day they brought into it. They may have arrived with something to say, then decided that our news needed the evening more.

There can be affection in that decision. We make room for people we love, and some days one person needs most of it. Over time, though, taking turns can give way to taking roles. One person becomes the one who struggles; the other becomes the one who understands.

The arrangement is easy to miss while the understanding person keeps doing it well. Their first impatient reply can seem more surprising than all the difficult evenings they have absorbed.

Who gets to have a bad day? Sometimes the answer is hidden in whose bad mood needs an explanation, and whose already has one.

^{This is a space for exploration and reflection, not medical, psychological, or therapeutic advice. Each reader’s situation is unique and deserves the right kind of support. If you are struggling or in crisis, please contact a licensed mental health professional. This edition contains affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate, we may earn from qualifying purchases at no additional cost to you.}