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The art of miscommunication – Compliments that go wrong

Posted by: Emily   July 23rd 2009

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What back handed compliments have you received recently?

My boyfriends latest: ‘You look really good from behind’

This isn’t as bad as it sounds. We were swimming and he was commenting on my leg stroke. But it made me laugh none the less and made me think about back handed compliments in general.

Compliments like:

Man says to woman

“You look very sexy in that dress” (So far so good).
“It hides your flabby belly”.

Woman says to man the morning after the night before.

“Don’t worry, the best things come in small packages” Ouch!

Meanwhile, most compliments are not back handed and are 100% sincere. Why though are we women so dreadful at accepting sincere compliments from men?

Man says:
“You look nice today”
Woman responds:
“So I didn’t look nice yesterday?”

Man will then inevitably try to explain he was being nice, sincere and no insult re the day before was intended! Woman is having none of his excuses. She feels fat and ugly and goes to change into a sack.

If we tell a man he looks good, we generally don’t endure an inquisition afterwards.

Though there is an exception to this rule.

Tell a man he looks good and that you saw other women admiring him and you’ll spend the next hour being grilled on the specifics of  who exactly you saw eyeing him up.

How old were they, what did they look like?

Old and wrinkly admirers are apparently not a good measure of how great he looks. He wants to know he’s been greatly admired by younger, attractive women.

That leaves us in a conundrum.

Do we admit that we only observed old dears looking and risk his ego taking a dent. Or do we pretend that we saw lots of hot women checking him out? The risk there being that he might think he can do better and dumps us!

Such a delicate path to tread.

What I find most frustrating though is when people go fishing for compliments. I am utterly useless at recognising when someone is on a compliment inducing exercise. These usually take the form of a request for your honest opinion.

To demonstrate, a few years ago my then flatmate asked me:

“Does my bum look big in this?”

To which I replied

Yes it does, it looks big in everything you wear because you have a big bum. My advice is to cover it up.”

My flat mate looked mortified and never spoke to me for 3 days. Very unfair I thought!

More recently a pal of mine was telling me how she needed to lose some weight and asked what I thought. I replied thus:

“You look fine aside from some extra weight around the tummy. Perhaps if you drank less alcohol that’d shift it.”

Her face fell as she asked me :

“So you think I need to lose weight and that I drink too much?”

I was very confused. The conversation began with her telling me she needed to lose weight. I thus took that as a given. The alcohol remark was just me trying to be helpful.

My pals now know not to ask my opinion unless they are 100% sure my true and unedited opinion is what they want.

Me, I’d like to say I have learned to think before I speak.

I’d like to say it…….. but I can’t.

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