on kindness vs niceness

Expect and give pristine kindness.

This is much harder than it sounds, especially when you have relationship trauma. Kindness requires agreement with both parties of a relationship, to always center love as the foundation of your relationship. Kindness requires maturity and self-knowledge. It means dropping defensiveness and self regulating when your nervous system is activated. Kindness requires responsibility- to see where you are overreacting or coming from an old story.

Niceness centers the other person’s needs over your own and your need to be liked. Niceness is not usually honest.

One of the most basic foundations for my and Chris’s relationship is that we are always kind to one another. This doesn’t mean we don’t disagree, get stubborn and go to our corners to sulk occasionally.  But it does mean that we meet as adults almost all of the time.  We rarely bring each other our inner children to soothe, and when we do, we can call each other out on it. Kindly.

Even when we spent a couple of years in an on again/off again situationship, there was never anything said that we’ve later regretted.

We don’t yell and scream at each other. We don’t call each other names.

I wasn’t raised like this and I didn’t have romantic relationships like this earlier in life. 

In fact, I did a great job of baiting men to turn into yellers in previous relationships. It helped me maintain my victim status and confirm my beliefs about men that they were ‘all fill-in-the-blank.’  I also used lots of passive aggressive tactics to get what I wanted that appeared ‘nice’ but were really strategic. 

This has all taken a serious amount of maturity and deep inner inquiry to unwind.  To reach a place where my nervous system can relax, even in conflict. To ask for what I need without drama. To honor the kindness foundation of our relationship.

Kindness brings more kindness- when we mess up it’s much easier to confess mistakes when we know the other isn’t going to pile on and when we know forgiveness will be found easily.

Kindness also means being honest when something isn’t working or when needs aren’t being met. Usually needs need to be met on our own but as parents, it usually takes some cooperation to make things happen.

An expectation of kindness means not allowing anything but.  It means not making excuses for unkind behavior, not engaging in unkind exchanges and not internalizing someone else’s projections.

Niceness has a much different quality, is more outcome driven, and externally focused. It seeks validation. Being nice means hoping to be liked, to be seen a certain way, to ensure one’s safety.  

 I still have some of this conditioning too, but it doesn’t take up much energy or space anymore and when I find myself being ‘nice’ it’s usually expensive on my system.  

When you stop being nice, people rebel a bit around you and you’ll find that the relationships that aren’t true fall away. This keeps a lot of people stuck in nice forever.

But niceness isn’t kind because it isn’t honest.  I remember when I was starting to date a lot after my last longterm relationship and I really hated ‘rejecting’ people (I don’t really believe in this concept anymore but that is for another post). I wanted to be nice and give of my time to ensure other people didn’t feel badly about what they had to offer. Many were good guys, just not right for me. Until I realized just how draining this was, to try and protect others’ feelings at my expense. And that by me not being honest, I may be keeping them from meeting someone that was a better fit. I became very good at breaking things off, sometimes before a first date if things didn’t seem like they had real potential.