I sat on the edge of our bathtub shirtless, covered in shorn locks, and increasingly annoyed. The target of my inexplicable frustration: my adoring barber-wife, clippers buzzing in hand. It’s not that she was doing poorly; to the contrary, she knows my thinning locks and ever-more-visible scalp better than anyone. But for all her good intentions, she is still an amateur, learning from YouTube and trial-and-error, which made me (glasses off, no mirror) feel vulnerable and paranoid. With her every gentle clip and pacifying word, my pique grew. Eventually I burst out, “I don’t want a haircut, I want haircut theater,” which felt more revealing than I’d intended.
My adoring barber-wife understood what I meant, luckily: she went and fetched a soft-bristled brush, some fragrant beard oil, and another comb. Finishing the haircut, she used professional jargon like “fade” and “blend”, lavishing many superfluous strokes of brush and comb upon my pate. Nothing about her barbering skill changed, but nonetheless, her performance made me feel safe.
Relationships are fueled by performances. When going on a first date,1 I bring out my charming extrovert rather than my brooding cynic, even if I’ve had a bad day otherwise. I don’t mean this pejoratively. These performances are essentially empathetic;2 we scaffold our attachments to other humans by feigning connection until a truer, deeper affection develops. For example, Mary Jane Watson becomes a night owl to sync with Peter Parker’s moonlighting; Peter attends MJ’s performances even if he can’t stand jazz music. These performances are like security theater at an airport, inauthentic but reassuring nonetheless.
A relationship’s pageant of empathy is perhaps most obvious for romantic desire. MJ is tired from work, but still kisses Peter and calls him “tiger”. Peter feels emboldened by MJ’s flirtation to growl playfully like the animal he is not; MJ is immediately reassured that her emotional vulnerability was met and reciprocated, safely escalating the trust on display.3 Contrast to the mood-killer if Peter doesn’t stage a performance: “Thanks, MJ, but I don’t feel confident enough to flirt back today.” Relationships are a positive feedback loop built on confident, selfless falsehoods.
Sometimes the performance is made to an unappreciative audience, and the unrequited emotional vulnerability takes a toll on the performer. (MJ starts to feel a lack of sleep, and Peter hasn’t noticed, taking it for granted.) Or perhaps, the security of a committed relationship unveils the performance for what it is. What next? Will the relationship survive when its foundation is shaken? In my experience, four broad outcomes are possible:
- The performance becomes so costly it can only be dropped with collateral damage. (After months of sleep deprivation, MJ stops performing “night owl”, but also stops performing kindness and selflessness because she can no longer trust Peter to affirm and reciprocate her performances.) The positive feedback loop inverts. This occurs if neither partner is willing to grow, or if the partners perform out of manipulation rather than empathy.
- Perhaps the performance was always redundant. (MJ was only performing “night-owl” because Peter saw her working evenings and felt he must perform “breadwinning ladder climber”. Peter pretends to like the chocolates MJ buys him because he didn’t want to hurt her feelings on their first Valentine’s together, but she doesn’t like chocolate, either, and only bought it for him.) Both partners can simply drop the performance and move on with more honesty.
- One partner begins to genuinely love the thing they perform. (Peter finds a few jazz bands he loves, and from there learns to appreciate the whole genre.)
- One partner finds that they can grow past the need for a performance. (Peter grows beyond the toxic paradigm of “breadwinning ladder climber”, so he renegotiates a work-life balance that is better for MJ.) Here, the performance comes to enlarge the humans who are in relationship. They learn to grow past it.
Performed empathy is the chrysalis of resilience, confidence, and selflessness. And when the metamorphosis is complete, the empathy is brought to life.
- The same applies to friendships; being someone’s “shoulder to cry on” is a performance of empathy and solidarity even (or especially) if your friend brought it on themselves. Or at work: I might feel shy at a conference, but I’ll still shake hands and make eye contact all day, because it helps me do my job.
- For this analysis, I assume a fundamentally good-faith performance. The calculated deception of the manipulative and the obsequious posturing of the insecure are other kinds of performance, but they are metastasized versions.
- I had trouble finding psychological/therapeutic research on this phenomena, so I mostly rely on my own analysis. But I’m essentially offering my personal experience on what it feels like to accept what John Gottman calls a “relational bid” (good luck getting access to the primary source or any published research findings, though).