The Handbook Everyone Else Apparently Received

There is apparently a handbook for being a person.

I don't have a copy.

I've spent a lot of my life discovering individual pages of it after I've already violated whatever rule was written there. Sometimes the discovery is useful. Oh. That's what people expect in this situation. Good to know. Sometimes I learn the rule and realize that it explains a social interaction that had previously baffled me. And sometimes I learn the rule and think, No, that's fucking stupid. I'm still not doing that.

The older I get, though, the more I've realized something else: there isn't actually one handbook. We all have different editions, assembled from our families, cultures, communities, identities, relationships, experiences, and whatever other social information we absorbed along the way. The really strange part isn't that the rules are unwritten. It's how confidently we can assume everyone else's copy says the same thing ours does.

The Rule I Didn't Know I Was Breaking

I had a metamour once who had very different ideas from mine about what our relationship with each other was supposed to look like. We shared a partner, but she and I weren't friends and didn't have an independent relationship beyond our connection to him.

That was perfectly comfortable for me. I didn't dislike her. I simply didn't understand sharing a partner to automatically create an obligation for the two of us to become personally involved in each other's lives.

At some point, one of her family members was in the hospital. Our shared partner mentioned it to me, and I said something along the lines of, "Oh, I hope they feel better soon." He passed that sentiment along to her. Later, her step-parent died, which affected plans he had with me, and I asked him to give her my condolences. That was how I would have handled the same situation with almost anyone I didn't have an independent relationship with. I cared that someone important to him was hurting, and I expressed that care without inserting myself into an intimate experience she hadn't personally shared with me.

Apparently, that wasn't how she understood it. I didn't know this at the time, but she seems to have expected me to reach out to her directly. To her, apparently, direct contact communicated care. Passing my condolences through our shared partner didn't meet the standard she was using to evaluate the interaction.

Nobody had told me there was a standard.

According to My Handbook, This Was Horrifying

Then my grandmother died.

I found out about my grandmother's death shortly before I was supposed to go to my usual game night with our shared partner. I hadn't processed it. I hadn't even told my husband or my children yet. I told my partner because the information materially affected our plans: I didn't want to go be social. I wanted to go home.

Within what felt like two minutes, I received a message from my meta offering her condolences, and I was fucking enraged. Not mildly annoyed. Not confused. I experienced her message as an intrusion into something intensely private at a moment when I hadn't even decided for myself who I was ready to tell. I had shared information with one person because he needed to know why I was changing our plans, and almost immediately that information had traveled farther than I intended.

Her message probably would have felt caring to plenty of people, but to me it felt invasive. I can recognize now that the intensity of my reaction was probably disproportionate to the actual offense. She hadn't kicked down my front door and demanded that I perform grief for her. She sent a condolence message. But emotional reactions aren't always calibrated according to what seems reasonable when we reconstruct them years later, and my very real experience in that moment was: How fucking dare you enter this space without being invited?

That's where the handbook becomes interesting. From her perspective, she may have been doing exactly what a considerate person was supposed to do. Someone experienced a death, so you acknowledged it directly. From mine, consideration meant respecting relational boundaries and not assuming that information you received secondhand was an invitation into somebody else's private experience. The exact same behavior could communicate care to one person and intrusion to another.

When a Preference Becomes a Character Test

I later learned that there was apparently another layer to all of this. The difference between how she'd handled my grandmother's death and how I'd handled the deaths and illnesses in her family had become evidence, in her mind, of something about the two of us. She had reached out directly to me. I hadn't reached out directly to her. Therefore, apparently, she'd done the caring thing and I hadn't.

Fuck your performative nonsense, Joann.

But underneath my irritation is something I find genuinely interesting now, because this is a very human thing to do. We don't just develop preferences about how relationships should work. We can turn those preferences into rules without realizing we've done it. I would want someone to contact me directly when a family member dies can quietly become contacting someone directly is the considerate thing to do, which can then become considerate people contact someone directly. Once we've made that progression, another person's failure to perform the behavior isn't merely a difference anymore. It becomes information about their character.

Research on social norms helps explain why this happens. Norms don't simply tell us what people commonly do. They can also communicate what people are supposed to do, which means violating one can invite judgment. We construct our understanding of those norms from the people and environments around us, and our perception of what "everyone" thinks is not necessarily particularly accurate.

There's even a related phenomenon researchers call the false consensus effect: people tend to overestimate how widely other people share their own beliefs, choices, and preferences. That means the handbook isn't just unwritten. We may be wildly overestimating how many other people have the same edition.

The Golden Rule Has a Problem

There's an extremely familiar moral principle sitting underneath all of this: treat others the way you would like to be treated.

The Golden Rule sounds obviously compassionate, and as a starting point, it is. It asks us to consider another person's experience rather than acting entirely out of self-interest. If I would appreciate kindness, patience, generosity, privacy, respect, or help, I can reasonably assume other people might appreciate those things too.

But there's a problem hidden inside the wording: I'm still the reference point. If I'm using my own preferences to decide what kindness looks like for you, I'm considering your experience without actually knowing very much about it.

Suppose I move into a new neighborhood, and my neighbor brings me homemade chocolate-chip cookies because that's what they would love someone to do for them. That's neighborly. It's thoughtful. It's a genuine attempt at kindness. It's also entirely possible that I'm gluten intolerant. Maybe I'm allergic to chocolate. Maybe I'm diabetic. Maybe I don't eat homemade food from kitchens I don't know. Maybe I just really fucking hate chocolate-chip cookies.

The intention doesn't suddenly become malicious because I can't eat the cookies. But the fact that you would enjoy receiving them doesn't tell you whether I will. The same problem becomes much more consequential when we apply it to emotional needs, relationships, communication, privacy, affection, work, sex, family, disability, or anything else where people can vary enormously.

Treating other people the way we want to be treated is better than not considering them at all. Treating people the way they want to be treated requires something harder: we have to learn something about them.

Defaults Aren't the Problem

I don't think the answer is to abolish social conventions and negotiate every human interaction from scratch. That sounds exhausting.

Defaults are useful. If I don't know you, I need somewhere to begin. I can assume you probably don't want me standing six inches from your face while we talk. I can say thank you when you do something kind. I can express sympathy when something terrible happens. I can use whatever social information I've accumulated as a reasonable starting point for interacting with another human being.

The problem isn't having defaults. The problem is forgetting they're defaults. As I learn more about you, information about you should gradually replace my assumptions about people in general. Maybe you hate being hugged. Maybe birthdays are incredibly important to you. Maybe you don't want advice when you're upset. Maybe you absolutely do want advice and find vague emotional validation maddening. Maybe you want people to check on you when you're grieving. Maybe you want everyone to leave you the fuck alone until you decide you're ready to emerge.

None of those preferences has to become a universal theory of how caring people behave. They can just be information about a person.

Sometimes I Know the Rule and Still Don't Like It

There's another category that matters to me because I think people often assume that someone who doesn't follow a social convention must not understand it. Sometimes I understand it perfectly well.

For example, there are people who find tremendous value in routine "good morning" and "good night" messages in relationships. I generally don't. Without anything substantive attached to them, those messages can feel performative to me rather than connective. The same thing happens when someone says, "I hope you're well," instead of asking, "How are you?" My brain can interpret the first version as I am performing concern but do not actually want information about your current condition.

I know that's not necessarily what the other person means, and that's the important part. Once someone I care about tells me that a good-morning message makes them feel remembered and connected, I have information I didn't have before. I may choose to participate in a ritual that has very little intrinsic value to me because it has value to them. At the same time, they can learn that my failure to spontaneously perform that ritual doesn't mean I forgot about them or don't care. Neither of us has to prove whose interpretation of the behavior is correct. We can just learn each other's handbook.

The Strange Confidence of "Everybody Knows"

I think "everybody knows" may be one of the most dangerous phrases in human interaction.

Everybody knows you're supposed to call.

Everybody knows you bring something when you're invited.

Everybody knows you don't ask that.

Everybody knows what "I'm fine" means.

Everybody knows you should send a thank-you note.

Everybody knows what professional looks like.

Everybody knows how a wife behaves, how a husband behaves, how a friend behaves, how an employee behaves, how a grieving person behaves, how a disabled person behaves, how someone who cares about you behaves.

Except apparently we fucking don't.

Some of us didn't learn the rule. Some of us learned a completely different one. Some of us know the rule but don't interpret the behavior the same way. Some of us followed the rule for years before realizing we hated it. Some of us are consciously breaking it because it makes absolutely no sense for our lives.

And sometimes almost everyone is performing the rule because almost everyone thinks everyone else expects them to. That's where the handbook metaphor becomes most useful to me. The problem isn't simply that I somehow failed to receive the social instruction manual everybody else got. The problem is believing such a universal manual ever existed.

Treat People Like People

There is a concept sometimes called the Platinum Rule: instead of treating others the way you want to be treated, treat them the way they want to be treated.

I like the correction, although even that isn't as simple as it sounds. People don't always know what they need. Sometimes what someone wants conflicts with what somebody else needs. Sometimes a person's preferred treatment is something you cannot or should not provide. Relationships still require boundaries, negotiation, compromise, and judgment.

But as an orientation toward other people, I think it's much closer to what I want. If I care about you, I want to become curious about what care looks like from where you're standing. I don't want to assume that the thing that makes me feel loved automatically makes you feel loved. I don't want to decide that because I value a particular social ritual, your failure to perform it demonstrates a character defect. And I especially don't want to keep offering you chocolate-chip cookies after you've told me you're allergic because bringing cookies is what good neighbors do.

The handbook is useful when I don't know anything about you yet.

Once I do, I'd rather know you.

Extended Reading