“Nice guys finish last” is a classic line that can be translated to “Boring guys aren’t sexy.” This is not what I’m referring to when I say, “Being nice can suck.” I’m also not talking about how a lot of people confuse being nice with being a pushover. I’m a firm believer on being nice to a point and not letting people treat me like a doormat, but even being nice in a healthy way can suck because when conflict hits it doesn’t feel… fair; there isn’t a feeling of justice.
Last month I had a bride tell me that the wedding I was booked to do for her was being moved from the city where I live to a place an hour and fifteen minutes away in good traffic, which is rare at the time she was getting married. As an officiate who can’t be late (I’m kind of a big deal), going her direction I need to give a three hour buffer in case something crazy happens. For instance, one time I was going in that direction on a Saturday and a truck carrying stone accidentally dumped its load shutting all three lanes of the highway down; that was a bad day for driving. As an officiant, I can’t use that an excuse for being late. Thus, because of the increased travel time and buffer, I have a set travel fee for that area that many other brides have happily paid in the past (I’m that big a deal). Because of the venue change, I told the bride I would have to add a travel cost that is still cheaper than having a plumber come to your house (aka nothing for a wedding) or she could find someone more local. A few days later she simply emailed me she had found someone local and wouldn’t need me anymore. The message was fine without any hint of anger. I wished her good luck and thanked her for finding someone else because the drive wasn’t something I really wanted to do. That should have been where this mundane story ended, but it suddenly became much more interesting with the introduction of a new character – the bride’s mom (duhn, duhn, duhnnnn). Several days later I received an email from the mom who was furious at me. She expressed how I was pathetic for not wanting to do the drive and that she was glad her daughter found someone else who was a decent person unlike me who was clearly awful and “needed to go to etiquette school.” She was very thorough in her page long attack and at the very end of the email she wrote: “And you can keep the deposit.” Writing this now, my thought is “Yeah, I’ll keep the deposit because that’s the idea of a deposit. If you break the contract, you don’t get the money back,” and then I’d brush her off. Unfortunately, as all things tend to be, in the moment this email was a much bigger deal – I was hurt. I know people accuse others of what they are guilty of themselves, and this woman claiming I needed to go to etiquette school meant she was the obvious candidate for enrollment, but in the moment I wasn’t able to brush this email aside; I shouldn’t have even read the whole thing, but angry letters tend to be like train wrecks where you can’t look away. You have to see all the gory details even if it haunts you later.
The good news is I have developed enough self control that I was able to send a very professional response. I started by thanking her for bringing to my attention that I had upset her and then apologized for any confusion my email had caused. I pointed out that my comment of not wanting to do the drive was to help the bride not feel any guilt for hiring someone else. I then wished her and her daughter good luck at the wedding and avoided any hint of a dig like “with all due respect.” It was the perfect assertive letter that was simple, clear, and showed positivity. When I hit send I knew this would eat the mom up inside, and did that make me feel any better? Not a chance! I wanted to rip her apart, and tell her what a jerk she was. I wanted to scream at her for being another millennial parent who felt she had to “fight” for his child even when the child behaved more grown up than her. I wanted to tell her to keep her busy-body nose out of where it doesn’t belong, and she’s what’s wrong with the world. I WANTED JUSTICE!!
That’s the problem with being nice to a point – it doesn’t feel fair! What I actually did was very assertive and healthy while a pushover would’ve sent the deposit back out of guilt and fear, but that wasn’t even a thought for me (it would’ve a few years ago).
When I told my wife about the email, her immediate response was the mom was scaring/guilting me into giving back the deposit. If that was the case, the mom was even more pathetic than I originally thought. The deposit was $75. At a wedding, $75 is nothing; that’s not even a plate at the dinner table, which likely goes for $100-$150. Plus, photographers typically ask for deposits around $1000. I could see being upset about losing that, but if the contract says there are no returns if the couple breaks the arrangement, the couple is out of luck if they break the contract. When I bought a bow window for my house, the seller made it very clear that there were no returns and even though my initial thought was the window was too small and I wanted a different window, there were no returns. That’s the deal that was made, so I didn’t even ask the store about it. That’s what people of integrity do – you keep your word.
The hardest part about being nice is when other people aren’t, and it seems like there are a lot of people in the world who aren’t nice. There are so many self-serving, manipulative, hidden messaging, and rude people who are so worried about how they “feel” they forget about other peoples’ feelings. Fortunately, being nice to a point is worth it because at the end of the day, you can sleep better knowing that you are a good person who is making the world a better place and in the end it will pay off. In the moment being nice can suck, but when we pass away, the world will miss us unlike the self-serving, mean people who leave the world better off, and while they are alive, they’ll be in constant fear as they’ll assume everyone else is as mean as them and will have to protect themselves accordingly. It causes you to have less trust of others and to always be on edge because you can’t even trust nice people. At least I can do that.
This week may you consider how you can be nice to a point.
Rev Chad Tomlinson, ChadDavid.ca, Learning to love dumb people (like me)