Looking for a polite way to say “Please kindly keep your unsolicited opinions to yourself!”

This post is not about marriage, but is rather about my expressing a pet peeve of mine, and trying to work out in real time how to deal with it. I am going to be very honest in this post. Unfortunately, it may well demonstrate some unattractive personal attributes of my own.

Here is the thing: I can be very non-confrontational. So sometimes, instead of arguing with someone about something, I will find it easier to just ghost them altogether. However, I would also prefer to avoid anything that could possibly turn into an argument. If I feel confident in the person’s character, then yes, I would feel able to discuss it. However, if I do not feel confident in their character, then honestly, it just feels easier to walk away. Which means that I tend to walk away from a lot of people.
So this post describes a few real interactions with real people. And actually, I have walked away from them all just now. All the same though, I am still asking myself how I might have handled those situations more tactfully, and gotten my point across, possibly without having to walk away from people.

Please observe the image above. It is the screenshot I took of my tabs just before writing this post. And it is an honest screenshot in that I did not artificially open any for the sake of taking the screenshot. These are all tabs of websites that I have opened and perused, some at great length, during the course of this computer session. Actually, before taking the screenshot I had already closed a couple of tabs from the Guardian (https://www.theguardian.com/uk)

So what is the point I am making here? Namely this: a point I have made a few times before, and that is that I read. A lot! A heck of a lot. I have recently tried to analyse it to myself, again, and it is like these days I read compulsively. My mind is constantly searching for information to feed on – literally. On a typical day I would tend to open practically every website I could think of, and at the very least scan through headlines.
So because I read a lot, I tend to consider myself to be quite well-informed about general affairs, what is happening in the world, although to be fair I struggle to get into the details of politics.

One topic on which I am undoubtedly well read is the topic of relationships. For this I read a variety of articles ranging from articles by certified relationship professionals, to people like me, who are writing relationship advice from their experiences and observations, to people who are simply telling their own stories about whatever may have happened in their relationships, good or bad. So the relationship posts I write on this blog are not written purely “off the top of my head”, from sheer imagination. Rather they are written as reflections on things I have observed, or things I have read about, applying conclusions from research and scientific studies as necessary. I am quite sure that the stuff I have written here is very reliable. Or at least it works for the person that I am.

And something else is this: while I think about this stuff all the time, I am usually careful not to tell other people what to do. Because of course everyone is entitled to their own opinion, and to make their own decisions. If I feel that someone is on the verge of making an unwise decision, depending on how close I feel we are in our relationship, I might write a post and post it on Facebook and pray that they see.
All of this is just to establish who I am, and how I go about things.

So yeah, there was this woman. (Let me remind you that I am going to be candid in this post!) And what I need to be candid about is this: she just was not the kind of person from whom I would have sought an educated opinion about relationships. I am not saying that she was not smart, because she was. However, there is a difference between being smart and going the extra mile as I would do. And remember that I don’t merely think about these things. But additionally I have a blog (this very blog) where I discuss various relationship topics, and I show that I am constantly thinking about these things, constantly evaluating ideas.
So I told this woman about this blog. And long story short, this woman who clearly did not seek to educate herself, at least not the way I do by reading constantly – this woman tried to foist her opinion on me about how I should live my romantic life. According to her, instead of having my two-year rules and strict criteria, I should go out with guys and put myself into vulnerable positions with men of untested character so that I would know what to look out for, and learn how to discern male character, for the next time. So to me it was like she was suggesting that I should go out and get burned, so that I would know how to protect myself from getting burned on subsequent occasions. Or, I thought, I could just carry on as I have been doing, in that I have sat down and laboriously worked out a way to find out all I need to know about someone without getting burned at all!
So in my non-confrontational way, I tried to diplomatically say “I don’t think so!” And can you believe that this woman tried to insist to me the way I should be living my life?! Like seriously? You are obviously free to make whatever decisions you like about your life. But guess what? I am equally entitled to make whatever decisions I want about my life! And I think that she may have sincerely thought that she was trying to protect me in some way.

So here is my question: how do you politely respond in this kind of situation when someone is insistent to you about the way you should live your life? What I sincerely wanted to tell her is that I had not asked for her opinion, and furthermore, considering the way that she generally lived her life she would be the last person I would ask for her opinion. Just now, I cannot think of a more gracious way of saying that. As I say, she did not seem to go out of her way to educate herself about anything (although there would often be sophisticated terminology mixed in to what she said). But especially about relationships please just take my word for it. When you talk about relationships, in a way you invite people to be like yourself, or you talk about your regrets to prevent other people from making your mistakes too. She seemed to share her regrets with me, I’m guessing, by inviting me to do exactly the same things she had done, to get presumably exactly the same regrettable results that she shared with me. What a disaster. So then my question is this: In this situation, when someone’s behaviour literally verges on being controlling, is there a polite way to tell them to stop doing this? In the event, what I did do was simply to block her calls. And you know what? That was smooth, clean and easy, and saved lots of the anticipated aggro that comes when you feel that someone is just not hearing you, or engaging with what you are saying. However, I’m thinking that I should at least have said something first, something like “Honestly, I appreciate that you are trying to help. However, I would honestly prefer it just now if you would just keep your opinions and advice to yourself.” And then if she did not listen, then I would have been perfectly justified in blocking her calls. Part of my bemusement about the situation is this: how could someone maintain an opinion about me that is so clearly contrary to evidence? I’ve got over a decade on this blog of regular posts, and this person apparently thought I did not know my own mind, and I needed her to make up my own mind for me.
Furthermore, this woman apparently struggled in other kinds of relationships as well as romantic relationships. So this raises another question: if you have gone through life, consistently “rubbing people up the wrong way”, but you actually want to make friends with people, would you not at one time sit down and evaluate your behaviour, and ask yourself what you may have done wrong in any one situation, and actually make a change? So when I blocked her calls, might she have taken that opportunity to sit down and ask herself “Hmm, what may have gone wrong there?”

So that was one scenario. This is another one. In a way I feel awful talking about these scenarios, because I know that if these people read this blog, they might be able to know that I am talking about them. And yet I want to talk about these situations.
So there was this guy. And once again he was pushing his opinions about my approach to things. To be clear he was married, and there was nothing dodgy about his behaviour whatsoever. But once again the fact that he was so freely pushing his opinions annoyed me. It was as if there was an unspoken subtext that of course, because of his gender and ethnicity, I would look up to his opinion, which I found deeply annoying. Ultimately, I was not able to find a gentle way of telling him this, so to my shame I simply unfriended him instead, and communicated the message passive-aggressively. Perhaps, if the situation were to arise again, I could simply tell him what I have written above: “I thank you because I know that you are coming from a sincere place. All the same, it kinda annoys me that you are so free in communicating your opinion even though I have not asked for it. Next time, please please wait for me to ask you.” Actually you know what, I am actually being a bit unfair in saying this because he was in a position of leadership over me, and it may have been that very fact that emboldened him to so freely share his opinion. So then, the trick would have been to diplomatically let him know that even though he was in a position of leadership over me, I did not really look up to him as he may have expected…

Both of these situations require so much grace. Both of these situations annoyed me, to the point where I was scared of losing my temper. As such, it just felt easier to ghost the people concerned. (I have also ghosted people who did absolutely nothing wrong, due to my own relationship immaturity.)

So this raises the question, of how to let people know that I am receptive to their advice, in those cases with those people where I am receptive. But you know what? I guess what I am discussing on this post is emotional intelligence, at least a facet of it. And the people I have come across who I am more likely to ask for advice happen to be the kind of people who have more emotional intelligence to start with. So they are the ones less likely to try to force their opinion on me.
I don’t want everyone reading this to get worried that I might be speaking about them. If you have offered your advice to me in the past and I have not unfriended you, then the likelihood is that I really do welcome your advice. Or if I come out and ask you directly for your advice, then once again, it is because I value what you have to say.

—–
Edit added: 14th Nov 2022

Since I wrote this post a few hours ago, I have been thinking further about the first scenario, with the woman. The truth is that I have been thinking about this situation for ages. There is something niggling at my mind about this whole situation, but I cannot identify what that something is. Two ideas that have occurred to me are as follows:
1. Learning how to deal with people who pressurise me
2. How do I know I’m right?

1. Yeah, in the event, perhaps due to the confusion that this situation provokes in me, I just blocked this woman out of hand. While I was less than impressed about the way she behaved, I feel sure that she was not acting out of malice. This could be the key to my confusion regarding her: moving forward, I have decided not to block people outright, if I can help it. One key exception though is if they clearly act out of malice. Here it is wise to block them because I just do not know and I cannot trust what they might be capable of doing. So this woman did not act of malice. I believe that on the whole she sincerely tried to be kind. However she took a misguided approach to this. And then she pressurised me with her opinion, which is behaviour that I can never appreciate. I think that the tension between all these factors created cognitive dissonance within me regarding her. You know, on this blog I have previously spoken of a generally nice guy who equally tried to pressurise me in something that many people might consider totally innocent, and I had zero qualms about ending that friendship. Actually he ended it, and I made no effort to reach out or to heal the breach. I just shrugged and let it go. The difference here is that this was a woman. Ideally, moving forward I would like to warn people that I don’t like being pressurised, and could they please respect my right to disagree with them? I had already warned the guy beforehand that he had a way of pressurising people, but I imagine that he thought that it was OK because he was doing it “for God”. I myself used to think that way when I was younger, but I have since realised that that is not true. So when I eventually ditched him or performed the actions which led to him ditching me, I felt I had already given him enough warning.
With the woman however, I don’t think that I gave her that same warning, and that may be why it is weighing on my mind. However, from the interaction I had with her, I suspect am utterly sure that if I had tried to explain, or say that i did not like being pressurised, she would have tried to kick back that she was not pressurising me, and she would actually have tried to deliberately create an argument from that. So on one hand I do feel a little bad about not making an effort, but my experience of her soothes my conscience. Unfortunately there are some ways people behave which means that they forfeit the right to communication or an explanation, even if they are otherwise “nice people”. Another example would be if your otherwise lovely partner tried to hit you, for instance, and then sat around waiting for you to explain why you have suddenly left him. Apologies, this example is a little brutal. Off the top of my head I cannot think of anything a little more gentle just now. My mind sometimes sounds off if I act in way that is not in line with my values, and I need to quieten my mind and reassure myself that the way I acted towards her was fine.

The second thing that my mind was puzzling over just a few minutes ago (about 30 mins ago, if that matters!) is this: how do I know I’m right?! When it comes to comparing alternative approaches to relationships, how can I categorically say that my approach is reliable, and yours is not?
Part of the issue concerns what each approach is trying to achieve.
I said “Two years!” She said “Oh no, go out with them, date them, and find out what they are like!” But so so many people on Reddit etc complain about the spouses that they have married, and the conclusion that they draw, and the conclusion that everyone else, myself included also draws, is that they should have known their spouse better. Or where the wife is complaining, for instance, the husband does something which demonstrates that the wife did not know him that well before she married him. So with many of these women, if they had known who their husbands truly were, they would not have married them. So the corollary is that you should do your best to know someone deeply before marrying them. How can this be controversial???!!! So the whole point of “two years” is that going out with someone to get to know them makes you extremely vulnerable to whomever they might turn out to be, so you should try to evaluate their character for two years in a non-romantic context, where two years is acknowledged as the length of time that it reliably takes to get to know someone. Putting themselves into the intimacy of a relationship has caused lots of trouble for lots of women in the past, and will sadly continue to do so. OK, I accept that “two-yearing” might not be the best way to evaluate someone’s character. However, other than trusting to sheer luck, clearly the best way to avoid a dreadful choice of partner is to find some way to evaluate their character. If anyone can give me a better way of doing that than “two yearing” then I am all ears. However, two yearing is still clearly superior to making yourself vulnerable to someone completely unknown through relationship intimacy. Perhaps she did not appreciate that the whole point is to get one marriage right from the outset? Perhaps the approach would be different for someone who was not so focused on marriage to start with, or who did not think that marriages could realistically last forever?

Actually this second issue is not particularly about her. It pertains more to when someone comes along with an alternative viewpoint to mine, and calls into question my own approach about relationships. And then I have to ask myself “Well how do I know I am right?” I guess that because these are theories, it might sometimes be hard to categorically say that one approach is correct over the other.

Furthermore regarding this woman, she related some of her relationship experiences to me and they were not lovely. I was giving her a solution to avoid making similar mistakes moving forward. I could not help being a little unimpressed that she ignored my frankly excellent suggestion, which has worked well for me, and instead tried to drag me into her poor approach, which has only caused her so much pain, and furthermore tried to force this self-destructive approach on my head. The whole thing seemed so weird to me that I could not help dreaming up a few weird suspicions about her motives…I tried to be watchful and careful, and not jump to conclusions just because something had occurred to me. However as those suspicions had already been seeded, the next time she behaved incomprehensibly to me I did not even sit around to attempt to discuss. Rather I just blocked her calls, and shrug – that was that. I know that above I have stated that she she is sincere. However, there were some niggling doubts in my mind. Ultimately from the controlling nature that she revealed of herself I definitely do not regret ending the interaction with her. My own quibble with myself is how I went about it.#

—-
Another thought that has occurred to me regarding this woman is this: If I had been more careful with creating and asserting boundaries in the first place, I might have escaped that whole sorry saga altogether. And to be candid, the saga is a lot sorrier than I have explained here.

—-
[PS: it is not that I know everything, because I don’t. I would not consume information so voraciously if I thought I already knew everything, would I? It is not that I am not open to information, because I am. What frustrated me about those situations is that the people were insistent, and were so convinced that they were right that they did not give me an “out”, or a way to politely disagree with them, or even to agree to disagree. I said to the woman on a different occasion “OK, let’s agree to disagree!” meaning “I’m fed up of this pseudo-argument, let’s end it here and forget about it.” But no, she refused to heed the prompt and rather just kept trying to argue at me. Shudder!]

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *