Unsolicited Compliments: Yay or Nay?
99% of the time, unsolicited = please don’t
Picture this: you’re a woman sitting by the pool in your apartment complex with your laptop. The sun has long set, it’s cold even in your jacket, and you’re just trying to bang out the last item on your day’s to-do list. A strange man appears, walks over to you, and volunteers “you look nice”…
Let’s break the situation down:
- I (the woman in question) was clearly busy working.
- It was dark.
- I was alone.
- He was much bigger than me.
- Just to be crystal clear, I was rugged up in night-time clothes. I was not lounging around in a swimsuit — though that should not make one iota of difference.
There are a few different possibilities here. Perhaps he thought he was being kind, and that I would like to hear (the most original compliment of all time) “you look nice”.
Perhaps he didn’t think to consider what I was doing or what I would like, and just did an I-think-and-so-I-speak. Perhaps he wasn’t aware that, given the circumstances, his compliment would make me feel unsafe. Or perhaps he was, and it was his intention to make me feel unsafe. We’ll never know.
