Emotions and Their Discontents

Tonight I am moved to write about dislike, perhaps because last time I wrote about like.  

As will be and has been true everywhere, there are people here that I don't like.  I don't hate them, but I don't like them.  Obviously, there are lots of legitimate, if not reasonable, reasons

for disliking someone:  so-and-so has an incredibly irritating voice; so-and-so holds opinions you find reprehensible; so-and-so has, or appears to have, something you wish you had.  These dislikes are puzzling, and perhaps embarrassing (depending on which of them applies), but they aren't as puzzling as dislike for no reason.  For me, at least, there are some people I just don't like.  They never did anything to me or gave me any reason to be jealous (two common motivators of dislike, in my opinion), but I just don't like 'em.

Sometimes I try to pin down these dislikes - maybe everybody does.  "We just don't have similar outlooks," one might say, or, "He's too pushy," or whatever.  But those aren't true.  In some cases, antipathy is much simpler and simultaneously much more mysterious.  After a number of years and a number of these experiences, I've gradually decided that the only way to explain them is to say the person "doesn't smell right."  Because it seems to me that in the end these dislikes come from some instinctive place inside, the part of us that remains still animal (which, in my opinion, is quite a large part - but that's a story for another day).

The difficulty, of course, comes not in experiencing these dislikes but in negotiating them. What to do with the people you dislike?  Befriend them, on the "keep your friends close, but your enemies closer" theory? This has its applications, certainly, but the problem is that then you have to hang out with someone you don't like.  Out-and-out spurning is not a good idea, for reasons to do with you and with them (you don't have to be mean, after all).  So the best response seems to be a kind of measured engagement, in which you don't seek them out, but when you're with them by happenstance you keep up a smooth front so they don't know you dislike them.

And here we have the "s" of "Emotions," above, because this solution is also the only solution I've learned to any extreme emotion as I've grown up.  I have a friend back at my home university who once said to me, "We can't pick our emotions, but we can pick what we do with them."  That struck me as one of the smartest and most useful utterances I'd ever heard.  It seemed to me to mean, "We can't pick how we feel, but we can react to those feelings with dignity and sense."  You can sit at home gnashing your teeth about how much you hate that man with the high-pitched giggle who sits behind you in lecture, or blushing and tittering about how fabulous the girl who sits next to you in seminar is, but face-to-face with these people in public situations the best thing to do is to grind your emotions under your heel and appear relaxed and collected.

Which is actually a damn shame in some ways, it seems to me.  For one thing, you're denied the pleasure of, say, drinking in the face of that beautiful girl - or of expressing your contempt for someone of whom you're contemptuous.  And in the case of love, it makes the world a little less filled with happiness (because love is always good, I think, even if wasted on someone who isn't interested or isn't right).  On the other hand, though, you haven't debased yourself in any way, and since in the long run the only person you can be sure you're going to have to encounter daily for the rest of your life is you, there's a lot to be said for not behaving in ways that will embarrass you when you look back on them.

I'll tell you a little secret, though: sometimes I think dignity is just plain over-rated.