Who are we trying to impress?

“It is nice to be praised and admired, and I can’t help saying I like it."

I am reading a biography of Mitt Romney. In between accounts of campaigns and caucus conversations, there is a minor thread that keeps catching my attention: his lifelong efforts to impress his wife and high school sweetheart, Ann: “Romney had organized much of his life around winning and keeping Ann’s respect,” the biographer writes. I read about how, after voting as the lone Republican to convict President Trump of Article I, death threats poured in, friends cut him off, and the president’s allies sought to excommunicate him from their party. Despite all this, he felt only enormous relief: “The anxiety is gone,” he writes in his journal, thinking instead about “his sons, and how they’d remember him when he was gone.”

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Now I am reading Little Women. I have never underlined so many passages in a novel, wisdom I want to remember and copy over to my commonplace book. Again, that thread: nothing animates the girls more than pleasing their mother, making her proud, earning her respect. “Oh yes, we will try, Mother, we will,” they exclaim in one voice, over and over, vowing to do better in the eyes of their beloved Marmee.

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It is my twenty-first dativersary, an admittedly minor holiday. But still, even after two decades, even after it’s been eclipsed by a wedding anniversary and three children’s birthdays, we celebrate January 29. We mark this day when we said our first yes.

And this is right, because nested inside our nearly-forty-year-old bodies are those same two teenagers, the ones who couldn’t eat for nerves, who earnestly offered up mixtapes, who fairly quivered with the attention they paid each other. These shadow selves, I think, are one of our relationship’s beating hearts.

We are older now, our hearts split open and walking around outside our bodies in not one, not two, but three little forms, and yet we still try to impress: a rueful smile when I praise him in front of friends, a warm glow when he notices the effort I put into making a family tradition just so.

I wonder if this is a kind of protectant, loving someone you want to shine for, and being loved by them?

If so, we need it, because the urge to seek approval is strong in all of us. It is not by nature negative, but it is easily twisted: too often, we turn to our phones instead of our loved ones in moments of loneliness and celebration, disappointment and triumph, confusion and clarity. Instead of trying to make the ones who know us best proud, we perform for the ones who will accept a tightly-edited highlight, a tidy upward narrative, a black-and-white choice. We hope this will make us feel good, like we matter — but instead of filling us up, it leaves us empty, and wanting more.

And sometimes, it turns sour completely: at its nadir, in the haunting words of Freya India, we ourselves become the meaningless content. In our desire to be seen and appreciated, we cheapen and package ourselves for others to consume and critique. “We were raised on recognition,” she writes, “a generation sustained by likes and attention and advertising ourselves, and without it we are nothing.”

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“‘It is nice to be praised and admired, and I can’t help saying I like it,’ said Meg, looking half-ashamed of the confession.

‘That is perfectly natural, and quite harmless, if the liking does not become a passion, and lead one to do foolish things. Learn to know and value the praise which is worth having, and to excite the admiration of excellent people.’”

Marmee clearly knew the secret at the heart of this thread I’ve been unraveling: the very best people to impress are the ones we don’t need to impress to be loved. They are the ones who know us and stick with us in spite of our faults, despite seeing us at our lowest and meanest, who aren’t scared off by our bad days or worst impulses or stubborn sins. They believe in our future glory-selves, want for us the life that is truly life.

It is not bad for people “out there” to think well of us, or even for us to desire that they should think well of us. But they are too easily satisfied. Instead, let’s know and value the praise which is worth having. Let’s not try to banish the urge to impress, but entrust it to those who are worthy of it. Let’s put our best efforts not toward what is seen by the masses, but by the ones who matter most.

Thank you, as always, for being here. xo

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