Joe Palca - Annoying

3. Intrusive behaviors . Unlike the first two categories of social allergens, “intrusive behaviors are intentional and personally directed,” says Cunningham. “This is a person who always insists on inflicting his opinion on you, whether you are interested or not. Somebody who tells you how to improve yourself. Gives you unsolicited advice. Just generally tries to dominate you, often with the best of intentions, but you didn’t necessarily appoint this person to the role of surrogate parent.”

Intrusive behaviors can be relatively anonymous, like the bar bore who insists on telling you what’s wrong with America when all you want to do is watch the ballgame. Yet these kinds of behavior can also be quite personal. Parents frequently inflict them on their adult children. Parents know your insecurities best. If you are a successful lawyer, but your mother keeps reminding you that you could have been a doctor, it can get under your skin in a way that’s hard for others to appreciate. Or if your spouse is in the habit of reminding you that you don’t make as much money as Bob, the boyfriend she left to marry you, this, too, is a good way to set you off.

4. Norm violations . “These are intentional behaviors that are not directed at you personally but violate some standard that you have,” says Cunningham. “For example, you know somebody who is not paying his income tax. It’s not necessarily your business to supervise that person, but you pay your income taxes, and the fact that he doesn’t is annoying.

“There are certain norm violations that actually do entail some personal impact; for example, people who violate the building rules about not smoking in the bathroom, and you go into the bathroom right after them, and it stinks. Those norm violations have a personal impact, but it’s not directed at you.”

Taken together, these four categories of social allergens make living with someone else a challenge. Cunningham likes to recall a scene from the 1999 movie The Story of Us :

It’s inevitable—suddenly, all you’re aware of is that there are too many wet towels on the floor, he’s hogging the remote, and he’s scratching his back with a fork. Finally, you come face-to-face with the immutable truth that it’s virtually impossible to French-kiss a person who takes the new roll of toilet paper and leaves it resting on top of the empty cardboard roll. God forbid, he takes the two seconds to replace it. Does he not see it? Does he not see it?

There are people who meet, fall in love, stay married for their entire lives, and never have an unkind word for their spouses. And then there are the other six billion people on the planet.

People frequently describe their partners as both “the love of my life” and “one of the most annoying people I know”—in some cases, the most annoying person they know. It’s a baffling paradox. Consider the following scenario. It’s a scene that’s played out a million times at dinner parties around the world. Think of it as a theme with endless variations.

Four couples are sitting around a table. Everybody is on a second glass of wine. One of the men at the table starts to tell a joke.

“So, three strings go into a bar, and the first string says to the bartender, ‘I’d like a Tom Collins, please.’”

At this point, the man’s wife interrupts. “Please, not that joke again.”

He turns to her. “But they haven’t heard it.”

She avoids his look. “I have. At least a thousand times.”

“But it’s funny.”

“So you think.”

Now the incident has reached a turning point. The guy can finish telling the joke, which will annoy his wife. Or he can stop telling the joke, in which case he’ll be irritated.* When they get home, it’s easy to imagine the conversation.

“Why do you always interrupt me when I try to tell a joke? When we started dating, you liked my jokes.”

“That’s all you ever do at dinner parties. Tell jokes. We were talking about politics, and you pipe up with your dumb joke about strings.”

“Why do you always have to interrupt me at dinner parties? Can’t you ever let me finish a thought in public? Can’t you let other people decide what they do or don’t want to hear?”

And so on.

A reasonably well-adjusted couple will weather this contretemps. For a troubled marriage, it could take them one step closer to the end. Diane Felmlee has thought a lot about the circumstances that bring couples to this predicament. She’s a sociologist at the University of California, Davis. After decades of research, she’s convinced that she knows what’s going on.

The answer first occurred to her in the 1980s when she was just starting her academic career at Indiana University in Bloomington. She even remembers the day. She was having lunch with some of her women friends when the conversation turned to relationships. The women were sharing complaints about their partners. “One woman was saying her husband was never there on the weekends,” Felmlee recalls. “He was always working so hard, and she wished he was around more. So I asked her what drew her to him in the first place.”

Felmlee says her friend replied that she and her husband had been high school sweethearts, and what had first impressed her about him was that he was an incredibly hard worker. “It was clear he was going to be one of the more successful people in the class,” Felmlee remembers her friend saying. “Another woman said that her fiancé never talked with her about his feelings. ‘He won’t tell me what’s bothering him.’ So I asked her, ‘What drew you to him?’ and she said, “Well, he had this cool about him, a kind of cool demeanor.’ And I’m thinking, ‘Cool, reserved men don’t emote. They’re not going to talk about their feelings.’”

Felmlee says that she saw a pattern. In each case, it seemed that the very quality that was initially attractive became an irksome characteristic later in the relationship. Were her friends unusual, or was this a common occurrence? Felmlee decided to investigate. At the time, she was teaching a big lecture class. College sophomores are a common proving ground for new psychological theories, so it only made sense for her to engage her class. “I just had them pull out a piece of paper and asked them to think of their boyfriend or girlfriend and then write down what first attracted them to that person.”

Now, when you are the teacher, and you ask your class a question, you run a high risk of getting the answers your students think you want to hear. So she then asked a few unrelated questions to disguise what she was getting at. “And then I asked them what they least liked about that person. And if their relationship had ended, I asked why it ended.”

The answers confirmed her initial suspicions. It was fairly common for the students to be turned off by the very thing that first attracted them to the person they were—or had been—dating. In the last few decades, Felmlee has been conducting studies with couples to further explore this problem of what she calls “fatal attractions.” She says that virtually any positive trait that you can name can also be looked at as an annoyance.

“We asked one guy what he liked about a former girlfriend, and he listed every part of this woman’s body, including the most intimate parts. And when he answered the question ‘Why did you split up?’ he said that the relationship was based only on lust. There wasn’t enough love. I thought, ‘Well, he got what he wanted initially. Now he’s not happy with it.’” Similarly, Felmlee remembers a woman in one of her studies who really liked her husband’s body, and then she complained that he was always working out, instead of spending time with her.