Joe Palca - Annoying

One thing most couples have noticed is that the same behavior that drives you crazy when your partner does it can be (relatively) easy to ignore when someone outside the relationship does it. Cunningham says there are two reasons for this. One is that if it’s not your partner, you believe you are going to escape it. You can get through any dinner sitting next to an annoying person because you know that eventually it will be over—and you don’t have to wonder when. It ends when you leave the dinner table. Yet if your spouse has that same annoying trait, it will be present that night and at lunch the next day and on and on and on. The other reason is that you know you can expect irritating behaviors out in the big, bad world.

“When you’re out in public, you put the Teflon on,” says Cunningham. “But with spouses, you may have the shields down, and they may get to you more easily.” When you are at home, you hope to have a comfortable environment with agreeable people. “Outside in the world, you expect to deal with irksome people,” says Cunningham. It’s a case of forewarned is forearmed.

So what can you do? How can you prevent these social allergens from destroying your relationship? “The most common thing to do is to avoid the other person,” says Cunningham. This is not necessarily a good thing for relationships, “but it does explain separate bedrooms, separate vacations, and things.”

Even though this advice is likely to have the same effect on you as the phrase “eat more fruits and vegetables,” Cunningham says you should try to be accepting of your partner’s irritating habits. “This trait is a part of this person,” he says. “You’ve got to take this if you want all of the other good things.”

A slightly more practical approach is to try to reclassify behaviors. “Some people have said that you can see certain quirks that used to be annoying as actually endearing,” says Cunningham. Unfortunately, this reclassification usually occurs posthumously. Your spouse’s infuriating habit of snapping his bubblegum may seem oddly charming when the poor guy is remembered at his funeral. “If you can do that before the person has passed on, you’re ahead of the game.” Cunningham also notes that some people asked their spouse to cease and desist the annoying behavior, but that was effective in only a minority of cases, because some allergens were unintentional and hard to control and others were actions the offender felt entitled to perform.

Of course, we may be missing an angle here. There are times when, either consciously or unconsciously, we want to annoy our partners, says psychologist Arthur Aron of the State University of New York in Stony Brook. Aron says that sometimes we realize we are trying to get back at our partners for some transgression, and spouses know best what will get their partners’ goat. “You know when you hang out with someone, don’t bring up certain topics, or, if you do, don’t push it too hard,” says Aron. “With spouses, we know that our partners know our hot buttons, and it’s even more annoying when our partners bring them up.”

Intentionality of action may factor significantly in the annoying quotient. A door slammed by the wind is way less annoying than a door slammed by an angry spouse. Aron believes that this intentional “pushing too hard” isn’t limited to adult relationships. “Kids do this a lot with their parents. And to some extent, parents with their kids.” Aron says that children will deliberately not clean up their rooms, will drink milk directly from the container, and will not hand in their homework as a way to annoy a parent who sets a curfew too early or refuses to raise an allowance. Like Hatfield, Aron believes that many of these annoyances will be overlooked when there is commitment in a relationship and will be exaggerated when there is not. Growing annoyance can be a sign of trouble to come.

The good news here is that there are ways to address the problem. Aron says that one of the most important things you can do in a relationship is celebrate when something good happens to your partner. “That’s even more important than supporting him or her when things go bad,” says Aron.

Another trick is to be sure to do novel, challenging, exciting things with your partner, fairly often. Anything you can do that will make your relationship better will tend to make your partner less annoying. It’s a case of a familiar aphorism turned on its head: “Mind the pounds, and the pennies will take care of themselves.”

Just as you might fall for a person with one trait and then find that you’re annoyed by the same trait years later, the same can happen in the workplace. An employer may hire someone for a characteristic that later turns out to be annoying.

Robert Hogan has some ideas about that. In fact, he’s made a career of convincing companies that he can weed out the undesirable hires or at least give those people feedback that might help them change their behavior. One look at his house on Amelia Island on the Atlantic Coast of Florida is enough to tell you that he’s made a pretty successful career out of it. Amelia Island is an enclave of wealth and privilege. Hogan describes himself as “one of two liberals on the island.” His house sits at the edge of a tidal wetland on the island’s west coast. An unmemorable exterior gives way to a spectacular modern interior, with soaring ceilings, huge windows looking over the wetlands, and walls intersecting at interesting angles. This splendid home is where Hogan remotely runs Hogan Assessment Systems, Inc., a management consultant business located in Tulsa, Oklahoma, that was founded by Hogan and his wife, Joyce, when they were both professors at the University of Tulsa.

Hogan is a personality psychologist. “The problem with personality psychology as a discipline is that it started with Freud and Jung and Adler and Erikson,” he says. “They set the field off in the wrong direction. They argued that the most important generalization you can make about people is that everyone was somewhat neurotic, which means the big problem of life is to overcome your neurosis. Which means the goal of psychological assessment is to identify the sources of your psychopathology. That whole thing was a total mistake.”

The reason it was a mistake, according to Hogan, is that Freud and Jung and Adler were all crazy, to use the nontechnical term. They assumed that their own craziness was simply a version of what everybody else suffered from. “The trick is to get an impartial perspective on human nature so that you can get your own biography out of the way,” says Hogan. “It goes back to Socrates, ‘Know thyself.’ I always thought when I was young that ‘Know thyself’ was Freudian. Know the secret you that’s inside you.”

That’s not what he thinks anymore. “For Socrates and the Greeks, self-knowledge had to do with knowing the limits to your performance capabilities,” he says. “Basically, knowing what you’re good at and not good at. The best data for that are what other people are going to say about you.” In other words, what you think of yourself is irrelevant. If everybody you come in contact with thinks you’re a jerk, you’re a jerk whether you think that or not. “The you that you know is hardly worth knowing because you made it up,” says Hogan. “We’re all the stars in our own little dramas.” In other words, annoying people probably have no idea how annoying they are.

Hogan was also interested in the question of leadership. “Because to take leadership seriously means you have to take personality seriously,” he says. As he looked through the psychology literature, he found little consensus on what makes a good leader. So he turned the question on its head and asked, What makes a bad leader? There are a lot of bad leaders out there, says Hogan. A senior manager at one of the nation’s largest retailers estimates that two-thirds of the managers they hired were bad. “Here are the reasons they failed,” says Hogan. “They were arrogant, abrasive, and neurotic.”