I’m having a sort of weird problem: I cannot stand one of my coworkers, who is also dating one of my best friends (I know, awkward). We sort of rubbed each other wrong from the beginning, and things have gotten increasingly awkward since (not exactly helped by some slight drama from the friend in question). I don’t think there’s any actual malice on either side, and I don’t really have anything against the coworker, but I have a sort of pet-peeve reaction to all sorts of entirely normal thigs that wouldn’t bother me in anyone else. We manage to be courteous around each other, but it would be nice to not have that constant back-of-the-mind reaction.
So, have any of you guys managed to overcome a similar problem? Is there any hoe of detente?
It sounds like your reaction is almost entirely visceral. You just don’t like them. You’re allergic to their essence.
I’ve experienced that only a few times in my life, and I think it’s uncurable. The best you can do is limit your contact with them and try your best to hide your dislike.
Very different situation. I work with volunteers at a historical site. One old lady has a rather awkward personality. She is easily upset by trivial things and in meetings a lot of time is taken up explaining things to her. That wouldn’t seem so bad but she has to know about everything in great detail even where it’s not relevant to the work she does – detailed stuff about IT and so on. She used to drive me batty to the point that I would take spurious loo breaks just to get out of the room when she was talking. Then I came across a list of her local history publications and realised she had been doing good solid work for decades. It changed not only my opinion of her but made me a lot more patient. Yes she has numerous bees in her bonnet and yes, she can be very annoying, however she kind of deserves the accomodations people make for her and hey, I could end up being her one day (though I hope not )
So, my advice to you is to try to find some good things about this person. What does your friend see in them. You may never be able to like them but it would be good to get the irritation down.
It depends what behaviors are annoying you. Often it is people acting out things that you hate about your own behavior. How often do you hear someone complaining about a third party and you think, “pot, kettle.” In these cases you have a problem unless you can learn to recognize and accept the feeling.
However if it’s just stuff that you find irritating, feel sorry for the poor bastard. Everyone acts the way they do in the belief that they are maximizing their chances of getting what they want. It’s not about you, the poor guy is giving it all he’s got, he would probably love it if you liked him. How sad is that. Cut him some slack.
What Otara said! I used to work with a fairly idiosyncratic mob of cow-orkers, and it took a bit of conscious effort on my part to get over my initial antipathy to some of them.
It isn’t always possible… In two cases, I had to report blatant violations of workplace rules to the HR department. (One guy wouldn’t stop telling racist jokes, no matter how many times I begged him to stop. The other guy insisted on leaving religious reading material out in the break room – and the material was not benign. More like Chick tracts!)
But the guys whose behavior was merely obnoxious? The gum-popper, the guy who talked REALLY LOUD on the phone, the guy who had a new “get rich quick” scheme every day, the conspiracy-theory fanatic, the guy who liked to sing along with the radio, the guy who used way too much cologne (you could smell him approaching long before he actually got there!) and so on? Hey, Golden Rule, man: they probably think I’m hard to get along with.
Everyone contains a cosmos within their heads. If you take the time and make the effort, you can usually find something really admirable and engaging, even in these weirdos. (One guy turned out to be an amateur actor, and I often would go to see him in his plays. Real small-scale stuff: they’d rent a hotel meeting room, and set up chairs for an audience of fifteen. But it was fascinating!)
For years I would discount my original impression of someone, if it was bad, and try to take time to give them a chance to prove me wrong. The lesson I learned from doing this was that I was wasting my time, and it would usually be made clear to me why my first impression was the correct one.
I used to really dislike the guy who is now my best friend. My best friend in high school (a girl) started dating him and I was like “!!!” and she left for college and the two of us were left back in high school and we became best friends too. I think he changed, tho. Nobody really likes 14 year old boys
My uncle’s wife used to really get my goat. Just the way she acted, the way she talked. She is an attention whore and a brash Texan. This used to drive me crazy when I was in my 20s but I suddenly…got over it. I grew up and realized that’s how she is and now I’m not stupidly “surprised” when she acts a certain way. I know what to expect.
Granted, my aunt lives in AZ and I only see her every year or so, so it is much easier for me to have my “revelation” than it might be to get over a co-worker that you see every day.
Yeah. A co-worker and I disliked each other to the point of not speaking for several years. Changes in our job descriptions constrained us to have to interact many times daily. I forced myself to be courteous at first, and then friendly. Our jobs have changed again and we aren’t in the same building any more; when I do see him I greet him with genuine friendship.
This. Once you see a person’s humanity - it is hard to have irrational dislikes for that person. Might sound silly, but it has worked for me. Don’t try and like them - try and find out more about them as a human being. What is the worst that can happen?
Oh - and for me it was more of an accidental thing - I didn’t try it - it just happened.
Not really. The only thing that kinda comes close is if a first impression is later proven wrong, which has happened for me but is rare. My daily interactions are by and large with co-workers, and if my first impression of you is that you loudly experiment with ringtones/sing/snaugh *in a call center *while everyone around you is talking to customers, it’s unlikely the umpteenth impression is going to impress me down the road.
Since you can’t avoid the person you could try to figure out what you can learn from her. (I really like the suggestion of learning about people like that.) We all seem to bump into each other “accidently on purpose.” Sometimes our reactions are an invitation to learn more about ourselves.
I’ve said this in another thread (aren’t we supposed to mention that? If not, to hell with it. Pretend I just got here) that my younger brother spoke really loudly. It was from untreated earaches (infections) as a child when sometimes his eardrums burst. The subsequent scarring left him unaware that he was being too loud. Usually just about everybody’s “too muchness” has a reason and sometimes it’s a really interesting story.
I’m usually pretty good about smoothing over my reactions to people, though sometimes it goes the other way. I might not always get to actively liking them, but getting to indifference is not that hard.
One technique I use for people I find jarring due to behavior or appearance or any other factor is to pretend they are an alien. That resets my brain’s “something ain’t right” trigger to “that’s just their natural state”.
The proviso of course is, you have the right to be equally and oppositely annoying. If someone thoughtlessly runs their mouth off for ten minutes without taking a breath, you are fine mock yawning. As long as you can do it with humor.
When I was younger and less mature, I used to get my knickers in a twist over how other people behaved. Now I’m older, I realise that my one way of being is not the only right way of being, and I’m a lot more tolerant of other people’s quirks and differences.
Maybe you’re putting too much pressure on yourself in feeling guilty for not liking them. The problem is that when you focus on how much you dislike someone, you are only focussing on the things about them that you don’t like, and you rarely get to know the person better because you avoid interactions with them.
So how about making a plan that next time you’re in a social situation with each other, you try and found out a bit more about this person? If you really, really dislike them, you can think of it as a psychology experiment. You’re trying to learn more about this person so that you understand what makes them tick.
When you realise how glad you are that you’re not them, it makes them much easier to like. Imagine the Irritating Pain-In-The-Arse bullet that could have just as easily hit you, permanently wounded them instead. Hallelujah! You, fine **runcible spoon **have been saved from such a terrible fate.
I tend to like most people by default. Even if they’ve got a bad reputation - I like to give people benefit of the doubt until they prove themselves unlikeable. As a consequence there are only a handful of people in the world I don’t like.
But if they cross that line, there’s almost certainly no coming back.
When I had a housemate, one of his friends was the most annoying person ever. He was loud and in-yer-face and not too bright. I used to go to my room when he came over. Perhaps he just wore me down over time, he was part of that social circle, so I saw him a lot, and after a while, I realized he wasn’t so bad. He was loud, but he was also funny and full of energy and smarter than I first gave him credit for. I ended up really liking him.
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