… I had completely forgotten what she looked like! (It was in a group gathering, though; not a “running into on the street” encounter.)
This has to happen to other people. Two things:
It’s been a while since I saw her last. Many months.
I have a horrible, horrible, horrible memory for faces. I’ll remember your name in a thread, probably, but if I saw you I’d likely have no idea who you were the next time I saw you. Honest, it’s nothing personal. Heck, I’d rather remember you, probably.
So, given 1 and 2, I don’t feel extremely awful about it, although I do feel pretty bad. You might think, “Oh, well I guess she wasn’t very memorable, huh?” Trouble is, she was! See why I might feel bad?
Okay. I’d forgotten, but I figured out who she was soon enough. So all was and is well.
But here’s my question to you all:
Should I tell her I didn’t recognize her at first? That that was the reason I didn’t talk to her much was that - ulp - I couldn’t place her? Yipes!
I can see the advantage of leaving well enough alone, though. And because I have this sometimes unfortunate habit of playing it saf, I bet that’s what I wind up doing.
But then again, maybe she now thinks I’m a complete dork. I mean more so than usual.
I remember reading somewhere this is a left brain - right brain thing, with most people favouring one side over the other, like lefthanded/righthandedness. The majority of people remember faces a lot better than names (useful when growing up to find parents in a crowd), but there is the 10% who have it in reverse.
Can you remember the names of your classmates from when you were 7, but can’t picture their faces?
I don’t remember faces very well either. I can’t fathom how people ever identify people from wanted or missing posters. I used to work periodically, for several weeks at a time, at the same banks; at one there were two men I never could get straight, a loan officer and the controller. They looked alike, so even on my second visit I was still mixing them up. We only talked about business so I didn’t have enough info about them personally to separate them. This was my worst case. I used to think there was something drastically wrong with me until I read about the left/right brain thing a few years back. The most recent embarassing thing was seeing someone I had talked to several times, after a few months, and I didn’t recognize him at all. He said Hey, sue, don’t you recognize me? I told him I was on medication.
I wouldn’t tell her you didn’t recognize her because most people directly associate it with how much you liked them or were interested in them; they take it personally.
FIve minutes after I’ve met someone, chances are, i can’t tell you anything about what they look like…unless they were extreemly tall, or extreemly large, or extreemly small…
Problem with me is, I have a really bad memory for names too…
Even people I know well - I have great difficulty recalling what they look like without photographs.
It can be a real problem, and it can be REALLY embarassing, when - as happened to me once - you go up to someone who’s been going to the same small (150 or so ppl each sunday) church as you for almost a year and say “hi, how are you, I’m Tal” and they say, yeah, i know - I’ve been her for months.
I went to a party at a friend’s house. I heard someone talking, and her voice was really distinctive. “She sounds like someone…I’ve heard a voice just like that before,” I thought to myself. She was sitting one table over from me with a bunch of her friends, none of whom I recognized. Once she spotted me, she started chatting with me with great enthusiasm. I finally asked “I’m sorry, I’ve forgotten your name.” She looked a bit hurt, but told me her name. Didn’t ring a bell. So I asked “Where do I know you from?” At that point she stopped speaking to me, and neither she nor her friends spoke to me the rest of the party.
Turns out I’d met her at a party the previous week, and had spent half the party kissing her. It only dawned on me later who she was, and once it did, I remembered completely – her name, her user name, the email she’d sent me, her face, how she danced, how she kissed, her laugh, her voice…it all suddenly fit together. I have absolutely no idea how I possibly could have not remembered all that. (No, I hadn’t been drinking)
This is why, for the most part, witnesses are useless and get a lot people convicted with wrong visual evidence. Not always though.
I for one cannot remember names very well, but can tell you everything visual about a person, even if I only seen them for a split second. Being quiet and shy, you tend to be more observant. When you’re not quiet and shy, you’re too involved with talking and being “social”, that you’re more on a verbal queue than an image queue. -If that makes sense.
I did this once. I worked on our college paper then went off to the working world. A year or so later, someone at the paper held a party and I went. I remember being on the periphery of a few conversations where this really bright, but really young looking guy was the center of attention and I figured “joined after I left, I guess”. Then as I was leaving, he came up and said “Sorry we didn’t have a chance to talk more.” in a way which hinted that maybe I’d been ignoring him. So I looked closer and realized he was my managing editor and we’d worked together for three years – he’d shaved his full beard after I left and ended up looking five years younger.