I think passive aggression involves deliberate attempts to inflict distress on others without being seen as deliberately doing so. Thus, being chronically late or forgetful fits the bill, because the perp can always fend off accusations of intentionally inflicting distress (“hey, cut me some slack, I just overslept, that’s all!” “Hey, I just forgot, alright? Didn’t you ever forget anything?”).
The merry-go-round of selecting a restaurant described upthread is not exactly passive-aggression, but it’s similar: in this case the negating person often is refusing to be positively assertive because they do not want to be perceived as doing anything that limits or hurts the other person, even if it’s an unintended consequence of asserting their own interests. I think this and PA are related in that they are cases of someone not wanting to take ownership of their feelings and the consequences of them.
Similarly:
This is not passive-aggression, this is just a person who lacks assertiveness and in the absence of that behaviorial skill is still trying desperately to have her needs met - first by presenting the need as belonging to someone else (so she doesn’t have to face any perceived ill-will), and second by indirectly positing the idea that the fan is supposed to be on (not according to her wishes, but instead according to some unspoken convention).
Nursing has many passive-aggressive types. Most times when I bring a patient to an ICU I am greeted with several of these comments with varying degrees of hostile intent. (Ex) “Oh, I guess you don’t empty catheter bags down in your department.” Sorry, but I was busy keeping the patient alive!
I’ve found the best way to deal with the restaurant merry-go-round is to just say where you want to go and hop off the merry-go-round. That works for most passive-aggressive behaviour, actually - just stop engaging with it and do your own thing.
Whenever I say I will eat whatever someone suggests, I actually take the first suggestion. Am I the only one who does this?
Mine generally goes like this:
Partner 1: What do you want to eat?
Me: I don’t care. Whatever you want is fine.
P1: How about Chinese?
Me: Works for me!
I mean, the suggestion has to be pretty off the wall for me to say no. Monetarily prohibitive or extremely distant restaurants are about all that will make me question a suggestion.
I do note, however, that even though I am pretty much always compliant that all the ladies I have been in a relationship with hate the fact that I do this so often.
“Why is it my decision?” is asked a lot. It really and truly is that most of the time I have no strong preference for where to eat. I can find something that I will eat without modification just about anywhere.
I recently started a thread about how to deal with my friend’s annoying personal crisis, but I’m too lazy to go find it. In short, my friend was posting a bunch of tweets about how everyone hated her and how horrible her life is and how she should just go eat worms, etc. I was sympathetic to the fact that she was going through a hard time, but annoyed by the constant bombardment of self-pitying dramaaaaaaa.
The other day I dumped her as a friend because she aimed her passive aggression at me.
I posted an entry in my LiveJournal that I felt XYZ. Said friend disagreed, but instead of telling me so (which would have been fine, I wouldn’t have been offended, XYZ isn’t really a big deal), what she did instead was go to Twitter and write, essentially, “some people are such fucking bitches. I don’t think XYZ, I think ABC.”
Obviously I’m anonymizing it a lot, but the first sentence is a direct quote. I confronted her, asking her if she was calling me a fucking bitch. She wrote back to say that yes, she had been talking me about me, and it’s okay if I hate her, she hates herself and is a terrible person who can never do anything right. Et cetera.
Obliquely calling someone a fucking bitch in a forum you know they can read? That, my friends, is passive aggression.
The last thing you want to do while living in the Far East, IME, if you’re dealing with a group of three or more. It’s another thing reminding me of Chinese culture – there was an article on Cracked lately talking about the ideal situation going out to eat in China or Japan is when a group of people collectively mumble long enough to settle on a restaurant that none of them like (though of course they can’t come out and say so). Because if Person A is seen really enjoying him/herself, maybe they’re doing so at the expense of Persons B, C and D who hate the food there. Person A would then gain a reputation as a selfish boor and someone who can’t get along with the group (be it coworkers or–even worse–inlaws). Such a society breeds passive aggression out the wazoo, believe me.
My husband can be passive-agressive. I know I’ve told this little anecdote here before, because it blew up into a big discussion, but that’s the only reason I remember it.
One day I cut the tags off a couple of new shirts and absent-mindedly left them sitting on the bathroom counter instead of putting them in the trash. This is a bad habit of mine, it’s annoying, I know, and I’m always working to change it. But I am human, and sometimes I slip up. This was one of those times.
So my husband comes across the tags, and instead of A) just throwing them away himself and moving on with his life or B) coming to me and saying something along the line of “You left trash out on the counter again. Can you please try harder not to do that?”, either of which would have been fine with me, he chose option C) Bring the tags out to the living room, show them to me, and ask, “Were we saving these for anything? I thought they were trash but since you left them on the counter I wasn’t sure.”
A very minor instance of passive-aggressiveness, yes, but when this kind of thing happens over and over again it can get hard to live with. Fortunately, hubby does admit he has a tendency to do it and tries hard not to.
:dubious: Or perhaps you were still steaming because last week he had forgotten your cousin’s boyfriend’s mother’s birthday, and so you left those tags on the counter as your little way of getting back at him, because you know how much he hates that?
