Compliments and Flatteries – Compliments and their Complications #2
I am flattered you have shown up for day #2 of Compliments week!
Flattery Wolf
Flattery is fine. You just have to know what it is. It is a social nicety. It is grease that smooths the rough edges of social interactions. It is attached to an agenda. An agenda isn’t necessarily bad or evil or dangerous. But it can be. You have to be aware. Maybe it’s a benign agenda, the man just likes you. The man just wants a little attention and so he is just giving some attention. Maybe it’s cancerous and the man becomes a wolf and wants to get in your pants or in your wallet or in your life for some nefarious reason. You have to have a discernment about people, and men in particular. It should be up to the man to be good, not bad. He is responsible for that. But if he is not, if he is a wolf, and some men are, then you must be responsible for your side of it, the discernment, wisdom and knowledge to tell the difference between a wolf and a dog.
Complimentary Dog
Compliments are fine. But how do you know they are real, true, legitimate compliments and not underhanded flattery with an attached agenda to it? You know by what happens after the compliment. Does the man remain attentive to you in more ways than just complimenting you? Does he back up his supposed admiration for you by acting like someone who admires and respects you? Is he sensitive to what you want to talk about and do or is he pushy and insistent, always directing you back to what his agenda is? It isn’t that the man doesn’t have desires and hopes and even lusts. But he understands their place, that they are behind and less important than finding out and trying to meet your needs. A Complimentary Dog does that, a Flattery Wolf does not.
The Fight
So, who am I to make the case about Flattery Wolf vs Complimentary Dog? I can make the case because I have been both. And I bet if you ask most men they would say they have been both too. It is a fight between the two in many men. Which one wins? The one that gets fed wins. Do you, as the object of attention, reward the dog or the wolf? Do you enable the bad behavior or the good behavior?
I know it is rife with issues to call men dogs or wolves, obviously the analogy only goes so far. It does break down eventually. But it also has many useful elements to it in trying to understand how men think. And the better you understand how men think and act perhaps the better you will be in understanding how to deal with their flatteries and compliments.
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Drawing and commentary by Marty Coleman, who would be a dalmatian if he were a dog.
Quote by George Chapman, 1559-1634, English dramatist
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Historical Question from Yesterday Answered
Question: Oscar Wilde was put on trial, convicted and sent to prison for what crime?
Answer: Wilde was prosecuted for ‘Gross Indecency’. This was a charge leveled against suspected homosexuals who were not caught doing the expressly forbidden deed of anal intercourse, or buggery as it was known then (and which had a possible sentence of death), but were caught being too flagrant about their life in the otherwise underground web of homosexual society. Wilde spent 2 years in prison doing hard labor. When he came out he moved to France, never to return to England. He died destitute.
Oscar Wilde
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