Is Giving Compliments Selfish?
I gave a stranger a compliment the other week. I was in the lift, going up, when the doors opened and she stepped in. The whole lift rose with everybody in it, me included. I noticed her coat - the colour, the cut, the way it sat on her - and I said so. She looked surprised and pleased, and we had one of those brief warm exchanges that last thirty seconds and somehow stay with you for the rest of the day. On the surface: a small kindness. A moment of connection. Nothing to examine.
And yet.
This is what happened in the two seconds before I opened my mouth. The woman had a very large nose. Not a nose you might mention in passing, a nose that would be the first thing listed if someone had to describe her. I registered it. And then, almost immediately, I scanned the rest of her. Looking, I think now, for something to offer. Something to name. Something to place alongside the thing I had noticed, as if I were rebalancing a scale on her behalf. I found the coat. It was genuinely lovely. I said so genuinely. She received it genuinely. Nothing about the exchange was false.
But the trigger, the reason that particular truth was said that day, to that person was not entirely clean. If she had been conventionally beautiful, would I have noticed the coat at all? Would it have come out? I’m not sure it would.
The word compliment comes from the Latin complere, to fill up, to complete. At its root, a compliment was not flattery. It was an act of wholeness. You noticed something in someone, you named it, and in the naming, something was completed: in them, and in you. It’s a nice etymology. It’s also, I think, a little too clean for what actually happened in the lift.
Because here is what I have been wondering. Was I offering her the coat compliment as a small offering of “Look, I see something else too” aimed at both her and myself? Was it a way of proving to me that I wasn’t the kind of person who lets a nose be the first thing she sees? Or, murkier still: was I trying to make the discomfort I had about her nose go away by handing her something warm, so I wouldn’t have to sit with what I had noticed?
Was I projecting? Projection would mean I imagined she felt bad about her nose - which I don’t actually know - and then handed her the coat to reassure her about a feeling I had invented on her behalf. Without her permission. She may love her nose. She may not have thought about it once that day. My rebalancing was based on a story I wrote about her, which was really a story about the thing I had noticed and wished I hadn’t.
I don’t fully know what happened in those two seconds. I know what I did. I know what I registered. I know the two things happened close together. I cannot disentangle whether the compliment was a gift to her, a small piece of self-management, or both. Probably both.
I once had a colleague who would say things like “I’m so rubbish at organising, you’re so much better than me at it.” On the surface, a compliment. Underneath: flattery designed to produce a favour, wrapped in performed helplessness. The self-deprecation was so theatrical that it was almost a tell. She was not praising me. She was recruiting me.
That’s not what happened in the lift. I was not recruiting anyone. The coat compliment did no harm. She smiled. Her day was marginally better. Mine was too. The exchange was warm. I’m not saying I did something ungenerous. I’m saying warm and clean aren’t the same thing, and most compliments carry more of the giver than we like to admit. Knowing this doesn’t make me give less compliments. If anything, I give more. But it makes me a more honest giver.
I still don’t know if that means giving compliments is selfish. What I know is that they can be warm and self-serving in the same breath, and the warmth was real, and the self-serving was real, and both things were true in the lift going up.
Give the compliment, say the thing, or don’t. But if you do, let the room be warmer than you found it. Even if you needed the warmth too. Especially then.
Dear Tsunimee, You are so rigorously self-aware. The corners of my eyes smiled as I read your self-exploration—I’m not sure I know anyone else who can trace a quick, everyday compliment down to the varied psychological roots that feed it. You have a real gift for seeing depth in what others might take for the shallows.
Your observations always feel rooted in a genuine care for people and a broad appreciation of our shared humanity.
I trust that whatever mix of motives led you to offer the compliment, your presence and your words were received as an unanticipated, quiet blessing. In the end, the impact of the gift is what matters most—and if giving it brought a spark of joy to you, too, what could be wrong with that?
When I was the fattest person in every room I received complements, from time to time, on my outfit. I shopped in high-end Big and Tall shops. My attempt at being pleasant looking was in my choice of shirts. I didn't wear suits, I had no need to, it was too hot for me most of the year, and I could not afford the tailoring and upkeep of a suit of clothes in those days.
The internal dialog for seeing a big nose might resemble the internal dialog those around me might have been indulging in regarding their discomfort about being near an enormously fat man. Four year-olds would tug at their mother's arms and say "Why is that man so fat?" when they saw me, I knew well the adults were doing the same, but not being verbal within earshot.
I received those complements genuinely. I did have an excellent eye, I know a pleasing pattern when I saw it, and I appreciated careful tailoring of well-made shirts. I also always knew that when they said "You look great!" they were leaving out the "...for an enormously fat guy."
I gobbled up this attention like a starving dog with a soup bone. It did not matter to me what the giver of the compliment was taking care of in themselves, if anything, they had overcome something to deliver it, even if it was ultimately to soothe their own feelings stirred up by my appearance, it still hit like a compliment, and lifted my mood out of the "I am so revolting looking" swamp of self-loathing which I otherwise existed in.
A big nose might not induce the same feelings in it's owner, I dunno. I have an unremarkable nose myself. It may surprise you that I always look for the beauty in ugliness and the ugliness in beauty because I wan to see ALL of the world around, not just just parts which align with my sense of pleasantness.
In my view, as a man who feels visually unattractive (albeit much less so now), a compliment is a compliment, and if you're motivated by taking care of something in yourself too, well, two birds with one stone and all that. I'd be no less pleased with a genuine compliment if I knew you were overcoming feelings you might want to disown by making it. I would congratulate you on the effort. Ugly people have a harder time than pretty people. That's just a fact.