They are such good souls. Truly. Always ready to help. Always putting other people's needs ahead of their own.
So why, in heaven's name, does the whole world walk over them, or leave them alone?
Welcome to the dark world of the people-pleaser. Welcome to the lonely fate of the nice girl and the nice guy.
If I had a pound for every person who has confessed to me that their problem is that they are simply a pleaser type, I would be doing very nicely.
Like a great many traits, social pleasing is a desirable quality that becomes problematic only when it goes out of proportion.
Guessing the needs of the people around you and supplying them is not only a good trait, it is a survival trait. In proportion. A person is supposed to read the salient needs of those around them reasonably well, and even to try to meet them.
The problem begins where that becomes the whole of the method — and it generally traces back to the role of the good child. Mother and father made their love conditional on your being a good girl, and you learned to deliver the goods.
Then you grew up and thought you had cracked the code. Here is a way to make people stay with me and not abandon me: work out what they want, and give it to them.
Except that it does not work like that. Not in long-term relationships.
Why not? Two reasons.
First, and I am sorry to have to say it to your face: people do not always know what they want.
Our wishes are volatile and change from one day to the next. If somebody else's wishes become your ruler, you will find yourself serving a very capricious master — and resenting it, possibly with justice.
Second, we have an innate tendency to be strongly drawn to people with a strong will, and to comprehensively disregard people who appear to have none.
Because we are all looking for something to lean on, for an answer, for someone to lead — and the pleaser ignores that obvious need entirely. They offer accommodation, which is not the same as offering strength, and it turns out that accommodation alone is not attractive to anybody for very long.
And besides that, we are all frightened to death of the day the pleaser presents the bill. Because everybody senses, correctly, that an account is being kept — that nothing this comprehensive is being given freely — and nobody wants to be present when it is called in.