Written by Kate Townshend
Gratitude may not be the shining example of good behaviour that women are taught to aspire to. Exploring the dark side of our instinct to say “thank you so much” when we’re afforded things we deserve, Kate Townshend unpicks how we might better articulate how we truly feel without compromising our valid desire for more.
A few weeks ago, my husband and I found ourselves in a maze of roadworks and closed pavements on an evening stroll out with our baby, stopping us from taking the sensible route home.
On seeing our obvious confusion (and hearing our crying baby), a kind workman moved a barrier for us and I spent a full 90 seconds thanking him profusely. Seriously, I almost bought the man flowers. My husband, meanwhile, asked why nobody had considered pedestrian access in the first place.
Afterwards, I started thinking about our different reactions and wondering if there might not be a gendered element to them. After all, my most used words and phrases include ‘Sorry’, ‘Apologies’, and especially ‘Thanks so much’.
Obviously, gratitude is often a good thing: I’m not advocating shouting, ‘What is this nonsense?’ when we’re given a birthday present we don’t like. But maybe there is something wrong with a world in which women are taught that privileges men often take for granted are gifts for which we should be eternally grateful.
To see these societal lessons in action, you only have to look at the online spite directed towards Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe last year for daring to be angry with the government that deprived her of six years with her husband and child – rather than simply appreciative that it finally got its act together. She did, incidentally, thank many of those involved in her release – but simply stating that it had taken too long and too many foreign secretaries to bring her home was enough for a #SendHerBack hashtag to start trending.
And while performative gratitude seems to be a pretty common feature for Grammy award winners of whatever gender, I do wonder if Beyoncé might not deserve to be a little less grateful for her 32nd win and a little more upset that she seems to constantly miss out on the award for best album.
Pragya Agarwal is a behavioural and data scientist, and author of the book Hysterical: Exploding The Myth Of Gendered Emotions. She has some possible explanations for the examples above: “Women are expected to conform to rules of femininity which include having to moderate their ‘negative’ emotions to please others around them and to make others feel comfortable,” she says. “Women in general, but mainly women of colour and other marginalised identities, are expected to be grateful for the space they are afforded because they are not the norm.”
This is the dark side of gratitude then – a way of discouraging women (and marginalised women in particular), from higher expectations or questioning of the status quo – and once you start looking for it, it appears everywhere. It’s a tired trope of sexism bingo, for instance, that complaining of inequality in the UK inevitably invites responses regarding women around the world. There will always be some male commenter ready to remind us that it could be much worse and maybe we should be grateful that ‘all’ we’ve got to moan about is the pay gap and sexual harassment.
It’s the same underlying attitude that pervades the ‘nice guy’ narrative too – where men lament the fact that women fail to see them as sexual partners, regardless of how decent they are. Once again, we’re expected to be thankful when a potential male partner reaches an absolute base level of behaviour.
And it’s a short hop from here to putting up with being underpaid and undervalued in our workplaces as well, because of course we’re lucky to have jobs at all in the current climate. We’re lucky to be able to pay our rent or our mortgages. How terribly ungrateful we’d have to be to ask for ‘more’.
Jessica Chivers, psychologist, author and host of the Comeback Coach podcast for people returning to work after maternity and other work breaks, unpicks the attitudes behind the problem – drawing many of the same conclusions as Dr Agarwal: “We’re socialised to know that women pay a penalty when they transgress from being nice – and we’re led to believe that saying, ‘That doesn’t work for me,’ is not nice, that we’re being ungrateful.”
But Jessica also believes that we can reframe this conditioning to ensure that thankfulness doesn’t become a limiting force in our careers.” You can be grateful but that doesn’t mean you can’t ask for more,” she says. “Let’s normalise a sense of ‘I’m grateful AND…’”
This idea of gratitude not necessarily ending the conversation appeals to me. After all, there are proven benefits to appreciating the good things in our lives. Perhaps I can be grateful without allowing it to hold me in place. Perhaps I don’t have to swap out ‘thank you’ for ‘screw you’ (in all but a few select circumstances). And perhaps I can raise my own expectations of the world around me without becoming entitled.
But I still can’t shake the sense that sometimes the expectation of any gratitude at all can be toxic – and sexist. Perhaps because being endlessly grateful and positive comes at a cost – a cost I now realise hit me particularly hard after I experienced a miscarriage a few years ago. Among the overwhelming kindness of the people around me, there were a few more ambiguous comments. “At least you know you can get pregnant now.” “At least you weren’t too far along.”
I now feel that ‘At least…’ is often a kind of rallying cry to pathological thankfulness. One, incidentally, that has continued now I have a little boy. There’s a reason parents – and mothers especially – find it difficult to talk about the loneliness or the hard work of child-rearing because – again – we don’t want to seem ungrateful. ‘At least’ now I have my much-wanted baby…
In the end, though, these platitudes become a way of invalidating emotions that it would be more healthy for us to express.
“Moderating, regulating and suppressing emotions has a cognitive cost,” explains Dr Agarwal. “And this emotional load has an impact on women’s mental (and physical) health. The associated impact can include anxiety, depression and insomnia over a long period of time.”
So if gratitude isn’t always good for us, I think, finally, it might be time for me to work on being a bit less grateful. Or at least a bit more discerning and sincere about the things I’m truly thankful for versus the areas of my life where it’s OK to be sad or disappointed – where it’s OK to expect or ask for more.
“Thanks for nothing,” seems a bit extreme. But I think I’m done with “Thanks for everything,” too.
Images: Getty
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