The rule of the game demanded that I tagged a few facebook friends in the photo in return and pay it forward; I merely saw it as a way of spreading out a few smiles to people I thought might need them; and who doesn't need a little dose of corny-soapy-adorable from time to time? (Okay, maybe I'm a sucker for cuteness...)
Pretty soon, however, I received a message from one of the friends I had tagged:
"I don't want being pretty/the prettiest to be conditionned by being happy, because it's politically incorrect- if you see Hugh Grant being all mopey and sad you'd still think of him as the prettiest guy, but if you see one that's more plain or so- you'd ask him to be happy to be accepted and even then it'd take other factors like a good sense of humor and you being drunk at a party for the poor guy to get some action; it's only life that;s fair to us and its fairness is better illustrated by the saying "No one dies a virgin, life screws us all"."
The interesting point here isn't that...well, sometimes in life pleasing everyone is technically impossible. It isn't about me being surprised by his reaction or grasping it more or less; the interesting point is that it had never occured to me the photo can be "read" in this particular way. A baloon with a writing that would have said, for instance, "You're pretiest when you're skinny and blonde if you're female OR with huge muscles if you're male, respectively - I would have found it offensive enough to launch into one long tirade of "how dare they make people who don't fit their narrow ideal of beauty feel excluded?" I intuitively feel "you're prettiest when you're happy" is different, but as of now I couldn't tell exactly why. Maybe it's because I believe potentially everyone can be happy?
Or, is it merely because I attach a very different mindset to the words? To me, "you're prettiest when you're happy" sounds very acceptant (again, back to my beliefe that being happy is an ideal that potentially everyone can reach, as opposed to being skinny or successful or smart or whatever). To the guy quoted above, it doesn't. How do we negociate significances?
The one solution I know I DO NOT want -yet some people resort to it quite often, from what I've noticed- is getting very impersonal/avoiding expressing your thoughts, feelings and oppinions for fear you might offend someone. Think excessive political corectness- for instance. I mean- life without a healthy dose of controversies would not only be utterly boring, but will live horribly little room for personal growth and evolution of ideas. In layman's terms, we'd still pretty much be in caves without it.
I'm not advocating for the opposite extreme either: not caring at all about how other people understand what you are saying and leaving this responsibility up to them only. It also doesn't leave much room for fascinating controversies: you can't have a debate without an actual dialogue with your opponent.
So, the answer to this problem, I think, would ultimately be: when faced with a missunderstanding of this type, explicitate your significances: what do you mean by what yiu say? what sort of message are you trying to convey? how do you relate to your message?
(Note to self: Good luck with that :P)
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