Sincerity and manipulation

Dancing in the dark

Cross-posted from Twitter.

This post was written while listening to Sailor Song by Gigi Perez.

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Photo: Smoking in a carpark next to Golden Gai by Jae C Hong (2019)

Can you be sincere and manipulative? There may be edge cases, but my hunch is no. Because sincerity stems from a self-assured honesty, an ability to confront the self and accept the full range of emotions that may arise, even if they may be socially unacceptable, messy, or painful. Sincerity makes me trust you because you’ve run a check on your own intentions before conveying them, and the kind of person who is capable of doing this, or is at least trying to do so, is rarely someone who is trying to manipulate me. Someone who is being sincere is choosing to be vulnerable despite the risks, and they’re willing to do this because they care about me or the relationship we share. It comes from an earnest and admirable place. It’s a way of reaching through the veil and sharing your truth, whatever that may be in the moment, in hopes that it will reach the other person. It’s a move that requires letting go of an intimate part of you into the wind with no guarantee it will end up in the right place, and being okay with that.

Sincerity is hard. To be sincere, you often have to juggle conflicting emotions or details of a complex situation to come to a summary that you feel does justice to how you’re really feeling, without leaving anything out or fabricating something you don’t mean. You end up tracing emotions under other emotions until you hit bedrock and find out what’s *actually* sitting underneath the whole stack, and the answer may be surprising.

“Hey, I really care about you but a part of me feels like you keep pushing me away, and it makes me feel like I’m never going to be good enough for you. It reminds me of instances in the past where nothing I did was ever enough, and that terrifies me.”

That’s not easy to admit to someone. It’s easier to be passive aggressive and resentful. But you feel things beneath the anger and resentment; you just have to keep digging to find the real emotional truth of the situation. It may not be what you want to say to someone, because it makes you look childish or weak or any other adjective you could feel ashamed about. Sincerity is coming to terms with such answers, and sharing them anyway.

In response to real sincerity, most people are relieved and touched. They feel like they can be honest, too, and not in a “say the first thing that comes to mind because I’m just being brutally honest” way, but in the “this is how I really, really, feel about this” kind of way, like they’re whispering a precious secret. And now you’re in on each other’s secrets, together. And you figure out what to do in the new situation you find yourself in, now that you’ve been informed by shared confession.

You risk a little and sometimes win big. In my eyes, the price of sincerity is more than worth the rewards of deep intimacy and trust.

Manipulation, on the other hand, is using roundabout tricks to get something you want because you don’t believe you can get it by just asking for it, usually because the thing you want is socially unacceptable and harmful to the other person in some way so they would never agree if asked upfront. You can only manipulate someone if they would have denied an outright request of the thing you’re trying to get from them.

You can manipulate people to get harmless things, but there isn’t much reward in that so it’s not worth the effort. Even if you do, it rarely gets parsed as “manipulation” even if it technically is. It’s just called having an effect on others, or influencing them. Manipulation sneaks up on you, and even the person manipulating you is often unaware they’re doing it. These grasp-y yet precise and intentional moves happen in the shadows of relational space—the shadows that exist in the absence of sincerity, which emits a soft glow that is inviting and unafraid.

Both the manipulator and the manipulated lack sincerity, or rather they’re incapable of it. If the manipulator were able to confront their own seemingly unacceptable impulses and desires, they would process them healthily and learn to make reasonable demands of people in an open and honest manner. But because they can’t, they make a bunch of moves invisible to themselves to get their needs met. If you try to point out what they’re doing, they will deny it because they don’t actually see it, and wish to disidentify from those unacceptable impulses. The manipulation is made possible by their own internal plausible deniability. Not only are they unable to see themselves, but they are also afraid of doing so for fear of what they might find.

The manipulated is insincere in that they are unable to confront the unacceptable impressions they have of the manipulator’s behavior, falling victim to not wanting to be “just like all the others” who have misunderstood and wounded the manipulator (a mechanism which the manipulator is subtly aware of and takes advantage of). They see the red flags but don’t disengage because they do not want to be rude, or ignorant, or selfish, and if these things were to become apparent, it would destabilize their already fragile sense of self. This fragility becomes, ironically, a strong cage that traps them within whatever game the manipulator wants to play.

They may also be lacking in sincerity in the case where they are getting something from the exchange. Whether they admit it or not, they’re usually getting something from the manipulator at the same time the manipulator is getting something from them—attention, certainty, purpose, love. They cannot face the void in themselves. They are scared of it and wish for someone else to fill it for them in the middle of the night without their knowing. They don’t care how you do it, they just want it gone. This fear and avoidance hands over the keys to the manipulator. You can do a lot to someone if they’re letting you.

Both are participating in a mutually acknowledged game of hopeful ignorance—I will let you get away with not confronting yourself if you also look the other way from my insincerity; please, let’s get drunk on each other’s shadows and dance in the dark until one of us finds the other either overbearing or not enough. For now, we are enough for each other, until we’re not. The spell ends when we can’t satisfy each other anymore, and then it all falls apart.

Just for a moment, we can be okay if we have each other. But that never lasts, because it is fundamentally selfish. In not seeing yourself, you are unable to truly see others. Dance in the dark long enough, and eventually you’ll step on toes.