Are you two-faced?

[firecat]

I made some comments about this in someone else's journal (the entry is friends-locked, so not identified) and it got me to wondering.

If you have a problem with how someone behaves--

• Under what circumstances do you tell them?
• Under what circumstances do you not tell them but tell other people who know them?
  
  • If you tell others, do you care whether those comments to get back to the person?
  • If you want that not to happen, do you do anything to prevent it?
  • Do your prevention mechanisms work?
• Under what circumstances do you not tell anyone (or only one or two confidants)?

If someone has a problem with how you behave--

• Under what circumstances do you want to be told?
• Under what circumstances do you not want to be told?
• Do you think people say things behind your back that are different from what they say to your face?
  • If so, does this bother you?
  • If it bothers you, do you do anything about it?
  • What do you do?

Comments

[nellorat.livejournal.com]

Good questions. On the one side, if I have a problem with someone's behaviour and decide not to tell them, it's probably because I don't think it would do any good--that is, it's not a problem to them, or they won't listen to me, or whatever. But I don't actively try to keep the comment from them, either, unless I think they both will get angry over it and will somehow make my life more difficult because of their anger. At this point in my life, that's one person, whose social circle has literally no overlap with mine. I don't see this at all as being two-faced.

I can see in-betweenish cases that might be problematic, though. For instance, I want to tell the person, but not yet. In that case, if I tell others first, it could get back to that person in a way that I would regret, only in part because it would look two-faced. One subset of this is when I am not sure what the problem is, and a subset of that is when I think it might be partly me. I'm not sure whether I've ever had that happen or not, though I have had to handle a similar thing, someone finding out from others news that I was going to tell her, just not yet.

Having been in sf and related fandoms over half of my life, I take it as a fact of life that others are probably being more negative about me than they are to me, at least temporarily over something. I think this probably is more a matter of omission--ie, not telling me every single time I piss someone off--and I think it may be as much a good thing as a bad thing. I wouldn't call it two-faced, either. I'd save that for someone saying good things to my face and and things behind my back about the same behaviors of mine. In a close society, that kind of thing generally gets around, back to the person it's about, I think. Maybe I'm just overly optimistic, but I don't think that kind of thing happens too much in sf and related fandoms.

I guess my standards for wanting to be told when someone has a problem with my behavior are similar to when I tell: I want to be told if there's a chance the situation can be modified for the better, which is much of the time. If nothing else, the person and I can just avoid certain topics or situations. Hmmm. If the specific behavior isn't amenable to any fix at all (ie, the person objects to just the thought that I am in a triad, or study serial killers, or breed rats), but we get along well otherwise, I guess I'd want to know so as not to bring the subject up more than necessary. But you can usually tell that by how a person reacts; to me, it doesn't have to be discussed as an issue.