Small Words, Big Revelations

Words reveal character. Sometimes in an instant.¹

I remember a conversation years ago. I was speaking with a young woman I was interested in at the time. I asked her about whether or not she would be open to dating me, but in a roundabout way.

"Would you ever consider dating a foreigner?" I asked.²

"Before I studied abroad, my grandfather gathered the granddaughters and told us that they would not permit international marriage in the family," she replied, almost certainly stretching the truth to accomidate her desires.

That's when an upperclassman we knew chimed in uninvited: "Oh, so you're not from a spineless family!"

In that single moment, he transformed from acquaintance to enemy.

We'd had some positive interactions before this—not many, but enough that I'd formed a neutral impression. This single comment left the balance decidedly negative.

The conversation moved on, but that comment stayed with me. It wasn't just unnecessary. It was a window into something fundamental about who this person was.³

It was unasked for. It was revealing.

In one brief moment, he had demonstrated two things: his comfort with casual xenophobia and his willingness to prioritize an opportunity for posturing over basic respect. And here's the thing about revealing your character — you can't take it back. Once the magic trick is exposed, the audience can't un-see how it works.

Sometimes close friends can exchange words that might be considered offensive to outsiders. These comments, when made in a high-trust, high-interaction environment, are merely one of ten thousand otherwise positive interactions. They're small withdrawals from a relationship where regular, consistent deposits have built a substantial reserve of goodwill.⁴

This gentleman had no such balance with me. He was overdrawn before he even opened his mouth.

Each of us had alternatives in that moment. I could have asked her in a less public setting (though in my defense, it was a small social gathering in someone's apartment). She could have found a softer way to deliver the message, simply saying "I'm not interested", which I would have respected and would not have constituted a withdrawal from our shared goodwill.

And he? He could have kept his mouth shut. But staying quiet when you have the chance to demonstrate your superiority is apparently a feat of strength some cannot muster.

Not every interaction needs to be serious. But we do need to consider our audience and our relative position in the cultural context. He was older than me, and therefore in the particular cultral context, his words carried more weight, particularly in that setting. Instead of using that position to help navigate a potentially awkward moment, he wielded it like a club.

Social media often focuses on dramatic instances of prejudice, but it's these small, casual moments that reveal the most. The throwaway lines. The unnecessary judgments that expose character in a flash.

His words cost him nothing to say but showed me everything about how he sees the world.

I didn't actively avoid him going forward. Our paths crossed plenty of times after that. But I also didn't go out of my way to interact with him because I understood something fundamental about his character: if he had the opportunity to take a cheap shot, he would.³

Almost two decades later, I remember little else about him, but that single comment remains crystal clear. It's as if my brain filed it away to remind me both to stay clear and not to behave in a similar way.⁵

Years later, when I heard someone had keyed his new BMW in a church parking lot, I was neither surprised nor disappointed. In fact, schadenfreude might be the word.

What lines are we drawing when we speak? And who are we pushing to the other side?

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