Dating : Real Love Means Seeing Through Their Poker Smile

Smiling on demand is exhausting.

Smile is a loaded word. The happiest people I know don’t smile much. They don’t go around telling everyone else to do it, either.

They live in their emotions.

They let other people do the same. They know that most of the time, telling someone to smile doesn’t really help. They know a smile can mean lots of things, not all of them good. Above all, they don’t assume to know what’s going on in someone’s head, or what someone needs.

They ask.

They don’t see a sad face and tell it to smile. They ask what’s wrong. They listen. They offer help.

Sometimes smiling just comes with the job.

It’s emotional labor.

Anyone who’s ever waited tables knows this. They smile on demand for hours, to make clientele feel cozy. Their jobs depend on it. When they go home, they need a drink or three.

People in the service industry smile to give a place vibes. Most people never think about that when they go out dining and dancing. It’s one of the reasons some guys always think the waitress or the bartender is flirting with them, then feel manipulated later when they realize she was doing it for tips, or to keep them drinking top shelf.

Yeah, she has to — or she’ll be fired. Her manager is also the one encouraging her to wear those tight shirts. This kind of smiling is exhausting.

It doesn’t pay nearly enough.

Smiling on demand takes energy. It doesn’t always make you feel good. The truth is, it can wear you out.

The same goes for all of our relationships, not just work. A lot of the time, we smile for someone else — not ourselves. We smile because we’re covering up something. Maybe it’s anger. Maybe it’s hurt.

We don’t want to burden someone else with our raw emotions. So we stash our thoughts and feelings behind a smile. We save it all for later. We know other people’s well-being depends on us at least trying to act like we’re in a good mood, even if we’re not.

You might smile to get through your day. You might do it to maintain your relationships. But you can’t live behind a smile 24/7.

Trying to causes all kinds of problems.

Think about the last time you were in pain. You needed someone to talk to. You needed to sit in a quiet dark place. You needed to rest and let your mind breathe for a little while.

Maybe you couldn’t just then. You had to get through your day. You had that meeting. That date. That happy hour.

You did the best you could to keep it all together.

For a moment, your real face showed.

You decided to give your face a break. You told it to relax for a second. It wasn’t even a decision. It was more of a reflex. You let your smile down. You thought nobody was looking.

Someone was.

They made eye contact. They saw through the veil and into the real churning sea of your emotions. Now what? Instead of having a real conversation, or even offering one later, they came over and quoted Oprah. They told you to keep calm and carry on. Then they told you to smile. Maybe they didn’t use those exact words, but that was the gist.

This has happened to every single one of us. It didn’t make us feel loved. It didn’t make us feel seen or appreciated.

We felt more invisible than ever.

Telling someone to smile doesn’t make most people feel better. It’s not an act of love. It’s not thoughtful.

When someone commands you to smile, they’re trivializing your feelings. They’re dismissing your experience of the world. They’re trying to deny you the right to feel the way you actually do.

They’re telling you to keep up an act, regardless of how depleted it leaves you later on. They make it sound like they’re doing it for you. In truth, they’re doing it for themselves. Your smile makes their life easier. It soothes them. It makes them look and feel better.

They’re not helping you. You’re helping them.

They owe you.

People have been telling me to smile for decades. Some of them don’t even know me. They’re just passing strangers.

These people act like I owe them something. They act like they have it all figured out, and I’m dragging them down. At one point I realized the truth. These types don’t have life figured out.

They’re simply outsourcing their happiness.

They’re making every pretty little face they come across responsible for their mood and energy level. They sustain themselves on small talk and smiles, and they don’t care who they impose it on.

I always avoid these people.

They seem to think they’ve done something to deserve my smile. The mere sight of them should make me break into a wide angelic grin. They assume I’m sad or broken when I don’t, and it’s their job to fix me with a reminder to bend my lips into a more pleasing countenance.

They never imagine we could be saving our smiles for someone else, someone we enjoy having in our lives, someone who gives us a reason to smile — and not just an empty set of expectations.

The biggest mistake is to assume smiling makes you feel good. Sometimes it does. Sometimes it doesn’t.

Most of the time, smiling is about how you make someone else feel. Think about it. You don’t see your smile.

Everyone else does.

Not everyone smiles when they’re happy. Some people don’t even have the proper mirror neurons to smile.

I’m one of those people.

I have mild autism. Some of us have extreme difficulty smiling on demand, no matter how we feel.

I forget to smile in photographs, even when I’m having a great time. Friends and family have to remind me.

I don’t smile for myself. I smile for them. I’ve spent hours practicing my smile so I look as happy as I feel in other people’s photos. I do this because I love them. They’ve earned my smile.

Smiling isn’t a form of DIY therapy.

It’s how we communicate with people. It’s how we show everyone what we actually feel. For some of us, it doesn’t even work very well. And yet, we do it anyway. We practice our poker smiles. We don’t do it for ourselves. We do it for everyone else, because they matter to us.

We want them to know how we feel.

When you love someone, you can tell the difference between their people-pleasing smile and their real one. You don’t torture each other for hours, expecting each other to keep that face on. You get through your day. Then you care for each other. You let each other not smile. You listen. You comfort. You decompress. You download and process.

Someone who really loves you doesn’t tell you to smile.

They tell you that you don’t have to.