Are Your Adult-isms Costing You Friendships?

By Donna Shea & Nadine Briggs

We have a lot of adults pop onto our Facebook page talking about the struggles that they have making and keeping friends. Honestly, social coaching with kids is a heck of a lot easier than coaching adults given the greater complexity of their lives. Parents bring us their kids for the specific purpose of pointing out the obvious social struggles and connecting the dots to help kids break through the barriers that they have to making and keeping friends. Adults are more worrisome for us, because we never want to offend.

But something happened this past week that brings me (Donna) to writing this blog about adults and friendships. And I’m going to be frank. I’m doing this because I felt so badly and my heart hurts for the person in the story, yet at the same time, angry and upset by what went down.

The scenario is this. Some of you may know and most may not, that on top of all this cool, fun stuff I do with kids and families and writing with my pal Nadine, I also have taught dance for 23 years, line dancing in particular. (And if you are thinking cowboy boots and all that, we’ve come a long way since the Urban Cowboy days.) Curious? If you are a Facebook user, you can watch here and see what it is and what we do for fun. Line Dance Video on Facebook.

As you can see, it’s a really fun and pretty awesome community and a worldwide one at that. There are people of all ages and from all walks of life. No one cares about what you do for work, political views, sexual orientation or any of it. Come to a class and you are immediately a part of our dance family.

I had a woman join us this past fall. While I am not privy to her personal life, she presented as a person on the spectrum. I feel I have enough experience with autistic folks to take an educated guess. So when she fell into sending me emails about what I call particular-isms (the room was too hot, etc.), I empathized and told her I would do my very best to see what I could do to accommodate.

This past week, those particular-isms turned into full out-and-out email criticisms of my teaching style (inability to teach what she wanted to learn), music choices (the steps did not fit the music well, nor did she like the songs I picked) and more. She told me she was not coming back and would find someone better able to teach her. She didn’t know that I was just getting ready to teach the two dances that she had specifically asked me for, as I am happy to take suggestions from the dancers. Nope, before I had the chance, she had hurt my feelings so badly in that email that I deleted her from receiving any future newsletters and tried to forget about it.

But I couldn’t forget about it. It ate at me for days. And really, it’s just one person’s opinion-ism against a whole crowd of people who love what I do. But guys, especially those of you who tend to say what you think without softening it, there is a person on the other end of that message receiving that blow. What hurts the worst, is that I am a person that is always willing to accommodate and always, always has the best of intentions.

I wanted to be-friend her. And I was trying. I wanted her to have all of the happiness and joy that being in our community is about. People were asking where she was at class this week. She had friends here. And while I was hurt by her “ism’s,” I am sadder for her and the friendships she will now never know.