On Sunday morning, I was sitting on my deck reading the screenplay of the movie Frozen for a research study that I am working on, and as I read through the pages, somehow I couldn’t get past the fact that Hans COMPLETELY manipulated Anna. He took advantage of a young girl with only good intentions, and in a mere two hours, while the village was being coated with snow, he did a 180 on her and left her in a room to freeze to death. I don’t know which part irked me the most – the fact that he so perfectly staged a run-in and charmed her enough to fall for him, or the fact that he waited until Anna was at the point of utmost vulnerability, when he was holding her in his arms as she was about to die, to stab her in the back.
Yes, I am well aware of the fact that this is only a Disney movie, and Hans’s actions can arguably be chalked off as a mere attempt to model a classic rise and fall of a hero turned villain to catalyze a plot twist. Yet somehow, the way that he so convincingly charmed her with full-fledged intentions to use her right from the start, left me with a bitter taste in my mouth. Not only did I find myself buying into Hans’s love for Anna from the beginning, but I felt as blindsighted as she was as I watched his plan slowly unravel. Call me a hopeless romantic, but I thought Hans’s accidental run-in and his take on love at first sight was pretty convincing…
Though it’s only a movie, my naïveté towards the situation really took me aback. With a man as charming and handsome as Hans playing the game so well, how was Anna supposed to know that with every move towards him she was falling one step further into his trap? If we look back on his actions, what signs was he giving to foreshadow his eventual turn on her? Well, for starters, as much as I would love to believe in love at first sight, more and more I am starting to realize that building a real connection takes time. Again, I understand that inevitably things move faster in Disney movies, but they were going to get married after knowing each other for only a day! They knew absolutely nothing about each other – and aside from his perfect eyes, stellar voice, and the status symbol that came with being a prince, she had nothing to go on. But just as Anna did, we got swept away in the moment – taken by the catchy song and perfect image staring back at us, only to let a manipulative monster win us over.
While Anna was lucky enough to be saved by the mystical ice queen, not all of us can pick ourselves back up after being manipulated, just in time for Disney to paint the perfect sun over the village just as the credits are about to roll. Though relationships are inevitably dramatized in movies, I think that there is an important lesson here on the topic of relationship-building and trust. As I’m sure many of us can relate to, there are various instances that I can point to in my life where I feel like I have been used – by men, by my ‘friends,’ by my peers, etc. While I generally feel like I am a decent judge of character, there are inevitably times when I get swept up in the moment, and I let my naïveté get the best of me. Though there is often a part of me that is telling me to keep my guard up, to stop things from moving too fast or spiraling out of control, sometimes I think that I trust people too much. I trust that when I let someone into my life, they are going to treat me with the level of respect that I show them. But sometimes just when we start to lift up our guard and display our vulnerability, the person who we thought was there to help us is the one who we should have been running from in the first place.
While I continue to try to increase my ability to read people in developing personal and professional relationships, there are inevitably going to be people who don’t have the purest of intentions – and when we least expect it, there is a definite possibility that those who are closest to us could stab us in the back. The people who we most willingly let into our lives are the ones who know the most about us; they are the ones who have access to the most intimate details of our personal lives, and thus – just as Hans did – they can work their way into our world and beat us at our own game. Through letting people into our personal lives, we are undoubtedly opening ourselves up to vulnerability and the potential of getting hurt; this doesn’t mean that we should shut ourselves off from building those close relationships. It simply means that we need to develop the skills necessary to assess the intentions of those who we let into our lives, so that we can maintain a sense of judgment in the midst of an array of new feelings that often hold the power to sweep us off our feet, just enough to get us to look the other way.
Though I am still not a perfect judge of character and cannot preemptively back away from every unhealthy relationship, there are a set of questions that I ask myself when trying to assess the personal and professional relationships that I am building:
1. When I inquire about his or her life, does he/she reciprocate?
2. Does he/she remember things that I’ve told him/her in the past? Does he/she actually listen when I talk to him/her?
3. Is there depth to our conversations, or does conversation remain at a surfaced level?
4. Is there a healthy exchange of communication?
5. How does this person deal with conflict?
6. Has he/she taken a reasonable amount of time to try to get to know me?
7. Does he/she understand my long-term goals?
8. Would he/she want to be there only on the good days or on the bad days as well?
9. If something terrible happened, would I be able to call this person and know that they would be there for me and have my back?
10. Does he/she really like me, or just like the idea of me?
While truly talented manipulators (and they are out there) will know how to act in order to deceive you as you try to answer these types of questions, for the majority of relationships, asking these types of questions will serve as a strong starting point in getting to the root of someone’s intentions. For me, the most challenging question to analyze has by far been the last question: does this person really like me, or do they simply like the idea of me? Even if someone is genuinely not a bad person and does not have direct intentions to hurt you, I have found from my past experiences that the relationships that are going to last the longest are those with a foundation based upon a genuine interest in the other person. Given that I have found it extremely challenging to differentiate between judging when someone likes you as opposed to the idea of you, I will discuss how to distinguish between the two concepts further in a later post.