We’ve all caught ourselves at some point in our life conforming to the norms set by those who surround us, from family and friends to complete strangers. We’ve caught others at it, and we half jokingly write it off as scary.
One relationship in which this transformation into another is especially apparent is between two individuals who are dating—for ease of writing the rest of this post, I’m just going to say it’s a boy and a girl.
Micah Toub, a columnist at the Globe and Mail, is one such boyfriend who noticed that he was turning into his girlfriend, picking up some of her speech mannerisms, her style of dress, and even a hint of her Midwestern accent. His initial reaction: worry—shouldn’t he be staying true to his own identity?
The truth is though, that despite our constant mockery of how some people talk—notably the overuse of certain words such as “like”, “totally” and so on, a lot of us end up speaking like 5th grade girls anyway when we’re not making a conscious effort to sound intelligent. And that’s okay.
Not that biological basis should provide an excuse for laziness, but the Duke Psychology and Neuroscience Departments’ Tanya Chartrand who has been studying this phenomenon since the 1990s, says, “Mimicry is linked to prosociality,” an inarguably advantageous trait to possess.
“The effect goes beyond the dyad,” Dr. Chartrand says. “People who are mimicked more become more interdependent overall and are willing to help people more in general… When we’re mimicked less than we expect, we pig out more on junk food, procrastinate more and have less fine motor skills.”
The point, I should think, is that humans are social beings. I don’t want to make any conjectures on the meaning of life, but I’m guessing a lot of that meaning generation is going to come from our personal interactions with others. While I wholeheartedly advocate for independent thinking and defying norms, let’s not trivialize too much. Like, you know, I love it when people sound intelligent, but really, I’m much more interested in your ideas.
In the context of the boyfriend-girlfriend dynamic, Toub comes to accept his gradual transformation: “I might not be turning into my girlfriend after all. I’m turning into somebody, but I can’t know for sure who it is.”
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