By Rhian Kille, Associate Opinion Editor
‘I saw that at the core of me, where something real and solid should be, sat a mirror, reflecting whatever I thought others wanted to see.’ – Moya Sarner, ‘Are you a people pleaser? It’s time to find out what you really want’, The Guardian (2025)
As is true of most people pleasers, I like to think that people are overall pretty pleased by my façade of inexhaustible niceness and inoffensive demeanour. I used to include myself as part of this group, but recently anger, bitterness, and resentment, the classic symptoms of late-stage people pleasing, have begun to develop. I used to think people pleasing only made me a better friend. It was, I thought, at worst a harmless personality quirk, a cute pathological impulse. Now I’m coming to see it as something else entirely – a harmful trait that only pulls you further away from the person you want to be. It is an insecure absence, a ‘mirror’ ‘where something real and solid should be’ (Sarner, 2025), an unassuming form of dishonesty that can seriously damage the longevity of close relationships.
University social life has a very different configuration to the phases of life that precede it. Unlike secondary school, it requires effort and commitment to see friends regularly. For many people university life is characterised by its lack of social structure and routine, which makes students acutely vulnerable to loneliness and other mental health issues. I argue this unstable and unmoored lifestyle further compounds the distinct social behaviours that people develop in childhood, such as hyper-independence and co-dependence. Friction and lack of balance between these exaggerated behaviours is one of the many challenges facing our social circles. Our culture could not be more confused about how to cultivate and sustain a healthy community. In this endless series of imperfect villages some are persistently warm, while others are at constant risk of burning down.
‘Everyone wants a village, no one wants to be a villager’ is a popular internet phrase that captures the prevalent hypocrisy in the contemporary paradox of connection and community. It refers to people who do not want to put in the effort it takes to create and maintain what they claim is the object of their desire, an increasingly common behaviour. Whether they are bad at replies, cancel plans often, or never reach out, these people do not reciprocate in their relationships what they receive. This behaviour is what comes immediately to mind when we think of a “bad villager”, but it is far from the only behaviour that puts a village at risk.
People pleasing, although it rarely feels like it, largely amounts to being dishonest about what you truly want and who you truly are. It notoriously causes resentment to build up in the people pleaser themselves, a death by a thousand cuts that becomes more acute, and more painful, within close relationships where constant alignment is impossible. In the short term, people pleasing is a reliable crutch to facilitate connection, but it plants seeds of destruction in the foundation of the relationship, ensuring problems in the long term. In the end a chronic people pleaser’s problem won’t be if people like you, but if your relationship can survive the resentment you harbour towards them for your self-opposed imbalances and rules in the relationship. People pleasing and co-dependence is a common and fatal combination, a ticking time bomb, in close friendships, romantic relationships, and relationships between housemates at university. The combination provides stability for students who are unsteady in their precarious environments, routines and identities through means of another person. These behaviours are just as unsustainable as hyper-independence, they are just as likely to hurt you and your fellow villagers.
Interdependence, the dependence of two or more people on each other, is essential to a healthy community, but so is independence. The routines and behaviours you build at university shouldn’t revolve around only you, but they shouldn’t disregard you either. The best thing you can do for your friends is not to try to please them – love them, yes, take care of them, yes – but also let them know you intimately and take care of you, not just the palatable persona you show the rest of the world. We all have a bit of a mask that we wear in public, but if the mask starts to feel more like a ‘mirror’, ask yourself how the people and things intended for you are going to see the real you from behind it.
Image: Nata Chakova via Unsplash