An American woman quits smiling
Appearing happy is a cultural expectation, but it could be extremely tiring at the same time
Idecided to stop smiling because I was tired. Tired of the “Can I get a smile?” and “Smile, it’s not that bad!” comments that are a too common part of city life. Tired of things like the “Smile! You look tired” demand from the TSA agent who recently inspected my bag at the airport. My smiling boycott felt a little risky. It’s well known that women are often expected to smile to make others feel more comfortable. This expectation also seems like a big part of being American.
When I travel abroad, delivering a grin and a chirpy “I’m great, how are you?” has seemed like unnecessarily cheerful bluster, even slightly deranged. Once, in Hong Kong, I smiled so much that the woman I was talking to recoiled and stepped away. My European and Latin American friends agree that Americans smile far more than people do in their home countries.
Maybe it’s Americans’ access to orthodontics and cosmetic dentistry, a British friend suggested, bringing to mind the “Hollywood smile” of bleached and blinding-white teeth. The wide American smile is a relatively recent development: An analysis of high school yearbook photos revealed that smiles grew larger, toothier and more intense over the course of the 20th century.
Smiling may be a universal sign of positivity, but there are cultural differences. American smiles are more assertive, reflecting Americans’ rating of themselves as more dominant. A University of California at Berkeley professor of psychology claims that American smiles emphasise the upper teeth while British smiles also show the lower teeth, which Americans often mistake as “deferential” or a “suppressed grimace.”
Does America’s emphasis on smiling say something about a desire for happy endings, for appeasement and artifice? Or do we smile more as a way to cope with our troubles, as a source of comfort? A 2015 study concluded that people in Canada and the United States, countries with a long history of immigration, do smile more than those in other countries, as smiling is a form of non-verbal communication between those who don’t share a language.
In The Journal of Nonverbal Behaviour, a 2016 study found that cultures with a “low uncertainty avoidance,” in which the future is judged to be relatively unpredictable and social conditions are regarded as uncertain, view smiling too much as unintelligent. The more corrupt a society is, the more its citizens see smiling as suspicious.
Neutral expression
Smiling when you don’t feel like it has been proven to make you feel good by producing actual feelings of happiness. I’ve tried it, and it does work, but I don’t want to be ordered to smile. If a smile is the appearance of happiness, then to be commanded to smile takes away our right to our own feelings. We must appear happy, even if we’re not. A man told my friend to smile, for instance, on the day that she found out her father had died. Or maybe there’s just something about my neutral expression that comes across as seeming worried or displeased. People have asked if there was something wrong when I was feeling just fine. To compensate, I’ve found myself smiling forcefully when socialising with strangers, wanting to assure them that they don’t have to worry. That I’m OK.
I don’t smile when I pass strangers in the office hallway. The clerk at the post office doesn’t smile, so I don’t feel bad about not smiling back. It’s more difficult at the gym, where the front desk employees smile and recite the same welcome and goodbye lines to members as they come and go. I want to smile at them, but instead, I press my mouth into a straight line. I feel as if I’m being incredibly rude, as if I’ve betrayed a social contract. Forcing myself to not smile, it turns out, is even harder than forcing myself to smile.
“I’m trying not to smile,” I tell a friend when I meet her for dinner. But I’m glad to see her, and can’t keep up the ruse for too long. On the subway ride home, where my fellow passengers are avoiding one another or nodding off, the only person smiling is a man watching a video on his phone. I hold the elevator door open in my building for a woman with a baby carriage, and we squeeze into the narrow space together. We nod hello as she speaks to her child in Spanish. It’s the end of a long, cold day, the news headlines both depressing and alarming, and my neighbour meets my eyes as we stifle yawns at the same time. For a moment I forget about the experiment and it leaps out without thinking: I smile. Not an obligatory smile, not a coerced one, but a moment of sincere connection. She smiles back. And I feel good.