That relationships are sometimes complicated is a truth like a temple. But there is red flags that can alert us that this person is not for us and learn to detect them before, it is possible.
We know perfectly well what ghosting is, something that we have experienced firsthand. We have told you about gaslighting and of breadcrumbingbut there is one more term that unfortunately is becoming fashionable and that we are talking about today: negging.
what is negging
In a chapter of how I Met Your Mother, Barney “taught” a flirting technique in which you had to say a compliment but with something wrong, a kind of negative compliment. It is what is called negging and although it was not in his “game manual” it was just as bad for his conquests.
The concept of negging seems to come from a Canadian named Erik von Markovik, better known as Mystery, who believed himself to be the king of the track and who coined it as a flirting technique, according to the New York Times.
This term comes from the contraction of “negative complimenting”, which simplified could be a criticism disguised as a compliment. “You are very well for your age” could be the classic you need to understand the concept. It is a compliment but you know that under it there is a fault. It is a way of making another person feel insecure and undermine their self-esteem that can generate a relationship of dependency and submission.
As Iria Reguera, psychologist and coordinator of Vitónica explains, “it is a way of manipulating, of making the other person feel insecure and thus generate some emotional dependency. It may be mixed with actual compliments. That way, the other person never knows when she’s going to get a positive reinforcement and when a poisonous little gift, and you can make her believe emotional dependence.”
Although it is true that negging does not understand genres, is usually associated with that toxic masculinity and according to the expert, “to the roll that we have been sold that girls like bad boys who ignore us and who can not show much interest”. In the style of Hache in Three meters above the skyor of despues deone of the films that exudes the most toxic love in the history of cinema.
“I’m tired of going out with pretty aunts”, “to be such a freak you’re cute”, or “you’re handsome, even if you haven’t dressed up today” are some of the forms that this way of flirting adopts and that are a great “NO” that alerts us.
How to know if you are being neglected
Iria Reguera has it clear: the easiest way to detect it is to analyze how it makes you feel. “Compliments, the real ones, can make you feel embarrassed (because we all can be embarrassed when someone says something nice), but they are nice. If someone gives you a “compliment” and what you feel is discomfort, or you feel more insecure or think “I don’t know how to take this”, ask yourself that perhaps there is something in the phrase that squeaks you “.
That is just the point where we can detect that they are using negging with us. “If after that so-called compliment you stay a little overanalyzing yourself, wondering why he said what he said, if there is something wrong with youIt wasn’t really a compliment.”
If you think about it, surely negging has crossed your life. I remember that in high school they told me something that still echoes in my head and that then, at the age of 15, it seemed quite normal to me “you are good to be a nerd”. It can be something very subtle, like “normally I don’t like brunettes, but you do” or something more obvious like “you drive well for a woman”.
Be that as it may, when the red flag is present, cut to the chase. Iria Reguera reminds us that “a person who loves you as you are, or who likes how you are and with whom you can have a healthy relationship as equals, try to make you feel safe, feeds your self-esteem and wants you to believe in yourselfthat you like yourself and that you go as far as you can.”
Those veiled criticisms or negative compliments will only make your insecurity grow. Our expert adds something that seems to us the best way to identify that something is wrong: “If when you are with that person you feel insecure all the time, you feel that it affects your self-esteem, that you doubt yourself and that after being with that person person you go home worse than you arrived, that’s not it.”
Photos | How I met your mother, Giphy