As we grow older, mundanity constitutes more and more of our experience of the world. Our daily routines become ingrained, taking us along the same path to mark off the same errands and goals, week by week and month by month.
Our reliance on the small lies given and received can contribute to a failure to listen, to help one another grow, and to connect. We hide behind false encouragements. And we depend on them.
Mundanity does not preclude meaning—but as we adjust our lives to these rhythms and come to presume upon their constancy, we may open up our world to be shaken by the smallest fracture. A rainy summer day becomes a thorn in one’s side; a perceived slight festers into an existential crisis. The bad breaks in, but so does the good, and rarely do they exist neatly separated. Rather, they mesh into our days in ways that we struggle to adapt to. You Hurt My Feelings captures this emotional confusion in a line: “I’m sorry that you were fired from your job, and happy birthday.”
Nicole Holofcener’s latest film explores the ways that small events threaten to rupture our world. Beth (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) is an author and writing instructor trying to get a novel published and seeking to inspire her workshop students. Neither effort is going particularly well, but it’s not for lack of trying. Her husband, Don (Tobias Menzies), is a therapist who is having even less success at his work than Beth. The best guidance he has to give is to encourage a couple to talk with “a little less contempt and a little more honest feeling.” It doesn’t manage to make the contempt subside, but it does redirect some of it toward him.
When not being frustrated by their work, they spend time with Beth’s sister and her husband, Sarah and Mark (Michaela Watkins and Arian Moayed), or their son, Eliot (Owen Teague). Their lives are substantiated by their rhythms: Beth serves the homeless with Sarah at a nearby church; she dutifully visits her aging, prickly mother; she pressures Eliot to find a better career than a pot shop employee. There are goals, and there are disappointments. But even the latter form a cozy, natural world. A reliable day to day.
All of that is shattered, however, when Beth overhears Don saying that he doesn’t like her new novel. He’s read draft after draft after draft, always assuring her that it’s great work, but his real feelings are a lot sharper. Don’s hardly faring any better, as he’s confronted with multiple patients who find him at best a worthless therapist, at worst an overconfident idiot.
Beth and Don are both shaken by these revelations (as Sarah and Mark face parallel difficulties in their lives). Are they actually unsuited for the careers they’ve already spent decades in? Can they trust each other to be honest at all?
You Hurt My Feelings traces the arcs of its characters’ discontent and uncertainty. Holofcener approaches these topics with a down-to-earth wit and soft melancholy. There’s humor and hurt, but neither are given the exaggerated frame that many movies would bring. Instead, Holofcener is interested in the ups and downs of real life.
Over the course of their marriages, these couples have come to rely on their partners’ affirmations and their own talent. To dig deeper, they each depend on the other’s affirmations to reassure them of their own talent and self-worth. You Hurt My Feelings observes the minor exaggerations we tell each other in relationships (“Wow, I love this gift,” or “You’re so good at your work.”) and the fallout when those turn out to be white lies.
Our love for one another is not encompassed by the nice things we tell each other.
The proliferation of such lies in our relationships is not an inevitability; we always bear choices. Paul, writing to the Colossian believers, declares that their life together is meant to be marked by honesty: “Do not lie to one another, seeing that you have put off the old self with its practices” (Colossians 3:7-10). It goes beyond a mere requirement to be truthful. Scripture consistently calls us to love one another for the purpose of growth. The author of Hebrews connects encouragement with “stir[ring] one another up to love and good works” (Hebrews 10:24-25). It’s a picture of pursuit and cultivation, not the stagnation of self-assurance.
It is not wrong to offer simple kindnesses—we could all bear to give and receive more encouragement in our lives. But there’s a risk when we begin to rely on those. Left to our tendencies toward comfort, we often use each other’s love to insulate us from the harshness of the world. When we look to love to found our sense of self in this way, we oversimplify the purpose of relationship. And in time, our reliance on the small lies given and received can contribute to a failure to listen, to help one another grow, and to connect. We hide behind false encouragements. And we depend on them. If that insulation grows thick enough, we may believe that our impressive qualities earned us that love. But if love is a mere response to one’s greatness, the effect of one’s aura, then it is a meager thing indeed.
Instead, love is meant to move beyond what is earned. It’s a hand reached out to the other in compassion. It is forgiveness, it is generosity, it is real presence amid the failures and faults. As Paul writes elsewhere, we are called to serve one another through love (Galatians 5:13-14).
An honest love has the power to break our “small little narcissistic worlds.” We can’t change without the confrontation of truth coupled with the kindness of another’s love.
Our world is not meaningful because it is comfortable. Our careers and passions are not worthwhile because of our skill. And our love for one another is not encompassed by the nice things we tell each other. Our life together is much greater than that. It is through truth, spoken in love, that we will grow together in Christ (Ephesians 4:15-16).
