Cheap Validation Vs. Expensive Validation
I’m on a first date doing the usual rounds of getting to know you questions. While navigating this labyrinth of curiosity and mental notes, 80% of the time, my date will ask, “So you’re a DJ, you must get a lot of attention? People must hit on you all the time.”
The answer is yes. Yes, they do. And as someone who experiences a saturated amount of that attention, it has shifted something in me.
As a DJ, I lovingly think of the dance floor as a savannah, where predator (for lack of better terminology) prowls and prey responds in a modern choreography. A man compliments a woman, takes her number (or doesn’t), she goes home, and he does it to four more women before the night is over. Someone leaves with him or he’s left with his proverbial tail between his legs. I’ve seen men rattle off compliments at me only to leave with another girl the moment they realize I’m less enticed by their words than they expected. I’ve also seen men come specifically to my set — to see me — only to spend the night flirting with a slew of women in front of me. One even kissed a girl.
What’s interesting about the booth is that it gives you distance. There’s something about being slightly removed, watching the whole floor from a bird’s eye advantage, it makes the patterns impossible to miss. If you read my earlier piece on what I’ve learned from DJing, then you know I think of DJ as anthropologist. I see it every weekend, the approach, the compliments, the laugh or lack thereof and an eventual conclusion. We really are animals. The same dance, running on a loop, across a dozen different interactions before midnight. When you’ve watched it enough times from afar, and then lived it yourself at eye level, you stop being surprised. You start getting curious and become an observer. The privilege of this position is I get to integrate the lessons into my own life.
The savannah has a dominant currency. I’ve come to call it Cheap Validation.
Cheap validation is air. It’s empty, groundless, based on an idea of who you are, not rooted in the reality of who you are. People employ it as an unconscious strategy, a means to be liked rather than an intentional act. It’s the easiest path to manufacturing dopamine versus building authentic connection. A person who is overly complimentary with their words cheapens their meaning. If they can flatter with ease, without knowing you, they are saying it to fifteen other people with the same adroitness. Relationship expert Jillian Turecki puts it succinctly: “Feeling wanted feels really good, but to be desired is not the same thing as being valued.”
I used to really believe cheap validation because I believed people were like me. That they meant what they said. That they moved with intention. Pre-therapy, I dated someone who very early on looked at me and said, “This is really real.” I felt it too, and I held onto those words like a promise. Over the course of our relationship, I clung to what he said more than what he did. His words became the story I told myself when his actions started to contradict them. When it ended, in the revelation of a truth he had quietly withheld the entire time, I said to him, “I thought we were building something. You said this was really real.” He looked at me, not unkindly, and said, “I did feel that way. In that moment.”
In that moment.
I have thought about that phrase more than I care to admit. How much damage can live inside a three-word caveat. He never examined whether the feeling had roots, or whether it was just the weather of a particular evening. There is not enough awareness or discipline in most people to not say the thing they feel in real time. But I’d argue that you don’t actually mean something if it was only ever true in a fleeting moment. Feelings that don’t survive the sunrise aren’t real. I’d even go as far and say it’s dishonest. They’re just feelings not facts and that impermanence wields harm on the other person.
