Flaking It : What’s with these no-shows anyhow? Is it an etiquette thing? A commitment thing? They said they’d be there. But they never are.
Maybe right now you’re sitting in a coffee shop. You’ve been waiting an hour, say, for your friend Bill, who still hasn’t walked in.
Could he possibly have forgotten? No, you talked yesterday, and he mentioned getting together. You did say Tuesday, right? At this coffee shop, right? Is your watch running fast? Is there a SigAlert? Did Bill get hit by a bus?
Or is Bill doing that thing again--you know, just not showing up? Is he going to blow you off, bogue out, flake?
Arrgh, flakes! They’re those bafflingly rude people who will RSVP in excitement to a birthday party, wedding or dinner date, then mysteriously never appear. If you socialize at all, you surely know one. If you’re under 30, there’s a good chance you are one.
And if you’ve ever been stranded in front of a movie theater, waiting for a flaky friend who, come to think of it, probably never had any intention of meeting you in the first place, chances are you’ve wished you could flog one.
You’re not alone. And everyone has a theory about what makes flakes, well, flake.
Barry Sobel, 27, is a stand-up comedian so fed up with flakes he’s developed five minutes of anti-flake harangue. Sobel, an East Coast native, theorizes that this is a singularly west-of-the-Rockies behavior.
“In New York, if you call someone to go to the movies, it’s not a suggestion of what’s going to happen! It’s an actuality! If you’re not in front of that movie theater, you must give an excuse as to why you’re not there!” he screams to his laughing audience. “In the middle of the country, if Billy Joe McAllister is not at breakfast the next morning, there’s a reason--like Billy Joe McAllister jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge!”
Oh, so it’s a geographic thing?
Not so, says Meryl Schwartz, an assistant professor of English at the University of Hartford in Connecticut. Schwartz’s nightmarish flake experience, in fact, happened closer to the Tallahatchie Bridge than to the Golden Gate.
“I was a teaching assistant at the University of Wisconsin,” she remembers. “Freshman Comp 101. It was the first class that was all mine as a teacher, so it was really special. So I invited my students to my house for dinner on a Sunday night.
“I announced it a few weeks in advance, and that Friday I asked how many people would be making it. Almost everybody raised their hand. I cooked up a storm all weekend, then waited for them to show up. And out of 16 people, only one came to dinner. I still remember him: Larry--may he ever be blessed.”
Almost six years later, Schwartz is still nursing the burn from that night. “It was so embarrassing, so humiliating, as if it had been a personal attack on me, which it wasn’t.” She attributes her students’ rudeness to a lack of social grace.
Ah, an etiquette thing. A simple case of collective bad manners.
Nope, not quite so simple. Dr. Damon Wolfe, a fellow at UCLA’s Neuropsychiatric Institute, believes the habitual flake’s behavior belies a whole host of psychological ills--namely anger and a lack of what Wolfe calls healthy narcissism.
“Every kid needs a feeling that he’s a worthwhile person,” Wolfe explains. “But there are kids out there whose self-worth is squashed or ignored--usually by their parents. These kids grow up with a big hole in a very essential part of their personality. That hole gets filled with a depressive mush, a belief that you aren’t worth being paid attention to, a sense that ‘they aren’t going to miss me; why should I show up?’
“Then on the other side,” Wolfe adds, “is this very angry, neglected person who feels people owe him and he can do as he pleases.”
Denise, a 27-year-old “reformed flake” who works as an office administrator, adds another dimension: Flakes fear that if they turn down an invitation, they’ll never be asked again. Which explains why so many flakes practice “double booking”--making multiple commitments for the same time period.
“You want to please everybody, so you make plans with everybody,” she says. “Or you’re not sure how to tell the person no. So you make plans, knowing full well you’re not going to go.” After flaking out, Denise remembers, she’d usually fabricate an excuse--if she bothered to give an excuse at all.
“I was supposed to go to my friend’s baby shower,” she recalls. “I spoke to her a week before and told her I was going to go, but then I never went and never even called. That,” Denise says, “was seven years ago.”
Another former flake, “Dan,” a 29-year-old producer who didn’t want his real name used, recalls being reluctant to apologize after such behavior, often choosing to say nothing at all and hoping maybe the people he blew off would just . . . sort of . . . forget.
“I’d have this debate within myself: ‘I’m really going to have to eat crow. How much is it worth to me to do that, or can I just get by and hope they will kindly never mention it?’ ”
It’s precisely that attitude that drives Barry Sobel crazy.
“They don’t even have the common decency to lie to you! ‘I flaked’ is the reason! ‘I flaked’ is the excuse!”
Of course, the flaked-upon--dare we say “flake enablers?”--are also somewhat to blame if they don’t make their disappointment and anger known. Meryl Schwartz admits that after her students blew off her dinner party, “none of them ever said anything to me.” Schwartz didn’t know what to say, either, so she let it go. “I was so upset that I thought I would cry if I said anything, so the next day in class I was just kind of curt.”
In Denise’s case, her pregnant friend never called her on the phone--or on the carpet.
But, explains Wolfe, many flakes live in a constant state of denial while their friends tacitly approve by saying nothing. “I think flakes do have a strong sense of guilt. But if they normalize their dysfunctional behavior, they don’t have to think about it.”
Sort of like the rationale given by one confessed flake. “Actually, I don’t consider myself a flake,” she says cheerfully. “I consider myself a person who doesn’t commit, yet I’m expected to commit, and that’s why people call me a flake.” (A tell-tale footnote here: One sentence into her interview, this person had to get off the phone . . . and so far has not called back.)
All this is not to say flaking is simply a behavioral thing. Our ‘90s society actually encourages us to blow people off.
“We have become such a mobile nation. It’s a cliche, but we have to understand what kind of effect that has on us. We have the ability to flee at a moment’s notice,” Wolfe says.
“Then there’s the ubiquitousness of absolutely meaningless, yet entertaining, information. You can watch E! for 15 minutes and have enough stuff to talk about with 50 different people without having to get personal at all.”
The result, says Wolfe, is that although years ago the purpose of a party was to be around other people and exchange personal information and ideas, these days, “The importance of a party is now just being invited to it. You accept because it’s the polite thing to do, or because you’re flattered. Actually going isn’t important at all.”
The societal push toward flaking may also explain why those who do it are so often in their 20s or early 30s.
“We’re one of the first generations to live in this highly mobile society,” Wolfe says.
But if many flakes are simply young, might they grow out of it in time? Maybe it’s just a phase, after all.
“When I was 27, I supervised a production where everybody flaked,” says ex-flake Dan. “Seeing so many people flake in various ways, seeing how the cumulative effect of all that flaking proved overwhelming, that finally sent it home to me. Now every time I walk through the door for a party, I think, ‘Hey, I showed up.’ Every time I finish a job, I think, ‘Hey, I came through.’ I think people who don’t flake are able to consider how they affect the people around them.”
“Maybe I just grew up,” says fellow former flake Denise. “Being a reformed flake, it’s like being a reformed smoker. Now I can’t stand when people flake on me.” Then she laughs. “But I figure it’s karma.”
DR, DEBBIE TILLEY / For The Times