A fashion don’t?
Wearing white after Labor Day, plus too-hard handshakes.
Am I correct in thinking that you should not wear white linen after Labor Day and before Memorial Day? S.A. / Boston Hon, you can wear white -- linen, shoes, whatever -- any time it would make you look and feel fabulous, calendar be damned. I have seen women wear white peep-toe shoes with black tights in winter, and they looked terrific.
But maybe you don’t know what makes you look fabulous. Maybe you are like my dear husband, who I believe has some kind of sartorial learning disability. His skill in dressing himself is sufficient to keep him from dying of or being arrested for exposure, but that’s about it. Maybe, too, “fabulous” is a feeling you do not get from clothes. If Mr. Improbable were to say, “I feel good in this shirt,” he would not mean that the shirt enhanced his confidence. He would mean that the fabric was not scratchy.
Fashion is a realm in which my husband is neither terribly interested nor terribly competent. We all have these realms. And when you don’t care, when you don’t have gut instincts to follow, you don’t want to improvise. You want rules.
Many old rules have gone by the wayside, but just because you don’t have to follow them doesn’t mean you can’t. Apparently, it’s also now OK to serve red wine with fish and white wine with meat. But I don’t know squat about wine, so I do it the old way, because I don’t want to have to figure out how else I’m supposed to know what wine to serve. When you have the taste and style to improvise -- with clothes, food, words, wine -- feel free. And if you don’t, feel free to follow tradition. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s part of what tradition is there for.
I have recently heard a flurry of remarks to the effect that my handshake is surprisingly (and painfully) firm. I’m not an unusually macho guy, nor am I big or beefy, and I have no intention to grip somebody into submission, but I’ve always heard it framed as a virtue to have a firm and confident handshake. I am conscious of easing up when greeting elderly folks or petite people, either men or women. Recently, a very robust friend seemed a bit pained by my handshake, and I’ve started to ask myself if I need to really ease the squeeze. B.L. / Boston And now you’re . . . what? Asking me, a person who has never shaken hands with you, to offer an objective assessment? I’m sure you didn’t write expecting me to say, “Nonsense! They’re being wimps! Clench away, my good man,” so I don’t quite know what advice you are looking for. I suspect you’re simply rattled by suddenly having several different people criticize you in the exact same way about a commonplace action you’ve probably been doing since you were a teenager. I certainly would be unsettled by that, so if you were only hoping for validation, you’ve got it.
You’ll feel better if you take the issue up with a friend mano a mano, though. Have someone else shake your hand with the amount of pressure he feels you exert, so you can tell for yourself what you’re doing. Then practice with him once or twice until you get to a good level of pressure. If you’ve known the person for a while, you might ask if you’ve always had too hard a handshake, or if the recent spate of complaints reflects a change in your shaking style. If it’s the latter, what’s up with that? Are your hands getting stronger for some reason? Or are you under some kind of stress that’s causing muscle tension? Solving small mysteries like this can be fun, and every once in a great while some tiny clue can lead to a genuine bit of self-knowledge.
Miss Conduct is Robin Abrahams, a Cambridge-based writer with a PhD in psychology. Her new book is Miss Conduct’s Mind Over Manners.
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