The American Hothead Abroad
What We Can Learn from the Swedish Approach to Emotions
We were having a problem with our landlord a couple of months ago and I was pissed off. He’d been aggressive and unfair, but we were in a legal gray area. I didn’t want to put up with his nonsense but I also didn’t want to move, because the Stockholm real estate market is insane and I didn’t want to destabilize the kids.
My husband and I were in a booth at Bastard Burger, our local, drafting a letter in response. His friend, Johan, had joined us because he had experience in this area. Johan was asking about the specifics and taking notes.
“Can I tell you how I feel?” I asked. This was a preamble. I’d only wanted to give my view of the situation, so we could figure out a strategy. But Johan flinched as if I’d hit him in the face with a toilet brush.
“It doesn’t matter how you feel,” he said, horrified. “What does that have to do with anything?”
Johan is your classic Swedish android. There’s not much you can do to get a reaction out of him. He owns a small business and I have watched him trudge head down through impossible business problems and a lousy economy until he’s in the light again. He just takes the pain and keeps going, knowing that if it all falls down, it will fall on him. But this? For him, this was a bridge too far.
I was just as shocked. No one had ever asked me why my feelings were relevant. It was like asking whether my heartbeat was relevant. Johan and I gaped at each other for what I believe is called a pregnant pause.
In the U.S., there's no shame in showing how you feel. If you burst into tears because you failed a test, or got laid off, or received a speeding ticket, it’s perfectly OK. No one is going to look at you like you have horns. It’s OK to bitch to the waitress about what kind of day you’re having, or complain to the receptionist about the weather or moan to the deli guy about your allergies. Americans routinely express everything, because capitalism is tough going and we are all fighting hard just to punch through into tomorrow.
But here, you keep that shit to yourself, because they can’t handle it. I already knew this, because I had witnessed with my own eyes what can happen when society breaks down and a stranger attempts small talk in an elevator with a Swede. The beads of sweat, the bug eyes, the shaking hands. This experience, for a Swede, would be roughly equivalent to how an American might feel under cross-examination in a high-stakes trial. Swedes don’t do emotions.
Feelings are perceived as childish, irrelevant and awash in destructive potential. They are dangerous, because unlike anything else in Swedish life, they are not rules-bound. They can pop up without warning and once loose, they sometimes cannot be contained, all of which is terrifying to a Swede.
My joke is that the first thing a Swede does when they feel an emotion is to feel terrible about it. The second thing is to repress it. On reflection, though, this isn’t all that funny. When my friend was having a panic attack in the ER, everyone ignored her until she had managed to calm down.
Really, everything to a Swede that is not sleep, sex, food or exercise is a problem to be solved. If an emotion arises, it’s a problem and the goal is to get rid of it. If it recurs, then it’s unsolved. And that is messy. Swedes don’t do messy, either. Because of this, the most impossible romantic pairing I have personally witnessed is the Italian and the Swede. They find each other fascinating, as you can see in the highly scientific chart above. Nonetheless, they can never make it to Year Five, because Italians live in technicolor and Swedes don’t even know what that is.
“He used to call me his ice cube,” a Swedish friend lamented after her breakup with an Italian man. “But that’s just how I am!”
Johan and I recovered and together we gave the landlord a taste of his own medicine. The crisis passed. But I think I learned something important that evening. I don’t want to be a robot, but I am learning to behave like one. And when I see videos from home of Karens gone wild or shockingly violent road rage incidents or meltdowns at the airport, I wonder if we should all be a bit more like ice cubes.
Agreed. We seemed to have lost a sense of restraint. Also, a sense of public decorum, although that is hard thing to talk about without sounding ancient!
I did a brief internship in Stockholm and was housed with a bunch of international students. Whenever somebody managed to make a Swedish friend, it would make rounds through the entire building and everybody would be like 'how did you do it?!'. The Swedes are friendly people, but only after you get to know them. My favorite joke that I picked up while I was there was about the Finnish, who are apparently even worse: 'How do you know a Fin likes you? When he looks at *your* feet instead of his own.' That kind of summed up making friends in Scandinavia for me.