12 of the Most Unlikeable Character Traits

[Listen to an audio version of this blog here.]

“Why don’t you just get on a dating app?” my friend asked me. I was driving home from the desert after climbing a notoriously difficult mountain with some of my friends. “I’m tired,” I repeated, “and I’m annoyed.” We laughed together and she spent the next hour filling me in on her most recent dating horrors. By the time I arrived home, I was crying from laughing so hard. “I’ll just live vicariously through you,” I told her before hanging up. “I love you.”

What I told her was true; I am tired. I’m tired of stroking men’s egos, I’m tired of boring dates, I’m tired of making an effort to look nice and be nice only to be confronted with drywall personalities and exasperating monologues. No amount of whiskey can dull the sharp edge of a bad date. After an especially gruesome conversation with a man not worth mentioning I mentally thumbtacked an unlikeable trait onto my frontol lobe, and that is: arrogance. But then I started thinking about what other traits are the most humanly unlikeable, and here we are with another numbered list.

You might display these traits sometimes; everyone does. But people with high Emotional Intelligence (test your EQ here) tend to avoid these traits, earn more money, have better relationships, and bake a better lasagna than those who don’t.