When my husband and I got married, we sent a thank you note and a golf gift card to the pastor who married us. We met with him several times leading up to the wedding and felt as though we’d gotten to know each other pretty well during that time. I remember feeling somewhat dismissed when we did not get any response to our thank you gift we had sent. My mother made the comment at the time that you aren’t required to send a thank you for a thank you. That comment has stuck with me and I find myself paying attention to it more and more.
At my previous job we often joked when someone would say thank you and respond with “No, thank you” because in reality we were thanking each other for doing our job so it was somewhat comical to thank the thanker with a little bit of humor.
There is a good chance that I am an over-thanker. It might have something to do with my concern for making sure “the loop is closed” or that whoever I’m communicating with doesn’t feel cut-off or unappreciated. Deep down maybe I am looking to be thanked as well. In person, I think it’s relatively easy to draw the line on thanking. For example, you order a cup of coffee, the barista hands it over and you say thank you. You give her money and she thanks you. The normal thanking routine should end here. However, it’s so easy to say thanks again either because you’re so grateful for the cup of coffee or because it’s a reaction to being thanked that you could go on thanking each other all day over a cup of coffee.
Email is the real culprit of excessive thanking; or is it the cause? You could go back and forth with someone for days thanking them for their email and whatever it was they sent you or contacted you about in the first place. Email is tricky because unlike in real life you aren’t walking away from a conversation when it’s complete. It just sits and stares at you from the ‘inbox’ or some other designated folder. “Thank you” seems to be a reasonable way to end an email conversation but when you go into email autopilot and return the thanks, the vicious thanking cycle begins.
I suppose the solution to all this over thanking is to simply say “you’re welcome.”
