Reply to The advice to call out one-uppers or competitive 'friends'

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Reply to "The advice to call out one-uppers or competitive 'friends'"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I have also seen friends in a group complain about this (not from me).  I do sometimes think some people are very sensitive and the person who is supposedly one-upping them actually isn't.  It's kind of complex sometimes, not always clear cut.[/quote]

To add:  sometimes the person is just trying to relate and the "receiver" views it as one upping.  For ex:  Person A is telling a story about something that happened at a local beach and then person B relates a similar story about something that happened to them at a beach in Tahiti.  Intent is not to one up locale but to share in similar story.  Person A views it as one upping, Person B thinks they're sharing stories about what happened on the beach.[/quote]

I completely agree. The example you gave is common and completely normal. [/quote]

It really depends how they say it. If they are really just relating a similar experience at a beach, then the fact that it was in Tahiti is immaterial. So if they happen to mention it was Tahiti but the focus is on the shared experience, it's not one-upping.

But I think we can all imagine someone basically seizing on the friend's beach story as an excuse to mention her vacation in Tahiti. Like if the beach experiences weren't even that similar and it's really just an excuse to change the subject to their tropical vacation. I had a colleague who used to do this with the 10 months she lived in France while her spouse was on a work assignment there. It came up a lot, and always under the pretense of relating a story to something someone else has said (which was never about France). It was just a pretense to remind everyone she'd done a semi-interesting thing one time.

So it can go either way.[/quote]

Yes, true, it’s all in the tone & commentary. [/quote]

The story itself matters too. If I tell a story about going to the beach and randomly running into my best friend from elementary school for the first time in 20 years, and my friend jumps in with "omg I was at a beach in Tahiti and ran into this woman who used to work for my family when I was practically a baby!" that's one-upping even if the Tahiti reference isn't a huge deal.

I also assume that story is made up. The one-upper friend I had did stuff like this a lot and I often suspected her stories were exaggerations or even outright lies. It was just weird how she always had a similar story, and it was always more dramatic or interesting. So in addition to being a one-upper, I think she was a serial liar.[/quote]

+1[/quote]

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