Yikes, this is hard to watch. What began as lighthearted fun has devolved into one deeply insecure man’s battle to save face: This guy whose friends are poking fun at a small personality quirk he didn’t realize he had is denying it like a cornered animal.
Oof. There’s nothing worse than learning something weird about your behavior from people who will roast you for it at every possible opportunity.
Shaun Cook, a 28 year-old Tulsa, OK resident, is currently on a full-court press defensive to counter any and all of his buddies’ claims that he licks his lips a lot when he gets excited during a conversation—a trait that everyone in their friend group except Shaun himself has been aware of for years. One of his friends called out the behavior several minutes ago when Shaun 100% did lick his lips while animatedly discussing a band he just got into, and the group soon erupted in unanimous agreement that lip-licking is a signature Shaun thing they had all observed individually but had never discussed before. Visibly mortified to learn that he was a lip-licker, Shaun resisted the observation with the tense, fearful demeanor of a gazelle being ambushed by lions.
“No? What? I don’t do that, what are you even talking about?” Shaun denied, too panicked to realize that the more he showed his friends how much he’d let a low-stakes comment on his body language get under his skin, the more viciously they would harp on it. “No, no, I absolutely do not do that ‘all the time,’ that’s such an exaggeration. That’s so not true. You guys always do this,” he continued, lashing out like a scared moose calf kicking at circling wolves. At the same time, Shaun was internally devoting every ounce of his mental energy to not licking his lips—which he accidentally did again mere minutes after the group had moved onto a new topic of conversation, cementing his status among his friends as the resident lip-licker forever.
Unfortunately for Shaun, he definitely does do that. And his self-preserving protests have clearly fallen on deaf ears, because all his friends are now doing impressions of him licking his lips at each other.
Damn. Just minutes ago, Shaun had no idea about this unconscious habit at all. But now, lip-licking will be tied to him forever, especially since he reacted to this observation like an injured warthog fighting off a pack of wild dogs instead of taking it in stride. Any mention or sight of someone licking their lips will trigger a flood of self-consciousness in him, and it’ll be this way for the rest of his life. Rough. Hang in there, Shaun!
