Boundaries Mean Cruelty

One of my favorite blogs in the world is Captain Awkward. It’s an advice blog, a format I rarely read, but in this case it deals primarily with scripts and suggestions for setting boundaries. Sure, there’s lots of variations on that, but almost across the board it’s about making space for yourself, aimed at introverts, weird and awkward types, the socially anxious, and those who live in the world of oppression. It’s fantastic and you all should check it out.

Thanks to the help of Captain Awkward, a lot of DBT, and a pile of friends who openly talk about self care and openly asking for what we need, I’ve started to practice boundary setting as often as possible. It’s amazing how difficult it is to open my mouth to simply say something like “please don’t talk about calories around me,” but there you go. The internalized people pleasing is strong in me.

I’m getting better. I can tell friends that I’m not up for hanging out if I need to, I can tell my boyfriend when I don’t feel comfortable with something, I can even to some extent enforce my boundaries in the online world. But for some reason it all breaks down when it comes to my family. My family has always been pretty close, and we like to get together. We like to party. We like to eat a lot of food together. And we like to spend a great deal of time together, especially around the holidays.

Now through the process of reading about the fleeting thing called “normalcy” I have gleaned that my family goes a bit above and beyond in terms of holiday activities. I, on the other hand, am fairly socially anxious and spending many days in a row with the extended fam can be a drain.

So this year I’m opting out of some of the festivities. I’m making sure I see all the out of towners, get some immediate family time in, and trying to fit in friends too. But I’m skipping almost half of our events.

Part of me is convinced that the message I’m sending by setting this boundary, by saying that I am an adult with a job and friends and responsibilities and in order to take care of myself I need to take these steps, I am telling my family that I don’t love them. Part of my brain still reads “setting a boundary” as “cruelty”.

I know that by taking time to myself I am doing my best by everyone. I’ll be a happier, friendlier, more outgoing human being in the times that I do see my family. I’ll be able to be more present with them and actually (hopefully) have good conversations and interactions instead of living in a state of stress and anxiety that makes me antisocial and cranky. I know that one day of good time together is better than a week of time struggling to cope.

So why is it that I still read it as inappropriate? Why do I still read the boundary setting as taking something away from other people when in reality my time is not something that I owe anyone, it’s something I choose to give to others? Somewhere along the line society has convinced me that certain people deserve my time, no matter what that means. Not only that, but they deserve my time in a fashion that is acquiescing and non confrontational.

This is not to say that my family demands some sort of creepy submission, but that challenging your family, setting boundaries, or even just asking someone not to do something is viewed as hostile by many people. Not showing up is seen as a sign, and it’s not a good one.

I don’t know what it is about family that triggers the “you should not be an independent human being, you owe all your time to these people” script in my brain. I don’t know if this is something that happens to others, the selective way the mind chooses people you cannot be an adult with. But I know that it isn’t healthy to feel like I’m five again whenever my family asks me to do things, certain that I don’t actually have any choices but petulantly running to my room or doing what they ask.

So I’m sticking with my boundaries. Discomfort be damned.

Breaking Up Is Hard To Do

It’s not really anything new to assert that relationships as they’re portrayed on TV are total bullcrap. All the people are beautiful and everything is drama all the time. It’s not exactly a perfect representation of everyday relationships. There are many, many things that are unrealistic and unhelpful about the way that media portrays romantic relationships. But lately there’s been a particularly bad doozy of a trope that’s driving me up the wall.

It’s one about breakups, and it’s one that is entwined with all sorts of negative attitudes about both romantic relationships and the ending of romantic relationships. This is the trope in which a woman breaks up with a man, and in response the man utterly loses any compassion or care for the woman, yells, rages, threatens, and becomes basically an asshole.

I was watching The Vampire Diaries (I give 0 craps about your judgment for my taste in TV btw) and the two main characters broke up. After breaking up, the woman got into a relationship with the brother of her ex. Yes, this is not the coolest thing in the world to do, but they were broken up and it’s her life.

In response, he essentially told her that he didn’t care if she lived or died and that moving forward he would no longer put forth any effort if she or her family or friends were in danger (despite the fact that in the past he was portrayed as the good hearted one and that he considered these people his friends as well).  He seemed to take joy in showing her how little he cared about her, and when she asked why he was being so cruel he just said “this is me. You’ve never seen me when I’m not in love with you.”

This was portrayed as a perfectly legitimate response.

In reality, this is ridiculously out of line. First and foremost, someone gets to have their own feelings whether they’re dating you or not, and after you’ve broken up with someone you certainly don’t get to dictate their relationship choices. While it makes perfect sense to have anger and hurt when someone breaks up with you, that does not mean that you get to behave in a cruel manner, yell, break things, imply that they could or should die, threaten, or harass.

Particularly troubling is the implication that the only thing that keeps a man from being all these things (many of which are at least bordering on abusive) is being “in love”. It plays once again into the idea that women tame men with their calming influence and that being in a romantic relationship with someone is what keeps your life functional and worth it.

A big part of this is our tendency to see romantic relationships as the defining things in our life, but also for men to feel possessive about their female partners. It has to do with the idea that “love makes you crazy”, and that “without love nothing matters”. And none of this is reality. Of course love is wonderful and can enrich a life, but when you turn one relationship into your whole reason for living, your only source of happiness, of course it will make complete sense if you have a personality transplant when you’re broken up with. No, you don’t own your ex, your ex does not owe you things (except for the basic respect they owe everyone), and you still have to continue being a functional and compassionate human being even without them.

However there are some people who confuse the call to behave reasonably towards your ex with a call to repress your feelings.

At about the same time that I watched this episode, someone posted a comment on one of my friend’s Facebook wall. He said that his fiance had broken up with him and seemed to be opining that according to feminists he was wrong to be heartbroken and sad. He said that his emotions were irrational and so he shouldn’t have them.

Here’s the difference: being heartbroken and sad makes perfect sense. Changing your values, becoming an asshole, blaming the other person for what’s wrong with your life, threatening the other person, verbally abusing the other person, or harassing and badmouthing them are what’s not ok. And those two things are conflated throughout TV relationships (probably because it’s easiest to illustrate hurt and sadness through big, dramatic actions). Then they’re deemed reasonable because “it makes perfect sense to be hurt and angry after a breakup”. 

Being angry is not the same as informing someone you don’t care if they live or die. Being an adult means that you have to learn how to feel big, scary, painful emotions, and still behave reasonably and compassionately. And a huge part of this is learning that when a woman breaks up with you, you don’t own her. Scratch that, it’s recognizing that no matter what your relationship is with a woman you don’t get to tell her that you don’t care if she lives or dies, you don’t get to put her in danger, and you don’t get to be verbally abusive. If the only thing that has compelled you to behave ethically and compassionately towards a person and their family/loved ones is that you’re in a relationship with them, you’re really doing love wrong.

It’s possible for either gender to behave inappropriately upon a breakup, to be possessive, to be cruel, to allow their anger to rule their actions and push them to hurt others. However more often than not this is portrayed as gendered. Men are expected to be angry at a breakup, to throw things, to yell, to have a complete personality change. It plays into the trope that a woman should “tame” a man and make him reasonable and good. Without the woman, he is an animal.

There’s something in this trope that says it’s totally reasonable to be angry (which it is) and it’s perfectly reasonable to want to be loved (which it is) and so if you don’t have those things then you should do whatever it takes to get those things because you’re angry (not reasonable). Somewhere in there, a switch got crossed that said  ‘having an emotion’ and ‘acting on an emotion’ are the same thing, and it’s part of our larger cultural inability to regulate our emotions appropriately.

In real life, if someone tells you upon your breakup that they would let you die if they were given the option, or that they suddenly don’t give a crap about anyone but themselves, that is called abuse. That is the moment when you feel solid in your decision to break up with them because that is straight out manipulative bullcrap. It implies that you have created a monster and that if you don’t get back together with the individual, you’re responsible for their shitty behavior.

For those who think that this is only a TV phenomenon, let me just assure you that while it is rampant on TV, it has been picked up by people in real life. I’ve had people tell me things like this upon breaking up with them. Now thankfully because we’re not in a fantasy world in which I could be killed by vampires at any moment it doesn’t matter in quite the same way, but it is still manipulative, it is still painful, and it is still unnecessarily cruel.

We can do better. We can write stories in which men are adult enough to manage their emotions, ask for help, do some venting, cry a bit, and then move the fuck on. A break up is not the end of the world. A break up is something that happens. Relationships grow and hold and wane and end, and that is a part of life. People don’t stay the same forever, and we cannot all grow together.

Of course it’s sad to let go of something that you loved, but in almost no other place in life do we see people losing it over the organic end of things (when a pet dies, when a friendship ends, when someone moves away, when school ends). All of these endings are understood as part of life, and, while sad or melancholy, not a reflection upon you as a person, or an attack. We allow people a time to grieve, and then we expect them to continue their lives.

As a culture, we need to learn how to see the ending of relationships as something that can be coped with. It is hard, and we can survive. It is hard, and we can still behave well. It is hard, and we can move on. It is hard, and we can still do better.

Adulthood: Mourning The Past

I’ve been having a lot of ennui about being an adult lately. This is not uncommon. Twenty somethings excel at ennui and not wanting to be adult. But there appears to be more to this ennui than simply being overwhelmed or not really wanting to take responsibility.

Accepting adulthood doesn’t just mean taking on new responsibilities and learning how to do practical things. All of those are difficult and stressful, but what might be the most difficult part about growing up is the changing relationships and the loss of the world that existed when you were a child. When you begin to take responsibility for yourself, it shifts every relationship you have been in with an adult it shifts how the world looks, it shifts what consequences look like and how you handle them.

One of the most difficult of these for me is relationships. I’ve had an extremely close relationship with my mother since I was young. When I was a kid, this meant that she took care of me, she protected me, she made the world an easier place for me while teaching me about all the awesome stuff I could do in it. She was amazing at making things happen that I deeply wanted to happen (e.g. going to that really cool summer camp).

Now that I’m an adult, that person that my mother was no longer exists. In childhood, parents can become a bit godlike. Sometimes they’re kind, benevolent, awesome gods (like my parents), and sometimes they’re shitty gods, but they do hold all the power in the relationship. Sometimes this means they can come across as faultless. No matter how you view your parents when you’re a child, you’re not seeing them as real, complex human beings (because that’s not the relationship parents and children have).

As you grow up and the power dynamics in your relationship even out, you see your parents in more and more realistic ways, as human beings with faults and fears. The god that protected you as a child dies. This hurts. A lot. It’s a little bit terrifying too. The relationship you had with the adults in your life will change drastically, and that is also scary and painful. You’ve replaced your parents with these new, odd people who are very much like your parents but suddenly can’t fix things for you and screw things up sometimes and have a history and want to do things other than cook you dinner.

This may sound very selfish, but at its root its about losing someone you love. Of course I still love my parents, but they’re not the people that I saw as a kid. I’m never going to get back the feeling of Mama Bear Who Will Fix All My Problems And Make Everything Ok. That’s a good thing, but I miss her. Part of growing up is mourning. Oddly though, we never talk about the fact that it’s a good and healthy thing to stop and feel sad for the things that are gone. Generally the attitude is “well you knew you had to grow up, everyone has to do it, move on”. That’s unhealthy and callous. Setting aside some time to feel sad that things have changed makes perfect sense and makes it easier to go on and do the difficult work of paying your bills and organizing your own damn vacations and building a new relationship with these people who are your parents.

There are other things to mourn though, and other places to notice that as your perspective changes, you may have to learn to be in relation to new things. A big part of this is consequences. As a kid, consequences are often arbitrary and usually limited by the adults around you: in all likelihood nothing you do will have the consequence of you ending up homeless, getting fired, going hungry (there are circumstances in which these things happen, but for the most part you aren’t going to cause them). As an adult, these things are possible, and your actions could cause them: you can get fired, you can lose your apartment, you can not have enough money for food! AH! Your relationship to the world has expanded into a much bigger and much scarier territory.

While it’s quite likely that you won’t end up making any of these huge mistakes and you probably know that, the fact that they now exist is something that’s scary and new. The world has changed in an irrevocable way. This is another thing that you get to mourn. Every couple of months if you need to, you can sit down and have a good old worry fest about the fact that it’s now up to you to make sure you have a roof over your head and food in your tummy and no deadly molds growing on your bathtub. And once you’ve felt that worry you can stand back up and remind yourself that you’re capable and not going to make any deadly mistakes, then go about your day.

The natural emotions that are part of growing up aren’t a bad thing, but for some reason it’s become normal and acceptable to tell young people that they should just get over it and ignore those emotions because hey, it’s just being an adult and everyone has to do it. Newsflash: there’s lots of things that everyone has to do that are unpleasant and terrifying and that deserve some time to respect that. A great example of this is that everyone’s parents dies and it’s absolutely understood that you get time to grieve. Similarly, growing up is a time of flux and change and confusion. All of these come with natural emotions and it makes sense to feel those emotions.

Let’s stop with the shame and start accepting that a part of adulthood is mourning what you lost when you put childhood aside. Sometimes you do get to sigh deeply and miss having Mom tuck you into bed when you’re sick, or having long afternoons of playing outside in the dirt. You get to mourn the things you miss, and hopefully you can figure out how to reincorporate some of those things into your life in appropriate, adult ways.