You Don’t Need Your Partner’s Agreement to Break Up With Them

I hear some version of this very often, usually from women:

“I want to break up with my partner, but they don’t want to so I guess we’re staying together for now.”

“I want a divorce, but my husband wants to keep working on the marriage, so I’ll try it.”

“I tried to end my relationship, but it didn’t really ‘take.’”

Sometimes people want to break up and then they change their minds. But often, they don’t really change their minds–they just believe that breaking up, like getting together, is something that has to happen by mutual agreement.

It doesn’t. You can end a relationship (platonic, romantic, and/or sexual) at any time, with or without your partner’s agreement, with or without explanation, with or without “working on it” first, with or without meeting with them face to face, with or without apology.

“But ending a relationship without any of those things is a dick move!” Maybe? But the majority of the time I see it happen that way, it’s happening that way for a reason. The dumper may feel unsafe around the dumpee, they may know or suspect that the dumpee will try to pressure them into staying if they sit down for a conversation about it, they may have already told the dumpee many times that they will need to leave if things don’t change, and now they’re done.

It’s definitely easier if both partners agree that it’s time to end the relationship and what their interactions should look like going forward, and it’s great when that happens. But you can’t force it. If there’s a disagreement, the partner who wants less intimacy gets their way–not because the other partner’s desires aren’t valid, but because doing it any other way is a boundary violation. If you want us to hug and I don’t want to, then we don’t hug. If I want us to go on a date and you don’t want to, then we don’t go on a date. Otherwise, I would be forced into a hug I don’t want and you’d be forced into a date you don’t want, and that’s not okay. It’s not okay for anyone to be forced into a relationship, either.

Here someone often brings up “compromise.” You want physical intimacy with me and I don’t. What you really want is sex, but since you know it’s clearly wrong to pressure someone into sex, can’t we “at least” cuddle? If I wanted to, sure. But as I said, I don’t want physical intimacy with you at all. Cuddling isn’t a “compromise.” It’s a violation of my boundaries.

Likewise with ending relationships. Sometimes both exes want to stay friends after the breakup, and that’s great. But sometimes, only one of them does, and it becomes easy for the other to pressure them into a friendship as a “compromise”–especially if the person who wants the friendship is the person who just got dumped. “Can we at least be friends, then, if you won’t date me anymore?” “Fine, I guess.”

Charitably, I could say that the reason this happens is because people are modeling their breakups on their other Big Relationship Decisions, most of which involved mutual agreement or at least compromise. In healthy relationships, people take all the big steps–becoming “official,” moving in together, getting engaged, whatever–because they both really want to. Maybe to them that means that a breakup should only happen when they both really want to, too.

Healthy relationships also involve some amount of compromise, because needs don’t always perfectly align. If I really want to go out with my friends but my partner is sick and can’t cook dinner for themselves, I might stay and make dinner for them–not because I want to stay home and cook rather than going out with my friends, but because I care about my partner and want to help them.

If you’re really used to making these kinds of decisions–and most people in serious relationships are–then deciding to break up can feel similar. You’re pretty sure you want it to be over, but your partner reeeeeally wants you to stay, so you figure, “Well, I could stay for a bit longer, or I could stay as a more casual partner,” but then “a bit longer” turns into “indefinitely” and “more casual” turns into “exactly the same as it was before, except with more resentment because I thought things were going to be more casual and you’re still expecting them to be the same.”

Less charitably, though, there are some bigger issues going on. First of all, many people still think of relationships in terms like “obligation” and “duty,” which makes them very difficult to end or change. If you feel that you “owe” your partner a romantic relationship because they’re so nice to you or because they want it so much, how are you supposed to end it?

Second, women in particular (and, by extension, people perceived as women) are usually socialized to prioritize their partners over themselves. For many people, that means that even if you really want to break up, a partner’s strong desire to stay together overrides your desire to leave.

Finally, many people are manipulative and controlling in their relationships. I’m not just talking about abuse, although the line between these behaviors and abuse can be very difficult to draw. A manipulative and controlling partner can easily make it seem like breaking up with them is a grievous and unacceptable offense, not a necessary step that you need to take for your own self-care and wellbeing.

So when I hear things like, “I want to leave but they want to keep working on it, so I’m staying,” that raises a red flag. Why do their preferences override yours?

I’m often hearing about how so many people “these days” just quit relationships at the first sign of trouble rather than trying to “work on it.” From where I’m sitting, I don’t see a lot of that. I see people deciding that they’re no longer invested or safe in certain relationships, so they end those relationships.

If you still love and care about someone and want to be with them, but you’re having issues in your relationship, it might be worthwhile for you to try to “work on it.” (But even then, you don’t owe them that.) If you no longer want to be with that person, there is no “working on it” to be done. You can’t “work on” the fact that you don’t love someone and don’t want to see them anymore. You can’t force yourself to want something you don’t want. And even if you could, you don’t owe them that.

“But what about the people who suddenly up and quit a perfectly good relationship without even talking about it?” What about them? Jerks gonna jerk. I’m less worried about occasional jerks than I am about an entire society full of people, especially women and people perceived as women, who feel obligated to stay in relationships they don’t want. Besides, any relationship that someone wants to end is not a “perfectly good relationship.” If it’s a relationship you don’t want to be in, it’s not good, even if the reason you don’t want to be in it is 100% about you and your own issues.

I should mention: getting dumped sucks. (Usually.) You deserve support if you’re going through that. But the person who just announced that they no longer want to be in a relationship with you doesn’t owe you that support, and they especially don’t owe you any further intimacy just because it hurts you to lose that intimacy. It sucks and I’m sorry, but you’ll need to find support somewhere else and in some other form.

And if you’re the one sitting around waiting and hoping that one day your partner will finally agree with you that it’s time to break up, know this: you don’t need their agreement.

It takes two to tango, but only one to leave the dance floor.


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You Don’t Need Your Partner’s Agreement to Break Up With Them
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For Allies Who Feel Like Everything They Do Is Wrong

Something I hear regularly from progressive men:

“I don’t understand what I’m supposed to do as a feminist/ally. Some women say I should be fighting for women’s rights, but others say that that’s not my battle and that instead I should apply feminism to work on men’s issues–but others say that that’s appropriation and ‘what about teh menz.’ Some say I shouldn’t be a ‘white knight’ and defend women against sexism, but others say that it’s my role as a person with privilege to stick up for those without. They don’t even agree on whether or not I can call myself a feminist. The only thing they agree on is that I should listen to marginalized people, but no matter what I say or do, a marginalized person will disagree. Maybe I shouldn’t even bother, since no matter what I do I’m doing it wrong.”

(Substitute “men” for “white people,” et cetera.)

I sympathize with this. When a bunch of people are telling you what to do with an air of authority and they are telling you to do contradictory things–speak out, shut up and listen, stand up, have a fucking seat–it makes sense that you might just give up.

Here are some thoughts that might help you figure it out.

1. There is no activism rulebook.

One reason marginalized people are giving you contradictory messages is because there is no activism rulebook. This isn’t a board game where you just have to play by the rules (with perhaps some minor variations permitted) and follow the path to the end. That’s why the very topic of this article is so frustrating to many activists/marginalized people–when they feel like would-be allies are asking them for a concrete, simple step-by-step guide to fixing oppression (an act of unpaid intellectual labor, by the way), they feel like these would-be allies don’t really want to do the work themselves. They want to color-by-number, not paint originals.

There are a lot of legitimate disagreements among activists about what the best way to do activism is, and what the most important issues to focus on are. Should we try to get marginalized people into positions of power in politics and business, or should we work on dismantling those institutions? Should we be calm and friendly, or angry and confrontational? Should we work within flawed institutions to make them better, or should we create new ones? Should we address the “low-hanging fruit” issues (i.e. same-sex marriage) first in the hopes that they will make the more difficult issues more accessible, or should we go straight for the most urgent, least “sexy” problems? Should we work on acquiring “allies,” or should we say fuck it and make direct change ourselves? Do you catch more flies with honey or vinegar?

While there’s data on some of these and, I think, more compelling arguments in favor of some rather than others, the point is that experienced and knowledgeable activists disagree. So of course you’re getting told different things. There is no activism rulebook.

2. Marginalized people don’t all agree with each other.

There are many reasons why different marginalized people have different (but equally strong) opinions on activism and allies’ place in it. They might have had different personal experiences. They might have different intersecting identities. They might have different political and philosophical values that inform their approach to social justice.

People who share a marginalized identity are not all alike. When allies demand a Unified Field Theory of Ally Activism from them, they’re actually engaging in outgroup homogeneity bias–otherwise known as stereotyping. Of course women are giving you totally different opinions on how to fight sexism. Women aren’t all alike.

As a useful exercise to help you develop your empathy, try to figure out what’s causing the marginalized people you know to disagree with each other on something. For instance, I’ve found that most of the women and nonbinary people who strongly believe that men shouldn’t claim the “feminist” label are those who have been most harmed by “feminist” men who have infiltrated their spaces to get laid or feel special. Trying to actually understand the disagreement can take you from throwing your hands in the air and whining that “I guess I can’t do anything right” to acknowledging that people’s personal experiences shape their political views and that’s okay.

3. Marginalized people are not born with a magical complete understanding of their oppression.

“But you always say to listen to marginalized people!” you may protest. Yes, I do. Marginalized people are uniquely qualified to comment on their particular marginalization because they’ve lived it. Because they’ve lived it, they can explain to you exactly what it’s like and how it’s affected them. And because they’ve lived it, they’ve often done a lot of thinking and learning about how oppression works on a systemic scale. Your average woman probably understands sexism better than your average man, and your average person of color probably understands racism better than your average white person. (Caveat: research has not been conducted. At least not by me. But I feel pretty confident about those claims.)

But experiencing something firsthand doesn’t necessarily confer understanding of how exactly it works. Just because you can drive a car really well doesn’t mean you know how cars work, or how to fix a car that doesn’t work. Having a lot of experience with broken-down cars will gradually lead you to learn much more about how they work than someone without that experience, but it’s not going to be complete. And just because you can fix a passenger car doesn’t mean you can fix a semi.

And remember intersectionality. The reason many marginalized people do activism that is not intersectional and fails to account for the members of their group who are even more marginalized is because being a white woman doesn’t magically teach you what it’s like to be a Black woman or a trans woman, and being a cis gay man doesn’t magically teach you what it’s like to be a bisexual genderqueer person (and look at who we’ve primarily got leading feminist and LGBTQ movements). Many male allies get confused when, for instance, a Black trans woman tells them something about feminist activism that contradicts something a cis white woman said. Although the Black trans woman isn’t necessarily “more right” than the cis white woman, it’s quite likely that she’s getting at a piece of the puzzle that the cis white woman can’t see and hasn’t educated herself about. When someone who faces multiple forms of marginalization is telling you they disagree with you or someone you trust, listen up.

4. Listen to a wide range of opinions from marginalized people.

The dynamics I discussed above are why you should expose yourself to different voices as an ally. Some men read a few cis white women on feminism and think they’re done. No, they’re not.

Worse, some men listen to a few women who claim that short skirts and alcohol cause rape (yes, there are many women who buy into these myths because it’s comforting) and then feel validated in their belief that people can prevent their own assaults. Remember what I said about marginalized people not having a magical understanding of their own oppression?

You’re always going to find Black people who claim that young Black men just need to pull their pants up and be nice to the cops, and trans people who think that you’re not “really” the gender you identify with until you’ve had The Surgery, and women who don’t think they should have the right to vote, and so on. If these are the only marginalized people you listen to, you’re going to make a lot of other marginalized people pretty angry at you, and for good reason.

5. Listen to those further left than you.

I think that paying attention to opinions that seem way too “radical” can be a valuable exercise. First, you might find that you agree. Second, even if you don’t agree, you’re going to learn a lot about the dynamics you’re trying to address.

For instance, I once read (and was at times frustrated by) the book Against Equality, a radical queer response to same-sex marriage activism and other attempts to include queer people in traditional institutions. I’ve thought for a long time that same-sex marriage should never have become the focus of the LGBTQ rights movement–for many reasons–but I just couldn’t get behind some of the claims made in that book. For instance, some of the authors believe that not only should we not have focused on marriage equality and repealing DADT, but that we should actively avoid expanding these institutions to include queer people because these institutions are bad and harmful and therefore queer people should not join them.

I found that incredibly patronizing, and I also think that that excuses discrimination for the sake of a perceived greater good (namely, queer people not getting involved in marriage or the military). However, I also think that reading these essays gave me a new perspective on the potential harms that institutions like marriage might do both to queer people as individuals and to the LGBTQ rights movement as a whole. I may not agree that we should actively prevent queer people from being able to get married (and, anyway, that ship has sailed in the years since I read that book), but I know more now. And if I were an ally, I would be better prepared to do activism that actually helps rather than harms.

5. Listen, but make up your own mind.

What all of this comes down to is that, yes, you should listen to marginalized people, but they can’t do your thinking for you. They especially can’t do your acting for you. You’re going to have to take ownership of your opinions and actions, even though that means that someone will disagree. Someone will always disagree.

“But marginalized people say that I disagree with them because of my privilege.” Yes, sometimes. But I distinguish between two sorts of disagreement–the knee-jerk “no this feels bad stop saying that” sort of disagreement, and the thoughtful, considered sort where you actually sit down and discuss ideas with people and process those immediate feelings that you had and decide, no, this isn’t what I believe. If you’re constantly experiencing that immediate disagreement with marginalized people’s ideas–that disagreement that makes you want to lash out in anger or ignore what they’re saying–lean into that discomfort and figure it out. But not all disagreement is that.

Decide whose opinions you most respect, make sure that those people aren’t always the most privileged members of a particular marginalized group, and discuss with them. For instance, I find that the people whose opinions I most respect are the people who crave justice and not vengeance, who love nuance, who openly admit when they’re doing activism out of self-interest (I don’t trust anyone who says they never do that), who frequently criticize the groups they belong to, and who are comfortable with changing their minds. If someone like this disagrees with me, I put a lot more stock in that than if it’s some random internet person who enjoys name-calling.

But, yes, people will disagree, people will dislike you, people will use social justice language to discredit your opinions. Sometimes their use of that language will be valid, and sometimes it’ll be a form of weaponization. You won’t always know, so consult with someone you trust to be both kind and honest, and keep going.

Your primary goal as an ally needs to be something other than getting anyone’s approval. You’re not here to get people to like you. You’re here to get shit done.

~~~

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For Allies Who Feel Like Everything They Do Is Wrong

How to Get the Most Out of Therapy

Drawing of a therapy session in progress.
Credit: Guy Shennan

When you spend a lot of money on things, they usually come with an instruction manual to help you use them in the most effective possible way. Unfortunately, therapy doesn’t.

A common misconception about therapy held by many laypeople (and, unfortunately, some therapists) is that all you have to do as a client is show up and then…some vague hand-wavey magic stuff happens, and then the client gets better. Many people think of therapy like this:

  1. Go to therapy
  2. ???
  3. PROFIT

Really, though, it’s more like this:

  1. Go to therapy
  2. Establish some rapport with the therapist before you can delve into the serious stuff
  3. Sometimes be really uncomfortable
  4. Have a lot of meta-conversations with your therapist–that is, talk to the therapist about the process of talking to the therapist
  5. Do homework (in some types of therapy)
  6. Get called on your shit by the therapist
  7. Be uncomfortable again
  8. Make changes in your life outside of therapy
  9. PROFIT

As a therapist, it’s tempting to say that you should just show up and let the therapist do their job and you’ll feel better. Sometimes that’s exactly how it works. But ultimately, you can only get as much out of therapy as you put into it.

Continue reading “How to Get the Most Out of Therapy”

How to Get the Most Out of Therapy

Frivolous Friday: Social Media Etiquette

Frivolous Fridays are the Orbit bloggers’ excuse to post about fun things we care a lot about that may not necessarily have serious implications for politics or social justice. Although any day is a good day to write about our passions outside of social issues, we sometimes have a hard time giving ourselves permission to do that. This is our way of encouraging each other to take a break from serious topics and have some fun.

There’s been a lot of advice lately about what not to post on social media to avoid annoying other people, since that should obviously be your top priority going through life. I decided to helpfully condense all this advice into one article that you can keep handy.

The author taking a selfie of a flowery dress.
Nope.
    1. Don’t post any selfies. People who post selfies are self-obsessed. If you’re attractive and you post selfies, you’re probably just trying to show off and make people feel bad about themselves. If you’re unattractive and you post selfies, ew, nobody wants to see that. 
    2. …except for your profile photo. People who make their profile photo anything other than their own face are so awkward and weird. What, are you that insecure about your appearance? We all know you’re not a dog or a flower.
    3. Don’t post photos of your partner(s). That’s so annoying. Besides, how are all your single friends going to feel?
    4. Don’t post photos of your kid(s). Parents are sooo annoying on social media, always assuming that everyone wants to see a hundred photos of their kids. You can post one photo of each child per lifetime–preferably when they’re born and then never again.
    5. Don’t post photos of your pets. See above.
    6. Katya, the author's tabby/tortie cat.
      No.
      Don’t post photos of your friends. That just makes other people feel bad because they might not have as active of a social life. Besides, why are you trying to show off how popular you are? Just enjoy your time with your friends without having to broadcast it to the public.
    7. Don’t post photos of food. Who cares about your boring dinner? Oh, that’s a five-course Italian meal you cooked yourself? What a show-off.
      Spiced lamb liver with Israeli couscous.
      Definitely not.
    8. Don’t post photos of landscapes, cityscapes, or cool things you see. Why can’t you just enjoy the moment rather than waste it on taking a photo?
      Flowers in Cincinnati's Eden Park.
      Not this one either.
    9. So, pretty much don’t post photos of anything at all.
    10. Don’t post about your accomplishments. That makes it seem like you just want attention and affirmation for doing totally basic things like getting into medical school or having your writing accepted for publication. Yeah, yeah, we get it, you’re soooo smart and talented and perfect. No need to rub it in people’s faces. If you were really that happy about it, you wouldn’t need attention on social media.
    11. Don’t downplay your accomplishments. Otherwise known as humblebragging. This is annoying. Just be proud of what you did and don’t act all fake and modest about it.
    12. Actually, just don’t post positive things. That makes other people compare themselves to the unrealistic standard that you’ve set and that’s what causes mental illness. Do you want to give people mental illnesses?
    13. Don’t post negative things either. Nobody likes a Debbie Downer. It’s unfair to force other people to deal with your problems by seeing them briefly in their newsfeed and then immediately scrolling past.
    14. Don’t post about politics or social justice. It’s controversial and makes people upset, and besides, all you’re doing is reinforcing your own tribalism and trying to score points with other people on your side. Politics is not what Facebook is for.
    15. Don’t post funny memes. Don’t you care about anything serious, like what’s going on in the world?
    16. Don’t post song lyrics. I’m just going to assume they’re a passive-aggressive comment about me.
    17. Don’t post about work. That’s so boring. Leave it at the office.
    18. Don’t post about sex, not even with a warning. That’s disgusting. Keep it to yourself.
    19. Don’t post about fitness. Who cares about your workout routine?
    20. Don’t post about veganism, polyamory, atheism, or any other voluntary non-mainstream lifestyle or identity. You’re obviously just trying to convert people and that’s so much worse than people telling you that you shouldn’t be poly/atheist/vegan.
    21. Don’t post about race. Why do you have to make everything about race?
    22. Don’t post about sexual orientation. Why do you people always have to shove your homosexuality in our faces?
    23. Don’t opt out of social media. After reading all these rules, you might be thinking to yourself, “Wow, social media sounds like a lot of hard work. Also, no matter what I post, I’m shallow and vain and who even cares, right? Maybe I just shouldn’t have any social media accounts.” Not so fast! Opting out of social media means that you’re antisocial, boring, and holier-than-thou. You probably think you’re so much better than the rest of us vain and shallow narcissists. How rude. Do you even have any friends?
    24. Do post about how social media is for vain, shallow narcissists who can’t think critically or engage with the offline world. As a fun thought experiment, see how many current social issues you can blame on social media. And definitely post this article on social media. No, of course I didn’t write it just for the clicks. What are you talking about?

Obviously, that was satire. Post whatever the fuck you want; other people can deal with their own feelings about that.

~~~

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Frivolous Friday: Social Media Etiquette

Against One Penis Policies

Let’s talk about one penis policies, which is when a nonmonogamous couple–generally a straight man and a queer woman–create a rule stating that the woman can only have sex with other women. (In a less extreme but probably harder-to-enforce version, the woman can have casual sex with other men, but she can only fall in love with or form committed relationships with women.)

One penis policies are generally justified using some combination of these rhetorical moves:

  • “Well it works for us so you can’t judge it”
  • “It’s equal because both of us are only seeing women”
  • “I [the man] can’t emotionally handle her fucking another man so isn’t this better than just being monogamous”
  • “I [the man] wanted to give her the opportunity to explore her interest in other women; she doesn’t need another man”
  • “I [the woman] am not interested in any other men anyway so what’s the problem”

I’m going to suggest another justification for one penis policies, one that tends to underlie the rest. This one usually remains invisible because nobody wants to say it out loud and sometimes they don’t even realize it’s what they believe:

Girls don’t count.

Continue reading “Against One Penis Policies”

Against One Penis Policies

How to Support Asexual Youth

I have a new post up at Everyday Feminism about supporting the asexual youth in your life. Check it out:

Growing up, teens face a frustrating double standard.

On the one hand, the messages most of them get about sex from parents, other adults, and school is that sex is very bad and you shouldn’t do it (at least not until you’re an adult and married to someone of the “opposite” gender).

On the other hand, the way sex is presented in the media suggests that the desire for it is so overwhelming and overpowering that you can’t possibly control it – a dangerous message that feeds right into rape culture.

So what is sex? A terrible sin that good people should stay abstinent from, or an uncontrollable, animal urge that’s so euphoric and wonderful that we can’t live without it?

Any young person would get confused trying to sort these messages out. For an asexualyoung person, though, it can be even harder.

Asexual (or “ace”) kids and teens get all the same messages from our culture that allosexualkids and teens get, but they can rarely relate to them.

For them, sex might be pleasant, but not really a form of attraction or desire (watch out: those words mean slightly different things!). It might inspire curiosity, but not insatiable lust or that butterflies-in-your-stomach feeling. It might be something they don’t care about one way or the other, or it might be something they’re actively repulsed or horrified by.

Asexual people experience and imagine sex in a variety of ways, few of which are considered “normal” in our culture.

Indeed, our society privileges people who experience sexual attraction and desire, and this impacts asexual youth in a variety of ways.

For example, adults often tell asexual youth that they’ll “grow out of it,” which can be very invalidating. Even if your sexuality changes later in life, the one you’ve got right now is still quite real.

Adults may erase asexuality from sex education and from media depictions of sexuality and relationships. They may completely refuse to believe a young person who identifies as asexual because all teens are obsessed with sex, amirite?

This is a form of gaslighting, and it teaches young people not to trust their own perceptions of themselves and their desires.

All asexual people have to deal with comments like these, but they may especially impact young people who are just starting to think about their own sexuality and are less likely to have found supportive people and spaces that will affirm their identities.

So how can we be better at supporting asexual youth? Here are five ways to start.

Read the rest here.

How to Support Asexual Youth

Other People Have It Worse

[CN: bullying, sexual assault]

I had a client recently who spent most of his childhood as a target of relentless bullying and physical violence at school. Now, he says, “It’s not that big of a deal. I had a home and a loving family. Some people had it much worse.”

I said, “The worst thing you’ve ever gone through is the worst thing you’ve ever gone through.”

What I mean is that whatever it is that happened to you that still makes you burst into tears or wake up from nightmares or shudder in horror, that’s still (one of) the most difficult thing(s) you’ve ever lived through. The fact that the things that make other people burst into tears or wake up from nightmares or shudder in horror seem worse to you doesn’t change that.

Besides, it’s not so easy to rank suffering. Even if you could rank potential traumas from worst to least worst, someone else’s ranking might look totally different. (There are people who feel that they’d rather die than be gay, and there are happy gay people.) And the ranking might change completely if the hypothetical becomes real. Many people might think, “I could never live through ____,” until ____ happens. Then it sucks, and yet they live. Often they even thrive. And something else becomes The Worst Thing.

So, in fact, one of the people who’s survived one of the things you think about when you think “other people have it worse” might be thinking the same about you. Who’s to say who is right?

When I worked with survivors of sexual assault on a hotline, I noticed that almost every single one of them expressed the belief that others were the “real victims” while they didn’t really have it “that bad.” The women who had faced “attempted” rape said that the women who had “actually” been raped had it “worse.” The women who had been raped by partners or friends said that the women who had been raped by strangers had it “worse.” The women who had been raped by strangers said that the women who had been physically injured during the rape had it “worse.” The women who had been physically injured during the rape said that the women who had contracted an STI or become pregnant had it “worse.” And on and on it went.

In fact, some women who had been raped by strangers thought, “At least I didn’t get raped by someone I loved.” Some women have found it less traumatic to be raped by someone they hadn’t wanted to have sex with at all than by someone that they agreed to have sex with, who then violated their consent by lying about having put on a condom or by doing something else that they hadn’t consented to.

Everyone seems to think that 1) someone else’s experience was objectively worse, and 2) that this means that their own experience “shouldn’t be that big of a deal.”

So either everyone’s trauma is valid, or no one’s trauma is valid. And the latter doesn’t make any sense.

The purpose of reminding yourself that “others have it worse” is ostensibly to build perspective and remind yourself that yours aren’t the only problems in the world. That’s an admirable goal and a worthwhile perspective. However, I think that a certain amount of healing needs to happen before that’s feasible or healthy. It’s okay if there’s a period of time during which you feel absolutely certain that nobody has ever suffered as you’re suffering. And it’s okay if the cause of that feeling is a broken-up relationship or a failed class or even just a spectacularly shitty day. It doesn’t have to be a Real Approved Trauma™.

I think many people feel that they have a moral imperative to always Keep Things In Perspective and make sure that their feelings are in line with some objective ranking of bad things. But the way you feel in the aftermath of a bad thing doesn’t have to be your final say on the matter. It doesn’t have to Mean Anything besides the fact that your brain is doing brain stuff. It doesn’t have to be a feeling you “endorse.”

Of course, many people also believe that if you can somehow fully convince yourself that others do in fact Have It Worse, it will hasten your healing. I’m sure that’s the case for some people, but it doesn’t really seem in line with what I’ve observed in my own experiences, friendships, and professional work with people. Rather, it seems that people heal through acknowledging what happened to them and feeling the feelings that it brings up. There’s a reason why “Wow, that sounds really hard, I’m sorry” does a better job of comforting people than “You know, others have it worse.”

If there value in contemplating the struggles of others as part of your own healing process, I’m convinced that it doesn’t lie in chastisingly reminding yourself that Others Have It Worse, but in letting yourself see how similar those struggles really are. Don’t jump to the classist assumption that people in the “Third World” are necessarily dying of AIDS or hunger while silly privileged you is crying over a breakup. Read some lovesick poetry written by a teenage boy in Ethiopia. And, not but. Replace “This sucks but others have it worse” with “This sucks and I bet other people have to deal with it too.” Countless other people have survived this and you will too. Doesn’t make it suck any less, but it does mean there’s hope.

Emotions are relative, which is why the worst thing you’ve ever experienced feels like the worst thing in the world. But that’s a feature, not a bug. The fact that emotions are relative is what allows us both to cope with persistent adversity and also to keep reaching higher for happiness rather than becoming complacent.

It also means that there isn’t much use in trying to figure out who’s suffering more. Rational!You can choose to care more about global poverty than rare feline diseases that kills some pet cats (I think that would be a wise decision), but the rest of you is still allowed to grieve when your cat dies because of a rare feline disease, and while you’re grieving, you’re allowed to care much more about rare feline diseases than global poverty. If nothing else, think of it this way: the sooner you let yourself feel your feelings, the sooner you can be back to your rational, poverty-prioritizing self.

But besides that, I think that allowing ourselves to feel our own feelings also helps us to be more compassionate to others, including all those people we think are suffering so much more.

~~~

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Other People Have It Worse

Emotional Labor: What It Is and How To Do It

Ages ago, I read a fantastic article about practical things men can do to support feminism. [1] Almost every item on the list really resonated with my experience, and this was one of the most resonant:

2. Do 50% (or more) of emotional support work in your intimate relationships and friendships.

Recognize that women are disproportionately responsible for emotional labour and that being responsible for this takes away time and energy from things they find fulfilling.

Since this was just a list, that’s all it had to say about this very important topic. As I shared the article and discussed it with others, especially men, I realized that many men don’t actually know what “emotional labor” means. That, I think, is part of the problem.

I kept meaning to write a piece that explains the concept, but life happened, and I forgot. Then I read this [2]:

We are told frequently that women are more intuitive, more empathetic, more innately willing and able to offer succor and advice. How convenient that this cultural construct gives men an excuse to be emotionally lazy. How convenient that it casts feelings-based work as “an internal need, an aspiration, supposedly coming from the depths of our female character.”

This, in turn, spawned a great Metafilter thread in which people discuss their experiences with emotional labor. [3] And, that, finally, led to an Ask Metafilter thread [4], which addresses the very question I initially meant to address: what is emotional labor and how do you know if you’re doing your fair share of it?

If this topic interests you, I encourage you to read these resources, because they’re extremely useful and accessible. I wanted to highlight some of the contributions to the Ask Metafilter thread here.

The original Ask Metafilter post:

# Partnered Life

* Am I checking in with my partner to see if they had a rough day?
* If so, am I stepping up to make their life easier in other ways (cooking, cleaning, etc.)?
* Am I open and clear about my wants, and not forcing my partner to guess/drag it out of me?
* Am I contributing constructively to planning of meals, events, trips, etc?
* Am I actively trying to make my presence feel safe for my partner?
* Do I try to do nice things for my partner without being asked (flowers, treats, etc.)?
* Do I take care of my own administrative life (paperwork, bills) without needing to be repeatedly reminded?
* Am I supportive of my partner’s decisions, big and small?
* Am I respectful and validating of my partner’s emotions?
* Am I vocally grateful when my partner goes out of their way to do something nice for me?
* Am I nice to my partner’s family [if that’s a thing they want]?

# Friend Groups

* Do I work to coordinate peoples’ schedules so that we can have a nice picnic/party/board game night/etc.?
* When planning an event, am I conscious of possible interpersonal conflicts?
* When planning an event, do I take into account different peoples’ preferences for food, beverages, music, etc., so that no one feels excluded?
* Do I actually have everything prepared in advance for an event I’m hosting, or at least clearly and fairly delegated?
* If there is an imbalance of emotional or physical labor occurring, am I willing to risk social awkwardness to improve the lot of those negatively affected?

# Third Party Relationships (Familial & Otherwise)

* Do I remember to make phone calls and visits to people I care about and want to have relationships with?
* Do I remember to send cards to people I care about?
* Do I send thank you notes to people to acknowledge their emotional labor for me?
* Am I actively sensitive to and supportive of people who are experiencing a difficult time (death of spouse/child/pet, etc.)?

User phunniemie adds:

I’d add “am I going to the doctor regularly” to what you have.

I hear a lot of guys (I take it you are a dude) complain (complain, or even just mention offhand) all the time about x, y, or z weird body thing that they have going on, but 9 times out of 10 (actually more, but then we’re getting into fractions) when I ask if they’ve talked to a doctor about it their response is no, or it’s not that big a deal, or they can’t because they don’t have a doctor despite living in the same place for 5+ years. So now they’ve involved me in concern for their Problem Freckle but have no ability or intention to manage it themselves.

Make sure you’re taking care of yourself and being proactive about your healthcare (physical and mental) so that the women in your life don’t have to feel like your nurse.

WidgetAlley adds:

Huge one for me, especially in reference to mental illness or trauma or disorders: are you doing your own emotional work?

This means asking for support and accommodation for your feelings and your illness if you need it, and negotiating with your partner about your needs, but also not making your problems their problems. If you have depression or past trauma, tell your partner– don’t make them guess. Ask them to make reasonable adjustments to their behavior and interactions if you can, or if you’re not sure what you need, just keep them in the loop as much as you can.

And then, do your own work and get to a doctor, a therapist, or another appropriate person who can help you in a solid professional context. It’s reasonable and sane and wonderful to ask for support and love and reassurance, but don’t make fixing your own internal workings your partner’s problem any more than you can help it.

wintersweet adds:

Do I pause to observe the context (my partner’s body language or current activity, what’s been happening today, etc.) before I involve my partner in something me-focused? (Whether that’s a request or a touch or whatever.)

Am I answering my partner’s bids?

Am I taking responsibility for my own reminders by putting things in a calendar app or whatever reminds me to do things?

Am I aware of all the unseen work involved in things like meal preparation*, and am I educating myself so that I can share the work?

HotToddy adds:

How often am I saying knee-jerk defensive things like “I forgot,” “I’m trying,” “I’m doing my best,” “It’s not a big deal,” vs “Oops, shit, I’m sorry, let me [take independent action and come up with my own fucking idea for how I can finally make this change that you’ve repeatedly told me is important to you and that I’ve said I would do but still haven’t].

RogueTech adds:

Am I difficult as hell to work with and expect everyone to work around it because I present as male?

E. Whitehall adds:

Are you interrupting your partner unnecessarily? Is their busy-ness less valuable to you than a question you could likely just Google instead of interrupting them? Consider whether you really need to ask them, specifically, right now, about this particular thing. Consider whether you’ve actually looked for answers. Have you googled? Have you checked the most likely places? Several times? Have you actually reached in and looked with your hands for whatever you’ve lost?

There are a lot more great examples in the thread, but this should give you some sense of what emotional labor is.

You might notice that some things in the thread sound like the bare minimum for being a decent friend or partner, such as respecting and validating others’ emotions. Others sound like things that aren’t necessary (or even desirable) in every relationship. The important thing is that there’s a balance. If you and your friend or partner have the kind of relationship where you share household responsibilities and expenses, for instance, it’s unreasonable for your partner to always have to remind you to do your duties when they never need a reminder from you.

Of course, it’s easy for people to look at these lists and immediately start rationalizing: “Well, but, my partner’s so much better at planning things than I am, so of course they plan all of our social events as a couple” or “Well I have a mental illness and my friend doesn’t, so I can’t always be expected to remember to ask about their day the way they ask about mine.” Sure. This isn’t a be-all end-all list, and different people’s situations have their own particular needs and restraints. I encourage you not to get too hung up on any particular item on the list, and instead focus on the concept itself.

The point is that, for the most part, women are expected to do a lot of these sorts of things in relationships and friendships, and men are not. It may well be that men are on average objectively worse at them than women are, but that’s only because they’ve never been held responsible for these things and therefore haven’t developed the skill. Most men have gone their whole lives hearing that women are “naturally” suited for these things and men are “naturally” not, so why bother working on it? Gender essentialism doesn’t exactly foster a growth mindset, and many people don’t realize that things like communication skills and empathy can actually be improved.

After reading these articles and threads, I started to understand my frustrations with my male friends, roommates, and partners much better, because these imbalances have touched every single relationship I’ve ever had with a man. Male partners have consistently ignored glaring issues in the relationship so that I had to be the one to start the difficult conversation every single time, even though they supposedly had as much of a stake in the relationship as I did. Male roommates have made me beg and plead and send reminder texts to do even the most basic household management tasks. Male friends have tried to use me as a therapist, or drawn me into worrying about their physical health with them while refusing to see a doctor even though they had insurance.

Well-meaning men of varying roles in my life have consistently ignored my nonverbal cues [5], even very visible ones, forcing me to constantly have to articulate boundaries that ought to be obvious, over and over. (For instance, “Do you see how I’m intently reading a book right now? That means that I’m very interested in the book and am not interested in having a conversation right now.” “Did you notice how I’m hunched over with my arms folded over my stomach and a grimace on my face? This means that I’m in pain and probably not in the mood for cheery small-talk!” “Pay attention to how I’ve got huge headphones on and am staring at my computer screen and typing very quickly. This is why I didn’t hear a single word you just said and now is probably not a good time to chat about your day!”)

This is why being in relationship with men, even platonically, is often so exhausting for me. As much as I love them and care for them, it feels like work.

Like all gendered dynamics, of course, this isn’t exclusive to male-female interactions and the imbalance doesn’t always go in the same direction. It can happen in any relationship, romantic or platonic, serious or less so. I’m pointing out the gendered dynamic here because it’s so extremely prevalent and so very harmful. But if, for instance, you’re a man realizing that you’re doing the bulk of the emotional labor in your relationship with someone of whichever gender, you still have a right to try to sort that out.

I strongly suspect that the emotional labor imbalance underlies part of the problem men often say they have with forming and maintaining friendships with other men [6]. When neither of them is able to rely on the other person to do the emotional labor, relationships fall apart. In friendships and relationships with women, men are able to trust that we’ll handle all that messy feelings stuff.

I also suspect that this underlies the fear and anger with which some men respond to women’s emotional unavailability. That’s not to excuse the behavior–just to explain it. I empathize with this because it must be terrifying to feel like you can’t deal with your own stuff and the person you thought was going to help you is refusing to. It must be especially terrifying when you don’t even know where the feelings are coming from, when you can’t even tell yourself, Okay, this is scary because I’ve never had to do this for myself and now it’s time to learn how.

It would be like if you’ve gone your whole life having fully prepared meals just suddenly appear in front of you whenever you’re hungry, and suddenly you’re being told that not only will the prepared meals not be provided anymore, but now you have to go out and hunt and gather for yourself. Whaaaat.

Emotional labor is often invisible to men because a lot of it happens out of their sight. Emotional labor is when my friends and I carefully coordinate to make sure that nobody who’s invited to the party has drama with anyone else at the party, and then everyone comes and has a great time and has no idea how much thought went into it.

Emotional labor is when I have to cope, again, with the distress I feel at having to clean myself in a dirty bathroom or cook my food in a dirty kitchen because my male roommate didn’t think it was important to clean up his messes.

Emotional labor is having to start the 100th conversation with my male roommate about how I need my living space to be cleaner. Emotional labor is reminding my male roommate the next day that he agreed to clean up his mess but still hasn’t. Emotional labor is reassuring him that it’s okay, I’m not mad, I understand that he’s had a very busy stressful week. Emotional labor is not telling him that I’ve had a very busy stressful week, too, and his mess made it even worse.

Emotional labor is reassuring my partner over and over that yes, I love him, yes, I find him attractive, yes, I truly want to be with him, because he will not do the work of developing his self-esteem and relies on me to bandage those constantly-reopening wounds. Emotional labor is letting my partner know that I didn’t like what he did during sex last night, because he never asked me first if I wanted to do that. Emotional labor is reassuring him that, no, it’s okay, I’m not mad, I just wanted him to know for next time, yes, of course I love him, no, this doesn’t mean I’m not attracted to him, I’m just not interested in that sort of sex. Emotional labor is not being able to rely on him to reassure me that it’s not my fault that I didn’t like what happened, because this conversation has turned into my reassuring him, again.

Emotional labor is when my friend messages me once every few weeks with multiple paragraphs about his life, which I listen to and empathize with. Afterward, he thanks me for being “such a good listener.” He asks how my life has been, and I say, “Well, not bad, but school has been so stressful lately…” He says, “Oh, that sucks! Well, anyway, I’d better get to bed, but thanks again for listening!”

Emotional labor is when my friend messages me and, with no trigger warning and barely any greeting, launches into a story involving self-harm or suicide because “you know about this stuff.”

Emotional labor was almost all of my male friends in high school IMing me to talk about how the girls all go for the assholes.

Emotional labor is when my partners decide they don’t want to be in a relationship with me anymore, but rather than directly communicating this to me, they start ignoring me or being mean for weeks until I have to ask what’s going on, hear that “I guess I’m just not into you anymore,” and then have to be the one to suggest breaking up. For extra points, then I have to comfort them about the breakup.

Emotional labor is setting the same boundary over and over, and every time he says, “I’m sorry, I know you already told me this, I guess I’d just forgotten.”

Emotional labor is being asked to completely explain and justify my boundaries. “I mean, that’s totally valid and I will obviously respect that, I just really want to understand, you know?”

Emotional labor is hiding the symptoms of mental illness, pretending my tears are from allergies, laughing too loudly at his jokes, not because I’m just in principle unwilling to open up about it, but because I know that he can’t deal with my mental illness and that I’ll just end up having to comfort him because my pain is too much for him to bear.

Emotional labor is managing my male partners’ feelings around how often we have sex, and soothing their disappointment when they expected to have sex (even though I never said we would) and then didn’t, and explaining why I didn’t want to have sex this time, and making sure we “at least cuddle a little before bed” even though after all of this, to be quite honest, the last thing I fucking want is to touch him.

Although discussions like this one give emotional labor a negative connotation, it’s not inherently bad. All relationships run on emotional labor. In any healthy, balanced relationship, romantic or otherwise, the participants are all doing some amount of it, though the total amount varies based on the type of relationship and the needs of those involved. Emotional labor becomes toxic when certain people are expected by default to be responsible for the bulk of it. It becomes toxic when it’s invisible, when it’s treated as an assumption rather than as something that the participants of a relationship intentionally discuss and negotiate together.

What might that look like in practice? Here are a few examples:

“I’m struggling with depression right now and am also extremely busy with my dissertation, so I’m not going to be able to do X, Y, or Z in this relationship. Instead, I’m going to make an extra effort to do A and B. Is that okay for you?”

“If we’re going to be living together, I need to make sure that we both do an equal share of X. Does that work for you?”

“I know you’ve had to give me a lot of reminders lately to do basic things for myself and for our household. I’m working on getting better at remembering on my own by [setting reminders on my phone/bringing this up in therapy/starting medication/cutting back on some stressful things]. While I work on this, are you okay with continuing to remind me? If you don’t feel that things have gotten any better in [timeframe], will you let me know?”

“I’ve noticed that you manage a lot of our interactions with my family. I feel like you get along a lot better with them than I do, so maybe it makes sense that you’re the one who plans our get-togethers, but is this okay with you? Do you need me to take more of an active role in this?”

“I’ve been the one who initiates the majority of our plans together, and while I always enjoy seeing you, I need some clarity about this. If you’re not that interested in spending time with me, I need to know. If you are, I’d really appreciate it if you sometimes invited me to do things, too.”

Remember that one way in which imbalances in emotional labor manifest themselves is that it always ends up being the job of the person who does the bulk of it to start these conversations and to let you know that they’re overwhelmed by the amount of emotional labor they have to do. End that cycle. Be the person who brings it up and ask your partner if this is okay for them. Remember that a lot of people who are doing the bulk of the emotional labor, especially women, might initially try to claim that it’s okay when deep down they feel that it isn’t. Leave room for them to change their minds as they feel more comfortable with you, and don’t pull the “But you said before that it was fine” thing.

I absolutely recognize that this work is not easy. If what I’ve described sounds exhausting and overwhelming and maaaybe you’ll just let your girlfriend/friend/etc deal with it instead, I get it. It is hard. But it would be a lot easier if that labor were distributed more fairly. Emotional labor isn’t a silly fluffy girl skill. It’s a life skill.

It’s hard, too, because most men have been intentionally deprived of the language and tools to even think about these sorts of issues, let alone work on them. That’s why so many men don’t even know what emotional labor is, and why they have no idea what to do when they feel really bad except find a woman and outsource the labor to her–often without even realizing why they’re doing what they’re doing. As I said before, this sounds absolutely terrifying and I do not envy men in this regard.

But you can’t get better at what you don’t practice. Start the tough conversations. Pause before speaking and intentionally observe your partner’s body language. Ask yourself, “What could I do to make life easier for them? What things are they doing to make life easier for me, without even being asked?” Spend some time listening to your own emotions and learning to name them before rushing to either unload them on someone else or drown them out with something that feels better.

I do not exaggerate one little bit when I say that if more and more men learn to do these things, we can change the world.


Although I chose to examine gender dynamics here because that's what I feel most qualified to talk about, it's very, very important to note that imbalances in emotional labor also happen along other axes. <strong>In particular, people of color often do emotional labor for white people, especially in conversations about race.</strong> This poem [7] illustrates this dynamic well.

Update: Maecenas, who started the Ask Metafilter thread, has compiled it into this really useful google doc.


[1] http://www.xojane.com/issues/feminism-men-practical-steps [2] http://the-toast.net/2015/07/13/emotional-labor/view-all/ [3] http://www.metafilter.com/151267/Wheres-My-Cut-On-Unpaid-Emotional-Labor [4] http://ask.metafilter.com/283189/Emotional-Labor-Checklist-Self-Assessment [5] https://the-orbit.net/brutereason/2015/04/25/reading-nonverbal-cues-without-making-assumptions/ [6] https://www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/features/a27259689/toxic-masculinity-male-friendships-emotional-labor-men-rely-on-women/ [7] https://resistracism.wordpress.com/2008/05/21/those-tears/

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Emotional Labor: What It Is and How To Do It

Keeping Others Happy At All Costs Is Manipulative

[spoilers for Orange is the New Black]

For a long time, and to a much lesser extent now, I have struggled with feeling like I have to keep everyone happy at all times and at all costs. I’m sure this is a common experience for many people, women especially.

When I facilitated a workshop about setting and respecting boundaries last week, I asked the participants what makes setting boundaries difficult at times. The most common response I got was that people are afraid of upsetting others by setting boundaries with them.

Being afraid of upsetting others is what leads me to “consent” to sex or other interactions that I don’t actually want. It leads me to carefully manage my public persona in ways that aren’t designed just to ensure my own safety and comfort, but also to avoid hurting others’ feelings. In some ways, this is good–it means I try to avoid doing things that are rude or mean, for instance–but in other ways, it stifles my self-expression and causes me to take much more responsibility for others’ feelings than I ought to. For instance, I shouldn’t be worrying that merely allowing a conservative or religious friend to see my Facebook posts will hurt their feelings. Yet I worry about that constantly.

I’ve tried all sorts of things to get myself to stop being such a people pleaser. As you might expect, reminding myself that It Doesn’t Matter What Others Think wasn’t necessarily helpful. Neither was getting shamed for it by others (often men, who don’t face the same pressures I do). You can’t always rationalize your feelings away.

The thing that helped the most was having this realization:

It is manipulative to try to keep the people around you happy at all times.

It can be difficult to think of yourself as someone who does something manipulative, but we all do in one way or another, so bear with me for a bit.

When we take responsibility for other people’s emotions and try to keep them happy at all costs, we’re manipulating their emotions. Sometimes, we’re even manipulating their reality: at its extremes, this sort of approach leads people to lie to others, sometimes about major things, in order to keep them from being upset. (Of course, sometimes lying to keep someone from being upset is necessary to keep yourself safe–that’s an abusive situation and not the sort of thing I’m discussing here.)

We often rationalize this sort of behavior by claiming that it’s “for their own good” and that we “just want them to be happy.” More often, though, it’s more for our own good: making people unhappy or upset is painful, and many of us have been taught that if we ever make anyone unhappy or upset, that makes us Bad People. Keeping others happy becomes a way of keeping ourselves happy, or at least keeping that self-hatred under control.

It took interacting with other people like this–other people like me–to realize that it’s manipulative. When people would admit to not being fully honest with me even when I asked for the truth because they worried that it would hurt my feelings, I felt manipulated–why didn’t they let me deal with my own feelings? Coming from men, it felt patronizing, like I’m some sort of fragile flower that needs to be protected from the force of my own emotions. Coming from neurotypical people, it felt ableist, like they thought that just because I have a mental illness, I can’t be trusted to handle my own emotional responses. Over and over, I heard “I didn’t want to tell you about my new partner because I thought you’d be upset” or “I didn’t want to tell you that I was exhausted of listening because you were just so sad” or “I didn’t want you to have to worry about yet another thing so I just arranged this whole situation that involves you without consulting you about it.” It was well-intentioned, but it was manipulative all the same.

Unfortunately, the impulse that many of us feel to keep others happy doesn’t come from nowhere. Sometimes people really do act like they think their emotions are our responsibility, and this realization that I had isn’t necessarily helpful for those situations. But it’s helpful for situations in which people really haven’t asked me to help manage their emotions for them.

In the new season of Orange is the New Black, there were some scenes that illustrated this vividly. In Episode 2, Red finally confronts Piper for lying to her about her family store, which Piper claimed to have visited on her furlough but which has actually been closed for ages:

Piper: Red, you’re back and you’re not talking to me. Now what did I do?

Red: My post-slock resolution was to stop giving liars second chances.

P: When did I lie to you?

R: “Business is booming. There’s a line out the door.” You were much more convincing than my husband, but you were just as stupid. You could have said you didn’t make your way there. Instead, you said you ate my vatrushkis.

P: I’m sorry. I–I thought that I was doing the right thing.

R: By lying? We read different children’s books.

P: You know many cultures value a person’s dignity over the truth. In Korea, they actually call it kibun. I heard that on The World with Marco Werman.

R: In Russia, we call it “bullshit.”

P: Look, there was nothing you could do about it, and I thought that I was saving you some pain.

R: You thought if you didn’t bring me bad news, I won’t kill the messenger.

P: I said what I said because I am a nice person and it felt right.

R: Nice is for cowards and Democrats. You’re a selfish little person. You wanted me to like you. Now I like you less.

Screenshot 2015-07-26 22.45.30
Red confronts Piper in Season 3, Episode 2 of Orange is the New Black.

I don’t mean to imply that everyone who lies or twists the truth in order to keep others happy is quite on the level of Piper (who is many folks’ least favorite OITNB character for a variety of reasons), but something about Red’s anger is very familiar to me. Red sees right through Piper’s excuses about being “nice” and “doing the right thing” and “saving you some pain,” and calls it what it really is: trying to get Red to like her, and failing spectacularly.

That, I think, is ultimately what’s so manipulative about it. Refusing to be honest with someone in order to keep them from disliking you is a way of saying, “I know you would probably want this information, but I’m going to withhold it from you because what’s more important to me is that you like me.”

There are subtler forms of dishonesty than what Piper did, to be sure. When I shy away from setting boundaries with someone even though I know they would want to know what my boundaries are, I’m lying by omission.

I totally, 100% get–because I’m living this myself right now–that a lot of this feels like an act of self-preservation. Especially for folks who have survived abuse, it might never feel safe to set boundaries, to be honest, and to allow people to dislike you. We feel that if we don’t keep everyone around us happy, we’ll never be safe. If you’re still living in a context like this, you know your situation best. Not everyone is able to set boundaries and be honest safely, and, as with everything else interpersonal, power and privilege play a role.

But if not, I think there’s a point at which our (understandable) fear of being disliked–even hated–becomes an excuse to avoid saying what needs to be said. I’m writing this as much for myself as for anyone else, because I’m getting exhausted of managing others’ emotions and I desperately need to be able to stop. Realizing that what I’m doing is actually manipulative has been very helpful. I can’t stand it when people try to withhold information from me in order to keep me happy, so I’m doing my best to stop doing it to them.

The advice Red finally gives Piper at the end of the episode resonated with me, and not only because Red and I share a heritage. She says, “Awaken your inner Russian. No more bullshit. Na zdorovie [to your health].”

Na zdorovie is what Russians say when we make a toast, but it’s applicable literally, too: my (mental) health can’t handle the stress of keeping everyone happy at all times, at all costs. Moreover, nobody asked me to manage their emotions for them. Let them deal with their own emotions, just like I deal with my own every day.

And now, since this is such a difficult topic, here’s an actual dog I visited today:

11215712_10153107792022862_6206185993411309787_n

~~~

It is important, though beyond the scope of this post, to address the distinction between “not taking responsibility for others’ emotions” and “being a huge raging asshole and then claiming that it’s not your responsibility if people are hurt.” Nooooope. No.

~~~

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Keeping Others Happy At All Costs Is Manipulative

When Someone's Negativity Makes You Uncomfortable

Ever since I got depressed and started paying attention to this stuff, I’ve been talking about the unintentionally-dismissive ways in which people often respond when someone shares something negative that they’re dealing with or feeling: “It’s not that big of a deal,” “Oh, cheer up!”, “Look at the bright side,” and so on. Something I’ve had to deal with in particular on Facebook is people making inane and inappropriate jokes in response to serious personal things that I post, which, I’m told, they do in order to “lighten the mood.”

Luckily, I’ve found a lot of great resources to help explain this to people, such as this book and this article. One form of pushback I’ve gotten is this: “But what if people make these types of comments/jokes because they’re uncomfortable with hearing the negative stuff?”

Well, yeah, that’s exactly why they do it. In most contexts, we’re still not used to honesty about negative life stuff, and it’s uncomfortable and awkward and weird, and so the automatic response is to deal with that discomfort by shutting the negativity down.

That said, there are different types of discomfort. There’s “this isn’t the social norm, wtf” discomfort, and there’s “this is crossing my boundaries” discomfort. Sometimes, though not always, they overlap.

When I post something on my own Facebook, that’s not violating anyone’s boundaries, because it’s my own page. (Obviously you can think of some extreme examples of this, such as if I used my Facebook to post a sexual comment about someone else.) Anyone who doesn’t like what’s on my Facebook generally can unfollow or unfriend me, or, if it’s not that big a deal, just ignore and scroll past the post. You can also do this amazing thing:

Didja know you can hide posts from your Facebook feed by hitting that down arrow in the top right corner? Now ya do!
Didja know you can hide posts from your Facebook feed by hitting that down arrow in the top right corner? Now ya do!

The mere fact that a post is visible in your feed does not obligate you to respond to it, not even if the post is very sad! I get a lot of comments like “Well I just felt like I had to say something because you were so sad.” No. Me being sad does not obligate a response from you. This type of thinking is bad for you–because it forces you to interact with things you don’t want to interact with–and it’s bad for me, because it causes people to make insensitive and inappropriate remarks to me when I’m already struggling. This type of thinking isn’t good for anyone, and that’s why I generally encourage people to try to avoid thinking of social interactions or relationships in terms of “obligation.”

And yeah, it’s totally possible that constantly seeing posts that bring you down and make negative feelings come up for you totally isn’t worth it, but as I said, that’s why unfollow/unfriend/hide post exist. I frequently unfollow and/or hide posts from people when they’re making me feel bad for no productive reason (for instance, something that I find really hard to deal with is violent rhetoric, and that’s my own boundary to responsibility for).  Sometimes, to be quite honest, someone’s post makes me feel sad and jealous and so I just hide it so that I don’t have to be reminded of it. Is this cowardly and “immature”? I mean, maybe? But it’s a hell of a lot better than commenting on the post with “meh I wish I had a job :(” or “well I’ll probably never get engaged, lol, so, congrats to you I guess.” I don’t have to spend 100% of my social media time actively Working On Myself, you know. Likewise, you are totally free to just hide my depression stuff from your feed if it’s unpleasant.

Situations in which someone asks “How are you?” and receives a “too”-honest response are a little thornier than Facebook feed management. On the one hand, you would be forgiven for assuming that if someone asks how you are, they want to know how you are. On the other hand, it is also currently the case that people use these sorts of questions as greetings or smalltalk and that they do not expect a treatise on all your current medical or financial or occupational or relational woes just because they said three words. If you don’t realize that someone didn’t mean to show that much interest and tell them anyway, I think that’s forgivable, because not everyone is always able to understand and navigate these unspoken assumptions. But if you’re reasonably certain that the person doesn’t actually want to know all these details and would be uncomfortable to hear them, it’s kind of creepy to give them anyway with the justification that “yeah well they technically asked.”

I usually handle these situations by being light on the details unless prompted. “How are you?” “Ugh, honestly, it’s been pretty stressful lately.” At that point, the person can say, “Oh no, what’s going on?” or they can say, “Damn, that sucks! Well, hope it gets better soon!” The ball is in their court, and nobody has to hear more than they’re comfortable with.

Situations in which the person doing the venting is the one who initiates the interaction can be even trickier, which is why I wrote a whole post about it. But to sum it up, basically, ask people for consent before dumping really serious stuff on them and definitely provide trigger warnings if you’re going to discuss things that are likely to be triggering for those who have dealt with them too.

There is definitely something very passive-aggressive about saying “Oh, cheer up, it’ll be fine!” when what you really mean is, “Actually, I’m not really comfortable listening to this, so I’m going to end this conversation now.” And yeah, the latter doesn’t sound like a nice thing to say. Yeah, it might hurt the feelings of the person who’s telling you the negative stuff. But it’s actually a much kinder thing to say than a dismissive remark that shuts the person down and makes them feel like they don’t even have the right to be upset about whatever it is they’re dealing with.

Worse, they may not actually get the message that you’re uncomfortable hearing about their problems. They may tell themselves that you’re just trying to make them feel better the best way you know how (because that really is why a lot of people say this sort of stuff!) and therefore feel really confused about whether or not you’re someone that they should come to when they want to talk about stuff. On the one hand, talking to you about stuff feels bad. On the other hand, you’re acting like you want them to feel better, so you must care, right?

Setting boundaries sometimes hurts feelings. There’s no way around this because you cannot control other people’s feelings, and there is no award for for Best At Being Passive Aggressive So As To Avoid Directly Hurting Feelings (And Instead Only Hurting Them Indirectly). (Even if there were, is that an award you want?) If you are uncomfortable hearing someone talk about their problems and are therefore unwilling to do it, it is in everyone’s best interest–especially theirs–for this to be clarified as soon as possible.

(And should you find yourself on the other side of that and having someone tell you that they can’t listen to you anymore, remember: you don’t have to like it or be happy about it, but you do have to respect their boundaries.)

This is one of those moments when I say, 1) your boundaries are always valid and it is okay (even good) to enforce them, and also 2) it might be a good idea to do some introspection about why you have the boundaries that you have. Yes, sometimes we need to set limits on what sort of emotional support we can offer others because we need to make sure that people aren’t depending on us in ways that we can’t be depended on, or that people aren’t triggering things that we’re still dealing with ourselves.

On the other hand, sometimes we’re uncomfortable hearing certain things because it’s outside of our current social norms and we have some unexamined ideas about what’s “appropriate” and what isn’t. For instance, when I have an automatic negative reaction to hearing someone say that they’re really worried because their job doesn’t pay them enough, is that because I need to avoid listening to such things for the sake of my own well-being, or because some part of me still believes that it’s “impolite” to openly talk about things like money (especially not having enough of it)? That’s not a trick question, because it could actually be either or both. Right now, as I’m dealing with my own job search and my own fears of making too little money, it could very well be that I need to step back and not be in conversations like these. Or it could also be that I have these leftover beliefs about talking about money.

It’s crucial, I think, to learn how to critically examine your own responses and the boundaries that you set up around those responses without assuming that those responses and boundaries are therefore illegitimate. You can critically examine where your boundaries come from while still maintaining them at least until you figure it out!

So if every time someone says something negative about their life, your brain is going “no stop get away this is bad ugh ugh,” that’s a response to consider examining, because a lot of the time that comes from some very unhealthy social norms we have about what people should do when they have a mental illness or other emotional difficulty (just keep it to themselves and suffer alone, or put a positive spin on it that may not be authentic at all). In the meantime, you still get to get away if that’s what you want to do.

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When Someone's Negativity Makes You Uncomfortable