Sunday 26 February 2017

Don't Use Maybe to Mean No


Ever tried to get a full pint through a crowd without spilling? That's what being human feels like to me, sometimes. The liquid in the pint in this metaphor is your overall sense of wellbeing. Every time you yield to circumstances and do something you did not quite want to do, you splash a drop of it away. Maybe you give in and agree to that second starter or stay for another pint or give your boss an unrealistic deadline. Splash, splash, splash.

I yield to the impulse to please people like a puppet yields to its master's strings. Two things conspire to make me do this: the genuine pleasure of seeing people happy and the fear, verging on phobia, of disappointing them. This is not a virtue.

Every time you offer something which you did not quite mean to give away, be it your time or anything else, you allow your boundaries to be trodden. This hurts. Weak boundaries can make you resentful and aggressive and not even aware of it. They can also make you avoid people, certainly those people disinclined to notice when your enthusiasm is less than unreserved. Poignantly, this is often your fault more than it is theirs. Mindreading is a tricky business.

Sometimes it is a matter of culture. Here is a story my grandfather loved to tell. It is the custom in Moldova for hosts to offer their guests a dinner invitation by asking more than once; at the same time, guests are expected to start by turning them down. In this way, poor hosts can save face by still issuing a dinner invitation and poor guests can avoid appearing desperate (or so the legend goes). In Transylvania, such fussing about is not the norm, presumably on the assumption that guests know best and that foisting attention on them might be irksome. (Though it is also the case that Transylvania has always been the richer province.) And there is a popular trope about a Moldovan who travels to Transylvania and turns down the dinner invitation, by his own lights. Queue cartoon comedy as the hungry guest looks on, with disbelieving dismay, at the food stuffs being duly withdrawn and packed away to the kitchen. Proud Moldovans like myself are socialised to feel delight in their customary sort of undue generosity. 

Still, weak boundaries are not a virtue. They are a symptom of chronic insecurity. You become compulsive about pleasing (and performing and perfecting) when you imagine that relationships are transactional and that you must make it profitable for others to offer you their time, attention and regard. Individuals assured of their own worth have nothing to fuss about. They offer what they mean to offer and no more.

You might think that boundaries make you rigid. Not so. If you walk along the edge of a sheer drop and there is no railing, you will walk well away from it. Where there is a railing, you can go right up to the edge. Good boundaries can mean more freedom, not less.

In acting class, we play this game sometimes. You pair with someone. Your partner's job is to shout boundaries as soon as they feel the slightest distress. Your job is to try to unsettle them. You test a string of gestures, maybe you start by touching their shoulder and then touch their hand. Before long, something will set them off. (I find trying to stick a finger in their left ear works quite well.) Different people have different boundaries and your job, and their job, is to learn to notice them. Also, to notice them before you trample them over. It is a social talent in painfully short supply.

Here is why you should get good at this game. When you are dealing with people who stand well outside of your boundaries, you can be calm and reasonable and examine your disagreements with academic detachment. You can debate, without losing your temper, the pros and cons of digital proximity to the tympanic cavity. Not so after the rubicon has been crossed. Then the situation is more like get your f**king finger out of my f**king ear. Trying to be calm after someone has stepped over your boundaries is like trying to negotiate a peace settlement while the invading army is marching through the city, door to door, killing all the babies. You will not want to be tactical; hysterical is what you will want to be. As George Orwell once put it, you "cannot take a purely aesthetic interest in a disease you are dying from". 

Playing boundaries in your head is a fun way to go about your day as well as useful. It helps with the people-hating. Oh come on, don't be boring, tequila shots? BOUNDARIES! Would you like double fries with that? BOUNDARIES! etc. Don't use maybe to mean no.