Reverse boundaries

How good are we at respecting when someone else says 'no'?

Feb 24, 2023

Hi! You’re reading A-Mail. I’m Anna Codrea-Rado, a business, tech and culture writer. My current reporting obsession is how work makes us feel. The vibe of this newsletter is somewhere between a reporter’s notebook and an email to a long-distance friend. 15,000+ readers love it. Maybe you will, too?

In my friendship group, I have a slogan: live your truth.

I can’t remember exactly when I first started saying it. It must have been at a party in my mid-20s when someone wanted to leave early and we all got up in arms. Back then, we acted as a unit. We were all fully committed to maximising the fun; always doing everything together.

We thought that our Greek chorus of “Nooo, don’t go!” was a show of affection – how much we’d miss them if they left. But when that friend confided that they really just wanted to go home, I conceded: “Live your truth.” Do what you need to do; we’re cool.

It became a shorthand for when someone wanted to do something that made them feel awkward. Like taking a night off from drinking, skipping out on the after-party or anything else that, perversely, makes us feel like we’re letting our mates down. “Live your truth”, while super corny, was a sign of respect for someone else’s boundary.

Lately, I don’t know what I did to anger the Instagram algorithm Gods, but the corners of the internet I lurk in are rife with aphorisms and passive-aggressive slogans about boundaries. Some recent examples:

“No” is a full sentence
It’s okay to say “my feelings and needs matter more”
You should never apologize for doing what is best for you

While I do think all these statements are true and correct, I do wonder how helpful it is to focus so singularly on setting boundaries. Because when it comes to boundaries – how good are we at respecting someone else when they say no to us?

Recently, I had an interaction where I tried to set a boundary and the person pushed back. It was a situation I often find myself in: someone wanting me to do work for free. I firmly said no and they listed a bunch of reasons why they didn’t accept that. (So much for Instagram telling me that no was a full sentence??)

Needless to say, I was really annoyed about it! The exchange did, however, give me pause to think that perhaps the trick with boundaries is to focus less on setting one’s own and more on respecting the boundaries of others. After all, there’s not much I can do about other people’s behaviour but I can do something about my own.

One of the best things I learned about boundaries is that they’re about behaviours and not people. That framing has been liberating for me – I’m not saying no to you, I’m saying no to your ask.

That being said, I’ve definitely inadvertently trodden on someone else’s boundary. My partner asks me not to wear shoes in the house, and yet I still do. (I also interrupted him watching his favourite show to ask him for examples of how I cross his boundaries 🙃).

A thought experiment: if we all focused a little more on accepting when someone else set a boundary and a little less on aggressively setting our own, would we even have to set such firm boundaries in the first place?

I don’t know. But what I do know is that I’d like to try. And next time someone sets a boundary, I’m going to do my best to respect that. I'm going to let them live their truth.

» Clubbing, but make it earlier. For the New York Times, I wrote about Before Midnight, Annie Mac's new club night that's designed for people who need their sleep.

It's a simple idea – a dance party that starts and ends earlier – and yet it's resonated with the thousands of people who thought their partying days were behind them. Parents, non-drinkers, carers, or anyone who just doesn't want to be out in the dead of night.

Annie Mac questioned something that most people in the nightlife world thought was a nonnegotiable – that club nights *had* to start 10pm and run til at least 3am. As a mother whose career is DJing, challenging that idea was the difference between having a sustainable workload and burnout.
I think that's something so many of us can relate to, regardless of industry. You only have to look at the runaway success of the first few Before Midnight events to see just how many people want to dance AND sleep. And how achievable it is to give them that option.

Isn't it amazing how one small tweak, like moving a club schedule a few hours earlier, can make such a joyous, wonderful difference to so many people.

[I started a thread about what other things in our lives could benefit from a tweak.]

» Edith Wharton was writing about presenteeism over 100 years ago. I recently read The Age of Innocence, published in 1920 and for which Wharton won a Pulitzer for fiction, making her the first woman to win the prize. I was so struck by this passage and its eerily familiar observation of professional ambivalence: “In consequence of this search he arrived late at the office, perceived that his doing so made no difference whatever to anyone, and was filled with sudden exasperation at the elaborate futility of his life… No one was deceived by his pretense of professional activity. In old-fashioned legal firms like that of which Mr Letterblair was the head, and which were mainly engaged in the management of large estates and ‘conservative’ investments, there were always two or three young men, fairly well-off, and without professional ambition, who, for a certain number of hours each day, sat at their desks accomplishing trivial tasks, or simply reading the newspaper.”

» Maybe You Should Talk To Someone. I loved Lori Gottlieb’s memoir of being a therapist and the parallel journey she takes alongside her patients. The book also introduced me to Gottlieb’s Dear Therapist column in The Atlantic. I can’t get enough of therapy content!

» And finally, a new word game! I confess that I’m a bit bored of Wordle now. So how thrilled was I when I discovered Contexto. It’s another word-guessing game, but you have unlimited gos at trying to work out the answer. It’s a bit like that game hot/cold I’d play as a kid.

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