Boundaries in relationships are hugely important, but greatly messed up. Whether it’s a relationship with a friend, romantic relationship, family member, acquaintance, teacher, student, co-worker, whatever. Problems with relationship boundaries leads to losing friends, losing business, boring performances, fizzled love relationships, fighting, isolation, feeling threatened, and many more problems.
Relationship boundary skills are not taught as a class for everyone. Most people learn through observation of their parents. Maybe that’s not the best thing in the world. Perhaps you’re inheriting a divorce rate. There is lots of information in psychology about these skills, but our historical-national view on psychology (among other things) is to use this information way too late after there’s already huge problems instead of using this information early on and for improvement of everyone’s lives. And you can learn these skills from a good ballroom dancing teacher – because teaching ballroom dancing is often like being a couple’s councilor.
There’s something to learn here for everyone. For people who have really good boundary skills to learn to be more observant of boundaries in other people and why you react to them the way you do. For people who are dating or looking for someone to date. For people in long term relationships. For improving storytelling and dance quality.
People can get really messed up. And it’s not so much really that they’re messed up, it’s just that they’ve never really seen good relationship boundary skills up close. Perhaps they grew up in a home with just a single parent, or with parents that had no boundary skills of their own. Their parents fought all the time, or were distant, or alternated between the two. When did they ever get a chance to learn the tiny, subtle, joyful, fun interaction of the setting of small minor boundaries and breaking them and renegotiating them.
The Wus/Dullard/Wall flower
The problem of the wus is the problem of not setting boundaries – of not reacting soon and often enough. They don’t set up boundaries and so people step right in and they don’t respond, and things progress, and they don’t respond, and they don’t respond, and they don’t respond. But then they do respond – they go postal. They yell at their husbands, they make wild accusations that they’re being threatened, they whine that they are the victim. They lose friendships, marriages, connection with people.
The Speedster/Slut/Easy girl/Salesman/Slimy guy
The problem of the speedster is the problem of brushing past boundaries and the negotiation of boundaries that would normally happen. Instead of paying attention to the subtle negotiations of personal boundaries they just go in and take or do. They come of callous, not caring. They are kind of unaware of the people they are interacting with.
Interactions
What if you put an extreme wus and an extreme speedster in the same room together? Just wait till the explosion happens! Put either of them with someone who has good boundary relationship skills – the wus or the speedster might just think the good skills person was just boring or inert or dull… the good skills person is probably thinking “red flag! red flag!!!”. (Want some entertainment, watch the SNL perfume ad spoof “red flag”.) What if you put these different type people on dates?
Learning to Negotiate
Developing good boundary skills is about subtlety. It about doing small simple harmless actions and observing the small reactions. On the course level it’s about protection and safety, but really if you’re doing it on a course level, it’s already too late. On the subtle level, it’s about flirting and leads to any number of things based on the situation: business deals, job offers, relationships, romance, hot sex, great dance performance, or just great friendships. It gives you full control of the relationships in your life.
Romance and Seduction
Perhaps this is easiest first to see in the example of romance and seduction. There are multitudes of small interactions and information to observe in situations of romance, many people are very aware of and thus a great place to start. First, the eyes, is someone awake, aware, looking around? Or are they closed down, distracted, or “not there”? Are they smiling? What emotion are they in?
There is always a boundary between you and other people, sometimes small, sometime great. You start distant. Observe the starting condition. Now instead of just barreling up to this someone and saying, “hey you’re hot, let’s go on a date”… Instead of that, just move slightly closer. Not a whole lot. This person you are interested in, what is their reaction? Again, move closer. What is their reaction? In this method, you have started to set up a dialog. A question and answer response, a series of boundaries that is the key to communicating and negotiating intention. You know right away if someone is interested, distracted, ready, not-ready, busy, or whatever. No blood needs to be shed, no one needs to be caught off guard.
Everyone’s personal distances (distance to acknowledgement, distance to casual conversation, distance to intimate conversation, distance to friends, distance to lovers) is influenced by culture, but still hugely different amongst a culture. If you can’t read exactly where those distances are just by walking up to someone, you can improve your relationship boundary skills.
The Poking Experiment
A popular favorite amongst high school boys is the poking their finger into the abdominals of a girl. It can be done as a surprise or with total awareness. It can be done platonic-ly or non-platonic-ly. It even works well into adulthood. It’s an initiation. In the communication and developing of boundaries, there is always a boundary, someone must initiate the crossing and then observe the interaction afterward. Initiating and not observing? That’s the speedster. Not reacting to something that’s clearly an initiation? That’s a wus. Initiating again and again and again and getting negative or no response? That’s just obnoxious.
By building up a catalog of initiation actions and reactions to them we build up a repertoire of communication with someone. You need to rebuild that with everyone you meet. It’s called relationship building. You create a gentle chase, you interact with them, they interact with you. Look for a balance. (Tennis gets really boring really fast if your other player can’t volley back the ball and you learn nothing and neither of you get better). You respect and give space to the other person by waiting for their response.
Dancing
There are a lot of great dancers out there. Beautiful technique, interesting choreography, but some have no chemistry. They may dance great, but they hold very little interest for me. They are not interacting with each other. There is no timing of waiting for the reaction of their partner after they have initiated something. If a couple has great interaction with each other, it changes everything, timings are now interesting and varied instead of boring, movements have cause. For couples that have great interaction, they could do a basic all day and it would still be interesting.
Observe
So go out an observe people now. And observe your own actions and reactions. And then take a moment for peace to observe the neutral and then wait for an initiation or even better – initiate something yourself. You can learn so much by just playing the game, experimenting, having fun. Take times to take breaks, rest, heal if you have to. But then get out there and mess around. Pay attention to others reactions carefully, respect them. Work small. Negotiate boundaries and actions and then renegotiate them again and again.
