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Hi Captain,

I (any pronouns) have experienced the same deeply uncomfortable restaurant scenario twice, and I’d love advice on handling it or avoiding it in the future. 

I jokingly referred to myself in the subject line as the Dinner Puritan because when I order at a restaurant I order based on dietary restrictions and finances, not exactly pleasure. I’m a single mixed drink or a single entrée with tap water kind of person. I never want to spend money on a main + dessert or multiple drinks unless it is a VERY special occasion. I’m also vegan with multiple food allergies/intolerances, so most menu options are out of the question regardless of price.

I’ve now been in two uncomfortable situations where I went out to eat with a group and ordered one small thing under $20, whereas everyone else ordered apps, drinks, and an entrée, totalling $50+ per person. In both instances a person put a single card down without discussing how they’d divide the check, and I woke up to requests that I pay for my entree plus tip/tax split evenly among the group, as opposed to split proportionally.

With tip/tax split equally I was, respectively, requested over $40 for a single drink, and a single plain order of fries. Aka, they were asking that I pay 140% gratuity! In both cases, I refused to pay this and offered to pay 40% gratuity, which I believe was fair, but deeply awkward as some people had already paid their “share” which was less than what they actually owed. These experiences also leave me feeling deeply wronged by the person who paid. How could they be so careless and cheap? I would never put a person on the spot like that and always do the math proportionally, unless I had consent to do otherwise. 

I told my roommate that going forward I’ll ask the waiter for a separate check, but he said that was also uncomfortable. I also wonder if I’m violating some sort of neurotypical rule that when you go out you are supposed to have “fun” how the entire group is having fun. Am I acting off-putting somehow by just ordering a single drink? I mean, I won’t stop, but I want to know how it’s perceived and how to mitigate the awkwardness of tricky situations like this in the future. 

Thanks!

The Dinner Puritan

Dear Dinner Puritan,

Your plan to tell the server “Hi, I’d like to be on my own check please” at the start of any group dining experience is the least awkward or complicated way to go in my opinion. Everybody at the table who wants to split a group check into equal shares is still free to do that, and any fellow reluctant shared-check people in the group will now have an opening to say, “Me too, please.” In the rare instance that the restaurant has a firm one check per table rule that isn’t already written in bold type on the menu, by asking about separate checks up front you’ll find out right away and can tell your companions now instead of letting it be a surprise later. “It’s fine if the restaurant won’t split the bill, but FYI I’m going to throw in cash to cover what I consume and not do the thing where we all split it evenly.”

With the caveat that reasons are for reasonable people and preferences around optional fun social things with people you like should not require defending, if anyone in the party expresses surprise or dismay and you feel compelled to clarify, try:

• “I have very specific dietary needs and budget constraints. Doing it this way lets me have the pleasure of your company without paying for it later.”
• “I don’t like mixing fun with complicated group math, so this is what works best for me..”
• “Oh, I just prefer it this way.”

I don’t dine out like I used to since COVID and my seven years of experience as waitstaff are a relic of the last century, but here’s what to keep in mind if a fellow diner invokes creating potential hassle for the server as a reason to not split checks:

• Restaurants already know how to split checks and do it all day, every day for other people. It is a routine part of doing business, not some eccentric oddity you invented to be weird at people.
• In my experience working in restaurants, it takes less time and effort to keep stuff separate from the start than have to reconstruct what every single member of a large party ate and drank at at the end.
• If it did make slightly more work to do it your way, so what? Acro$$ tipping culture$ and indu$trie$, there will alway$ be one incredibly $traightforward and univer$ally acceptable way to reward $omeone for going the extra mile for you.

If this makes your roommate or other dining companions uncomfortable, they have several choices open to them:

• If the illusion of group harmony is truly that important to them, they can volunteer to take over paying your portion of the bill for things you didn’t eat or drink from now on.
• They are equally free to avoid group dining situations where you will also be. (If someone would actually do that over something like this, consider that the added expense and effort of appeasing them is even less worth it than it was when you sent your letter.)
• They can feel slightly weird about it inside their private thoughts forever without ever making it your problem again. Which, when you think about it, is kind of what your roommate is asking you to do about his allegiance to splitting things “evenly” except you’re also supposed to pay $40 extra dollars for the privilege.
• They can embrace it as the harmless personal quirk that it is, like so:

Server: “Hi, welcome to The Piehole. Can I get you started with anything to drink, and would you prefer to be on the same check or separate?”

New person at the table who doesn’t know you well: “Oh, I think we’re good with one check!”

Friends who do know you: “The five of us are good on a single check, but Puritan likes their own.” 

You: “I sure do, thanks!”

Server: “Great. What can I get you?”

:no restaurant walls are destroyed by apocalyptic horsepeople as a result and an acceptable time is had by all:

Your job is not to fix everyone’s feelings or reset their expectations about how this should work. Your job is to keep doing what you know works for you. They will adjust, and if they don’t, there are bigger problems in the relationship than how you split the check.

As for whether you are acting “off” or violating some kind of neurotypical social pact: I’m not neurotypical and neurotypicals are not a monolith, but I’ve got some bonus content at Patreon about developing habits of non-compliance in low-stakes social situations.

Dear Captain Awkward,

In 2018, my (she/her, already away from home at the time) father married his current wife. I knew she had a religious conservative upbringing, but my father told me she wasn’t really aware of or interested in most politics. She always acted accepting and compassionate around me.

A few months ago, he casually dropped in a conversation over the phone that she had voted for Trump both times. Specifically, he told me, because she wanted Trump to ban abortion.

This would be horrible enough, but I have disabilities that mean I will probably be severely disabled or even die if I get pregnant and am denied a prompt abortion. My father should know this (I’ve told him). His wife has no excuse of ignorance on the medical reality of the situation – she is a nurse.

I was horrified. At her, but mostly at him for apparently being ok with this, and expecting me to be ok with it too. I had a meltdown (I’m autistic) over the phone. My dad also has a pattern of a) picking his s.o.’s over his kids; b) not accommodating or trying to understand my needs (I once had a panic attack because he invited strangers to a private dinner without telling me where I was able to be polite only by disassociating and running to the bathroom every 5 minutes to desperately try to suck in oxygen. He noticed but didn’t do anything or even check in on me, during or after.); and c) generally being superficially accepting but not demonstrating understanding that his queer, disabled daughter is actually queer and disabled. This felt like part of that pattern. I had no contact with my dad for a couple weeks.

At the time, I was also going through a really rough patch in my professional life, and finally emailed him about how much I wanted to call, wanted my dad, but that I felt like I couldn’t because I can’t trust him. He sent me back a response admitting that he doesn’t understand why I am upset, but he loves me.

Over the next couple weeks, we emailed, and then started texting, with general life updates and light conversation.

Early this morning, while I was deep in despair, I sent him a text asking how he could live with someone who helped all this to happen. (I understand, now that I’ve calmed down, that this was a bad idea.)

My dad responded with a very long text telling me that I should “leave politics out of [his] personal life.” That I was “taking it out on [him]” and “this has been going on for months and [he is] sick of it.” It is stressing both him and his wife out and “by any standard it is unacceptable” and I “need to grow up.”

I responded “Ok. You can contact me by email if you need to” and blocked his number.

And now I don’t know what to do next. I love my dad but if he didn’t feel safe before, he really doesn’t feel safe now.

I need help with how to move forward with a relationship with him. I would still like to email him like I was before, but apparently from his perspective that is “taking it out on him.” I would like to see him for Christmas (in a third location where I can leave if it gets upsetting), but I don’t even know how to raise the suggestion.

Or if I am overreacting, I would really appreciate a reality check. I really really want my dad back.

Thank you,

It’s Not About Her, It’s About How You Are Responding

Dear It’s Not About Her:

I was wondering when the first “How do I do I Faaaaaaamily and Holidays with Trump supporters right now?” email would roll in and it didn’t take long. You were the first over the line (4:28 pm Nov 6, for anyone keeping count) but not the last. I had 13 similar when I started writing this at 11:44 am Nov. 7 and will probably have at least as many more by the time this actually posts. So if it helps to know this, you are far from alone.

Interestingly, I got an editorial note back in the spring about how maybe the “politics” chapter in the book draft was an unnecessary side quest if I wanted the book to be “timeless.” Given that I have been writing about this exact problem from different angles for at least 9 years and counting, and the Nazis didn’t have the good grace to simply evaporate into thin air or stop being related to us, I’m not sure how the problem of “how do you constructively interact with people who say they love you and then vote like they hate you” is an irrelevant artifact of a departed age. FYI, I also saw the questions from this week about “how do we get through another 4 years of this bullshit in one piece” piling up after Tuesday night but today I’m gonna focus on the beat I know well: Family estrangement, boundaries, and how the annual winter holidays and their expectations of forced togetherness, capitalism, patriarchy, and cheer amplify every existing fault line.

Not About Her, you can’t control what your stepmom does or how your dad enables it, you can only control what you do in response. It’s understandably easier to displace your anger at your dad onto his wife than to face the fact that your dad at best doesn’t have a problem with her views and most likely voted the exact same way, if he voted at all. There’s obviously no way to know for sure unless he tells you, but telling you to “grow up” and blaming you for being scared and upset doesn’t fill me with optimism.

Your dad has choices about how he treats you and what kind of relationship he wants with you, and he’s choosing this. Your dad knows how you feel, he has your email to get in touch with you if and when he wants to, and it’s within his power to mend this rift any time he wants to. Not only is he not mending it, he’s telling you outright that he does not share your distress or your priorities, and he’s showing you that he is not a safe (or willing) harbor. This is nothing new. You say he has a pattern of choosing his romantic partners over his kids, and you know that he’s not going to suddenly get a divorce or chew his wife out. Nor is he gonna suddenly be open to celebrating a major holiday in a way that maximally accommodates you.

The fact that you’d rather not take him at his word, that you still hold out hope that a loving dad who can show up for you is still in there somewhere, is a testament to *your* loving and generous spirit, and I truly hope that someday your dad earns even a tenth of the grace you’re extending him now. But a scenario where your dad morphs a safe, comforting person for you to spend time with is probably not happening by Christmas, if ever, so your best course of action is to believe him about his priorities and then do whatever you need to take very good care of yourself.  

That’s why, in your shoes, I’d skip the whole idea of Christmas with your dad this year and make other plans altogether. If you do manage to meet up, my guess is that you are gonna be miserable, dysregulated, and rapid-cycling between fight, flight, fawn, and freeze the entire time, and everyone’s gonna walk away with their worst preconceptions about how it would go pretty much intact. If you stay away this year, think of it as:

1. Giving yourself the gift of time and space to feel your feelings and grieve.
2. Giving yourself permission to do zero work about fostering or maintaining a relationship with your dad for the time being.
3. Taking things one step at a time. Skipping Christmas this year might be the first of many, or it might be a necessary breather. You don’t have to decide all of it right now.

In your shoes, I would probably not think about skipping Christmas as “teaching your dad a lesson,” or anything about influencing his behavior, changing his mind, or fixing his heart. He might miss you and get a glimpse of what his life would be without you, but he might not, and even if he does miss you and feel sad, he might not change a single thing. Please keep your expectations about all of that incredibly low. Time to loop in your actual support system of people who consistently treat you with kindness, plan the most safe, warm, comforting holiday you can for yourself and leave the whole question of your dad alone for now.

Here endeth the individual response and beginneth the general:

The recommendations to choose yourself right now and keep your expectations low go for everyone who wrote me a similar letter and everyone who is contemplating one or has a draft in their Notes app. You can send me a million versions of this question and my advice will not fundamentally change from what it has been all along: Of the available “holiday” and “family” Venn diagrams before you, what’s the configuration that best protects you, your safety, your peace, your integrity, and your precious, irreplaceable, beautiful heart? You know your family, you know your own distress tolerance, so choose your own adventure.

If you don’t feel like celebrating right now, especially if it means doing a ton of labor around planning, hosting, cooking, traveling at great expense to yourself, not to mention gift-giving, and tiptoeing around the delicate sensibilities of people who demonstrated that they clearly don’t care about you, then this seems like a great year to sit the entire thing out. If certain people would be disappointed, how does that compare to how disappointed you are in them? You might be seeing the words “don’t comply in advance” a lot right now. This whole blog is an exercise in practicing non-compliance with harmful expectations and people in personal and social spheres. What does compliance about this specific thing get you? What does it cost you? In the short-term, where is your line? In the long-term, how bad would it have to get before you made a different decision?

Conversely, if there is a version of celebration that feels good to you, like planning a solo holiday or spending time with affirming friends and family, or because the religious elements hold meaning for you, then do that. If going home for holidays or hosting gives you a sense of joy and normalcy during tough times, then please eke out what joy and comfort you can and deck the fucking halls while you still can. Righteously denying yourself the things you love isn’t going to save a single person that needs saving.

If you want to show up to the usual gathering to be in solidarity with kids and non-terrible relatives or as an act of defiance because you don’t want to cede your whole family and special occasions to the worst people you’re related to for the rest of time, then do that and use the suggestions at the link for how to take good care of yourself. Consider banding together with non-bigots to make bingo cards or put a dollar in a jar every time the bigots say something terrible and donate the proceeds to a cause that they’d hate. “No, keep talking Uncle Paulcifer, every racist or homophobic thing you say is one more dollar for queer sex ed, and I win the Cousins Cup trophy if you get to 100 gross things in a single day!”

If you have the bandwidth and ability to have a bunch of awkward arguments, or to make them endlessly repeat stuff for your own amusement, let fly your inner Buttigieg and loose the dogs of “Well, actually…. ” Or give them the “just asking questions” treatment they love sooooooooo much. “Really? Is that what you think? Interesting. Please explain!” “Can you explain it again, I don’t understand.” “You were just joking? Okay, cool. But why is that funny, though?” “I still don’t understand. Can you explain it to me one more time!” “Hold up, let me get my phone. Could you run through it one more time for the TikTok? I was trying to tell my followers how racist you are, and they didn’t believe me, but I think what you just said will totally seal the deal!” If they leave in exasperation, you get to eat their share of pie! If you get yelled at or dis-invited next year and they don’t, then you’ll have ample time to contemplate how nothing they said or did was objectionable enough to get them sidelined, but your reaction was. (Don’t worry, I’ll set an extra place for you at the Scapegoats Table just in case.)

Look, it’s fun to picture their faces getting soooooooooo red and the way the forehead veins do a little dance when they pop out, but we know that not every theater kid is the “debate kid” brand of theater kid or has the necessary relentlessness or backup squad in place for this kind of shenanigans. If you don’t — especially if you are a vulnerable person whose access to safe housing, food, disability care, childcare, and/or the resources to complete your education requires attendance and a show of nominal compliance while you figure out a long-term plan– I will not judge you for faking it. There are a lot of kinds of courage in the world, and your safety and survival is more important than anyone’s fantasies about how “this” is the thing that will finally “show them.” Especially since nothing anyone does over the course of a single meal or day is gonna change any hearts or minds. (*Please hold that thought, we’ll come back to it in a few paragraphs). 

“But Captain Awkward, I already said I would go/host and everyone’s planning around me.”  Makes sense, I think a lot of us made plans in hopes that this was all going to go a whole different way. Some of you are asking for ‘polite’ ways to cancel, and honestly bless your hearts for giving a shit about maintaining decorum at this moment in time in a way that I frankly cannot match. I can tell you that general hosting etiquette indicates that the sooner you notify people to un-plan around you, the sooner they can make a different plan, and the exact wording you use is less important than delivering clear and actionable information. Meaning, if you text “Sorry, just letting you know that plans have changed and I’m no longer hosting or attending _______ this year. Have a wonderful holiday and hopefully see you in 2025!” today, then you have given everyone enough information to make other plans, and they can draw whatever conclusions they like.

If you cancel, will people demand to know why and badger you to change your mind? Let’s be real: If your family is the kind of family that has you writing to me every year around this time, then you already know the answer to that is “yes, obviously.” There’s no way to prevent them from asking, but you do get to decide how you respond. Remember that reasons are for reasonable people, and the people who are most likely to bug you at length about this are also the ones who most likely know *precisely* why you canceled. Whether you tell them “Still too mad about the election to look at anyone’s face right now!” or repeat “Sorry, plans changed. Maybe next year!” until you give up and mute notifications is up to you.

As long as you follow through on your decision and keep faith with yourself, you are the only person who can make an informed decision about the likely consequences of opting out and whether you’re willing to live with them. For example, if you know that cancelling now–or telling people why–means buying yourself weeks upon weeks of arguments and bullying, I will not judge you if you feign compliance and then suddenly miss your plane, have last-minute car trouble or mysterious plumbing issues, or manifest a fake and highly incapacitating illness that requires 24-7 access to the home bowl. (I figure if we have to deal with a constant threat of illness from unchecked COVID spread or listeria from deregulated food processing facilities, then, oops, I guess we’re also accepting a world where the people who usually do all the labor of making the holidays magical for everyone else might have to call in sick at the last minute.)

*Okay, it’s time for that thought we’ve been holding onto: Do you want to win the argument or do you want to be free?

People who write to me about family estrangement tend to want multiple things at once:

1. They want to finally put a stop to ongoing harm, abuse, and pain.
2. They want freedom to heal from past trauma and de-center the abusive person in their lives.
3. They often want help composing a final kiss-off manifesto that will ensure that the people who harmed them fully understand the harm they caused and why this painful decision was necessary once and for all.
4. They want to both have the last word and lay the groundwork for accountability, a change of heart, or an apology that is never, ever coming. And like, today’s Letter Writer, they hope against hope that it’s possible that there’s a universe where they still get to have a dad.

There is not one thing on that list that is silly or that I don’t deeply empathize with. The “post-election” letters that have rolled in so far this week all have similar sets of conflicting impulses, and and I recognize and salute anything and everything you have personally done to try to fix the hearts, change the minds, or cancel out the votes of the people you’re related to. There is no social script or interpersonal jujitsu you can do in this moment that will make any of this less awkward or painful. Not a one.

Just, political estrangement works like all the other estrangement, and you can’t count on ever getting everything on the list. So do you want to win the argument, or do you want to be free?

You can have space and peace and healing, with time..

You can have the last word, sort of, in that you can say your piece and then stop responding to whatever they say back.

But no matter how hard you try, you can’t fix other people’s hearts for them. These bogus calls for “unity” and “not letting politics distract us from what’s really important” are the same trap they’ve always been: “I get to treat you like shit, and you have to love and forgive me forever no matter how I treat you, and if you ever decide to stop playing this terrible game, I get to play the victim and blame everything on your supposed lack of empathy and commitment. Who wants a hug?”

Le sigh. Patriarchy is nothing if not boringly consistent, and you’ll notice that these articles about “how to coexist peacefully at holidays despite contrasting politics” are always about the concessions and compassion we owe them, and never about the basic human fucking decency they owe us.

Which is why I recommend that whatever you decide to do this year about the problem of “holidays,” “family,” and the precise dread:fury ratio you’re rocking, make it about taking care of yourself and the people who are closest to your heart, not about proving a point or teaching a supposed lesson to people who let you down. If what you need most right now is to tell certain people in your life to eff off into the sun forever and donate whatever you would have spent on their holiday gifts to abortion funds, I hope it feels as freeing as it sounds and brings you the relief and peace you need in this moment. But please, for yourself, let go of the idea that anybody is gonna “learn” anything from it and console yourself with this old quote from the Shakesville days that I think about a lot:

“There are times when you must speak, not because you are going to change the other person, but because if you don’t speak, they have changed you.”—Mary Quinn, aka Maud.

If quiet quitting The Holidays Industrial Complex feels like self-care or best way to honor your own integrity and peace, you’ll get no arguments from me, this year or any other year. If you want to show up to be in solidarity with others who can’t opt out, or because you want to leave the door open for things to be different someday, or because you’re one of the many people who needs to camouflage for your own safety, I have only love to offer you.

Between the lines of all these questions (current count as of Friday, 11/8/ 1:19 CST = 29) people are asking me for permission to take one course or another, or asking me how to do the most right thing, and I have no moral tests for you because I don’t have to live your life and because there are extremely good reasons that political organizing and mutual aid are *group* activities, reasons that include effectiveness, long-term sustainability, and safety in numbers. In answer to the inevitable “Really? THIS is what you’re worried about? People are dying“ doom chorus, please know that I would never do any of you the injustice of assuming that the precise makeup of your holiday table is even close to your only priority, ethical focus, or vector of possible resistance. All I ask in return is that you take care of you during this holiday season, and don’t make me a liar about the rest of it in the years to come.

Love, solidarity, and non-compliance forever.

Hello Captain Awkward,

A few years ago, I (she/her) randomly struck up a conversation with a neighbor on a bus we rode together. We had seen each other on the bus before, but had never talked. In the space of the 15-minute ride our conversation veered from the innocuous (birds are cool pets) to her trauma dumping on me about her abusive mother. Over the next week or so, these conversations continued with increasing trauma dumping and increasing invitations to hang out, which I consistently and politely declined. I ‘solved’ the problem by taking a later bus, and occasionally pretending to be asleep if we were on the same bus together. Classy, right?

My wife (she/her), recently experienced something similar at her place of worship. How can she gracefully shut down the trauma-dumping without having to find new services to attend? We are both people pleasers and would deeply appreciate a script for redirecting conversations from near strangers when they get traumatic.

Thank you!

Hello:

You cannot prevent people from approaching you in the first place or control what they talk about when they do. All you can do is control how you respond. Which is what you did with your bus nemesis. I know you don’t feel good about how you handled that, but if you’d continued riding the same bus while being visibly awake you would have had to build yourself a “don’t talk to me” fort out of headphones and sunglasses and deep hoods that hide your face, and when that didn’t work, you would have had to be direct: “You’re very kind, but I don’t want to be friends or spend my commute in conversation, especially about deeply personal topics” and it would have felt as bad or worse. She stopped bothering you, right? Then the message was received.

Whatever social skills you and your wife struggle with as recovering people-pleasers, some people lack the social skill of checking in with others to make sure they have consent before they divulge their innermost feelings and dark secrets. And unfortunately, some people use oversharing as a social tractor beam because somewhere they learned that the more in pain they are the more compelling they are. Once an ‘ALL ATTENTION IS GOOD ATTENTION’ person locks on, you can’t fix that shit with social scripts.

Stuff you can try: You can end the conversation altogether and make the reason all about you. “I’m so sorry, you’ll have to excuse me.” You can sometimes interrupt the flow before it gets intense. “Sorry to interrupt. I’m so sorry you are dealing with that, but this is a more [involved][sensitive][heavy][detailed] conversation than I’m prepared to have [right now][today][at this event].” Both of these strategies work best as an immediate prelude to moving away and creating physical distance.

At church, your wife can try redirecting. “That sounds serious! Let’s find someone who can maybe help.” Then she can walk them over to the pastor or someone whose explicit job description is to listen to church members and try to help them, foist with all her might, and hope they stay foisted. She may have to repeat the foist protocol several times before it sticks. “But I’d much rather talk to you!” “Oh, I’m so sorry, but I don’t have the right training or skills for this kind of issue, so let’s find someone who does and you can tell them what you were just telling me.” The trick is, once she offers to walk them to somewhere else, she must never stop walking. They’ll either follow (and be foisted) or they won’t. Either way, she’ll be free.

Depending on the denomination and the culture, Church Social Fallacies can operate a lot like Geek Social Fallacies, except much, much stronger. (See also: Addiction Recovery Space Social Fallacies). “I want you to feel welcome here, but that doesn’t mean I agreed to be your new best friend or make all my time here about you” is a tough boundary-needle to thread at the best of times, it’s even harder when there’s an extra layer of  GOD WOULD NEVER REJECT ME, DO U HATE GOD? running through the culture. Is your wife’s church a good-with-boundaries church or a God-hates-boundaries church?  If it’s a God-hates-boundaries church, y’all will need to find a new church soon anyway. One way to test is to ask the pastor (or similar) for advice about how to handle people who overshare upon first meeting. “Oh yeah, that’s a thing we’re trained to deal with when we become clergy, you did the right thing to refer them to me” = green flag. “WE ENCOURAGE EVERYONE TO BE OPEN ABOUT EVERYTHING ALL THE TIME” = RUN.

When I say that these strategies “work,” what I mean is that they are the most likely paths to get you out of conversation you don’t want to be having as quickly and efficiently as possible. Implementing them won’t feel good for you or the person you’re getting away from, and I don’t have any way to mitigate that. No matter how polite and reasonable you are, interrupting someone who is talking about heavy stuff with you mid-share so that you can extract yourself from the conversation is gonna make them feel bad. Being stuck in a conversation you know you’d rather not participate in is gonna make you and your wife feel bad. It’s awkward to realize you’ve misjudged your audience and level of closeness, as these people have clearly misjudged you and your wife. It sucks to be a survivor of abuse and trauma and not know who is safe to tell. It’s also awkward to have to be like, “cool story, CHANGED ANY SUBJECTS LATELY?” to someone who is obviously in pain when you don’t consent to be drawn into the graphic details of their story.

These mismatches in wants and assumptions won’t ever get less awkward, but you do get better at handling them with practice. Here are some places you can shore up your own skills:

1. Practice interrupting and extracting yourselves with each other until you have the language and the moves down.
2. Practice saying no and hearing no with each other without adding a ton of extra explanations or apologies.
3. Practice sitting with the awkwardness and temporary discomfort of situations where it’s not possible for everyone to get what they want.
4. Consistency is better than perfection. There are no perfect words that will make any of this feel good for all involved. However, consistently withdrawing from conversations you don’t want to be in sends the consistent, *accurate* message that these are conversations you don’t want to be in. Mixed messages, where you fake interest because you think you’re supposed to while inside the resentment grows and grows, help no one.
5. Remind yourselves that consent is ongoing and can be revoked at anytime. Just because you listened once, whether it was out of kindness or being too nervous to interrupt or leave, doesn’t mean you’re obligated to listen forever or do it next time.
6. Remind yourselves that compassion is not wasted. Sometimes people serially take advantage of the kindness of strangers, but sometimes you meet someone in the middle of their worst day ever, in a vulnerable moment when they truly do not have the ability to modulate or discern, you do the best you can under the circumstances, and life goes on. Each encounter is a new chance to do things differently, on both sides.

Announcement: the audience for these has changed, so I’m going to do them once every three or four months instead of monthly. So please come to this November one if you’re interested, there won’t be another until probably February.

2nd November, 1pm, Royal Festival Hall, Southbank Centre, SE1 8XX.

We will be on Level 2 (the upper levels are closed to non-ticket-holders), but I don’t know exactly where on the floor. It will depend on where we can find a table. I have shoulder length brown hair, and will have my plush Chthulu which looks like this:

https://images.fun.com.au/products/53367/1-1/cthulhu-12-plush.jpg

Please bring your masks/exemption lanyards, and obey any rules posted in the venue.

The venue has lifts to all floors and accessible toilets. The accessibility map is here:

https://bynder.southbankcentre.co.uk/m/7dc306803bc2d7cf/original/21539-24-Access-Updated-Access-Map_Proof-2.pdf

The food market outside (side away from the river) is pretty good for all sorts of requirements, and you can also bring food from home, or there are lots of cafes on the riverfront.

Other things to bear in mind:

1. Please make sure you respect people’s personal space and their choices about distancing.
2. We have all had a terrible time for the last four years. Sharing your struggles is okay and is part of what the group is for, but we need to be careful not to overwhelm each other or have the conversation be entirely negative. Where I usually draw the line here is that personal struggles are fine to talk about but political rants are discouraged, but I may have to move this line on the day when I see how things go. Don’t worry, I will tell you!
3. Probably lots of us have forgotten how to be around people (most likely me as well), so here is permission to walk away if you need space. Also a reminder that we will all react differently, so be careful to give others space if they need.

Please RSVP if you’re coming so I know whether or not we have enough people. If there’s no uptake I will cancel a couple of days before.

kate DOT towner AT gmail DOT com

Hello! 

Kind of awkward question. I don’t really have anyone to talk to about this because it’s centered around my friend group. I’m 25 years old, and happily single. I’m not going to go too in depth, but I’m just not looking for a romantic relationship right now due to various factors. But my friends who know this, keep trying to set me up with guys that I have no romantic interest in whatsoever. Oftentimes these are guys I am solely friends with, and I’m not looking for anything more than that.

I start feeling incredibly awkward around these guys because I know that my friends are trying to set me up with them (i.e: When I’m hanging with my friend group they’ll ask me what I think about this guy, if he’s single, etc). Its really weird to me that they’re almost forcing me to be in a relationship when I have verbally expressed that I am not interested. I’m kind of at a lost and I think most of this is due to societal norms forcing romantic relationships. Advice?

My first suggestion is to remind yourself that nobody can force you to actually date any of these people. You can say “no thanks” and “I’m not interested” forever and never go on a single date with any of them. The beauty of having a strong internal boundary is that you get to win this argument forever.

My second suggestion is to have an honest-to-god argument about this. The quickest way to do that is to interrupt the next session of “What do you think of Paulathan? Is he not man-shaped? Howabout Jeffopher? Are his burly forearms not pleasing? And Zebedekiel? Do his crops not flourish?” matchmaking with a question of your own: “I’ve told you I’m not interested in dating anyone right now, but you insist on pushing every one of my male friends at me anyway. Why?”

Then wait. Do not fill the silence. Let it get real awkward and do not let it go until they tell you why. Let them have a taste of their own relentlessness for a change. From their justifications, you will be able to tease out whether it’s that they don’t believe you about what you want or that they don’t care about what you want for reasons of their own.(Hint: Both are bad.)

I predict that during whatever follows you will hear something like “We just want you to be happy” and “We just think you and [Insert Man Here] would be really good together” at least once. Bonus points for “We just want to help.”

A potential answer to “We just want you to be happy”  is “Great! Being pressured to date people or constantly speculate about which one of my friends you feel I should date is making me annoyed and unhappy. What would make me happy is for you to believe the words I say about what I want for my own life and drop the topic of my love life unless I bring it up.”

A potential answer to “We just think you and ________ would be really good together” is “That might almost be compelling if you didn’t do the same thing with literally every man I’m friends with. Anyway, please stop. I like all my friends, or else we wouldn’t be friends. Friendships aren’t placeholders or dry runs for romantic relationships. My life is not fanfiction, and it’s creepy to continuously ‘ship me with every dude we know.”

“We just want to help” = “Is that so? I don’t recall asking for help, and I do recall multiple conversations where I’ve told you I’m not interested in dating right now and to leave me alone about it. If you want to help me, then STOP. Stop trying to push me at my friends. Stop commenting on and speculating about my romantic life. Stop treating me like a project. In fact, raise your pinky, look me in the eye, and promise me that you will stop trying to ‘help’ me with anything unless I ask you for help. Which means, unless you hear the words ‘Friendname, I would love your help with sorting out my dating life,’ this topic is off limits. Forever. Understood?”

My third suggestion is that 100% okay if you raise your voice and display visible anger during this argument, especially if they keep trying to argue with you once you’ve spelled out your boundary. This is not a new problem and they already know that you don’t like it. Once it gets like that, it’s no longer a communication problem, it’s a consent problem, and you don’t owe people politeness or gentle persuasion about matters of your consent. I keep saying this, because it keeps being true: Chronically pushy people are making a bet that pressuring you is the easiest and cheapest path to getting what they want. Society enforces a lot of rules about politeness and decorum and who is allowed to lose their shit and who is expected to let the shit roll downhill onto them that stacks the deck profoundly in the favor of coercion. You can’t control people’s initial mistaken assumptions, but you absolutely can make them lose that bet. You can stop awkwardly laughing and minimizing what’s happening, stop smoothing stuff over, stop letting people get away with “just joking,” and stop being the reasonable one who tries to be the bigger person. If these people have never seen what it’s like when you are furious at them, maybe it’s time they did. “YEP, I AM 100% UNREASONABLE ABOUT THIS. KNOCK. IT. OFF.”

After the initial argument where you have it all out, my fourth suggestion is to be boring, consistent, and frankly, dismissive. First strike: “What do I think of Saxmillian? For you? Sure, go for it! For me? I thought we agreed you would stop being weird about this.” Second strike: “Fucking yikes.” Third strike: GO HOME. No more explaining, arguing, justifying. The more you try to negotiate, the more you indicate that the topic is up for negotiation.

PSA: People who are willing to override your consent to pressure you into being involved with a man (any man) will be equally dismissive about your consent in other matters. At best, these “friends” will bore the shit out of you. At worst, they will put you in situations that are actively unsafe.

If they are single and obsessed with being partnered, these are the friends who will do stuff like leave you at the bar with randoms you don’t know so they can go off with some guy, even though they were supposed to be your ride home. They will cancel plans with you last minute because a dude who ghosted them last month suddenly popped up again. They will turn fun 1:1 plans with you into you watching them be on a date with whatever dude they brought along last minute, or worse, it will be an awkward double-date when the dude brings along a friend “for you.” If dudes are not present by some miracle, trust that you will spend the time listening to them moon over or complain about dudes.They will disappear whenever they are happily coupled and reappear whenever they need you to comfort them through their latest breakup.

If you do start dating someone down the road and experience problems, these are the friends who will encourage you to ignore and to persist in the relationship at all costs despite your unhappiness because they care more about being right (or the concept of love) than they do about what you want. “Relationships take work!” “Nobody’s perfect!” “Everybody settles a little bit!” “Do you want to be alone forever?” Bonus: You can look forward to whatever shithead they are partnered with ruining every fun occasion for the rest of time as they minimize and excuse his bad behavior and the behavior of whatever shithead friends he brings to the relationship.These friends will minimize and justify a constant barrage of misogyny, racism, atrocious political views, casual bullying, and other glaring signs that someone is a bad person because “it’s just a joke” and “love conquers all.”

The last time I was friends with a person who saw me and my singleness as a project she needed to remedy, I was 19 years old. We were on a co-ed camping trip with friends where we were the only girls and I was supposed to be sharing a tent with her, but she decided to hook up with one of the four dudes in the group. In our tent. Which contained my sleeping bag and all my stuff. Without warning me.

I thought it was a last minute oversight fueled by alcohol until one of the guys approached me by the campfire and sheepishly told me my friend had told him I liked him and arranged for me to stay in his tent earlier in the day because she wanted to be a good wing-woman. In fact, she’d moved my sleeping bag and backpack to his tent already. The only reason that this isn’t a much worse story is that he and the other guys along on the trip weren’t creeps. He’d realized I was picking up on none of his “signals” throughout the day (to be fair, I might have failed at flirting even harder if I had been interested) and figured that my friend was either badly mistaken or up to something and he should assume nothing without actually talking to me. It’s hard to have a “I mean, I totally would…but only if you also totally would” conversation when you’re also dying of embarrassment, so props to him and to being 19 and living in hope. I was too mad at her at that point to even contemplate his offer, and the second I indicated that he backed off completely

He and another guy ended up pushing down the back seat in his hatchback to make a little nest for me where I could sleep comfortably alone, and he gave me the keys so I could lock the doors from the inside. Then they both walked me to and from the campground latrines and tucked me in with a bottle of water and somebody’s extra pillow.

She and I never really had it out about that weekend and how her obsession with pairing off put me in danger. I wasn’t good at confrontation back then, especially not when it meant interrupting her raves about Mr. Wonderful and their new relationship. I hung back, felt angry, and I looked at our whole friendship in a new light. I noticed how the only thing she ever wanted to talk about was men, and how boring and repetitive it was. I noticed that whenever I walked with her to class or ate lunch with her, any time a guy came near us, she would turn her attention to them and become almost different person with big eyes and a higher voice and a tinkling laugh and a sudden performative ignorance of anything serious, even if we’d been talking about world events just seconds before. It was like I wasn’t even there anymore. I started timing how long it took for her to say anything to me or even look at me once a man was around. And then I started drifting away during those episodes and seeing if she noticed. She never did, and I eventually drifted into different friendships. I hope she got what she wanted. I got what I needed, which was a  lifelong allergy to friendships with people who treat me like an accessory or a convenient vessel for their own hopes and dreams.

This is why my fifth and final suggestion is to clock which friends believe you enough to change their behavior, as well as any friends who never made this a problem in the first place, and prioritize hanging out with people who do not center romantic relationships in general and romantic relationships with men in particular. If that means seeking out new friendships, do it. You will be both safer and happier in the long run.