on boundaries

I went dancing on Sunday. A lot of the regulars were out of the country, but it was a good crowd, I met several lovely new people, and was delighted to dance with almost everyone there. I say almost; there was one guy I prefer not to dance with (two if you count Mr Spine Trumpet, which now that we've built up a long and beautiful tradition of not dancing together, I do not). There's something about the way he behaves when we dance that makes me uncomfortable. It's not overtly creepy - he's not gropey and when he does say something it's far to the ambiguous side of being inappropriate, but I don't like it, and I see shades of the same thing when I happen to make eye contact with him off the dance floor. Usually dancing with one specific person isn't hard to avoid, but it was a quiet night, and when I turned to the bar to take a sip of my drink, out of the corner of my eye I could see him standing in front of me, slightly too close, and silent. Waiting for me to turn around and suddenly be staring him in the chest. I would be slightly startled, look up towards his face, where he would be smirking, and still silent. He wouldn't ask me to dance; he would assume that the dance contract was affirmed as soon as we made eye contact.

I hate this. People whose faces I recognise but whose names I don't know asking me to dance by suddenly looming over me in silence? Nope. Nope nope nope. So what did I do? Completely ignored the fact that he was there, turned back towards the bar and poured myself a glass of water. He melted away again. Was this the best way to handle things? Probably not. But it was the best I could do in the moment.

The reason I started overthinking this minor interaction? I was reading this post at Captain Awkward, about a creepy guy using creepy pick-up artist techniques, and thinking "Wow, that's creepy, using horrible strategies like that to get around someone's boundaries". Several people in the comments (I actually recommend both the post and all the comments, because that site is made of unicorns) said, "Well done for getting away now. It would have been so much worse if you'd actually ended up dating him." It would, wouldn't it? Imagine dating a guy who...

HOLY SHIT I TOTALLY DID

I'd forgotten. My memories of the guy when he was my friend were all good ones. More than once, when we were still dating and afterwards, I thought to myself, "It was so great being friends with him. It's a shame he changed so much after we started dating." But reading that letter, reading about a guy commenting on her body language and how guarded she was, reading the comments about PUA techniques, I suddenly remembered that he did that all the time when we were friends.

"You're standing there with your arms folded. That's a very defensive gesture. What makes you so defensive?"
"You're turning your body away from me. Why is that? Makes it seem like you're nervous. What have you got to be nervous about?"
"How come you're looking away? Are you scared? Look at me."

People analysing me has always made me massively uncomfortable, and when folding my arms EVEN MORE didn't help, I tried standing differently to get him to shut up. Which he did not. "Hey, you've got your arms down today, you're more open. That's good."

Then I remembered an exchange that happened shortly before we started going out.

Him: Those guys over there were asking if you and I were a couple.
Me: ...OK.
Him: I told them you'd probably scratch their eyes out if they said that in front of you.
Me: ...uh...
Him: I mean, no offense, you're very attractive and all, but... [pulls face] no.
Me: ...OK.

I remembered going home and writing in my DeadJournal (yes, DeadJournal. Teen Goth Jen had a DeadJournal, the existence of which I'd also completely forgotten up to this point) about what he'd said, and how I'd had a slight feeling of "oh, charming" but mostly a massive sense of relief because he'd said he wasn't attracted to me and I wasn't attracted to him either and it was great that everything was clear now and I didn't have to worry about the weird vibes anymore. Then we started dating shortly afterwards because he was smart and funny and that was what was important, right?

DUDE, YOU WERE FUCKING NEGGING ME.

(I asked him about that exchange a few times when we were dating. He would either flat-out deny it happened or embark on a long melodramatic display of What An Awful Person I Must Be To Say Things You Interpreted In Such A Way.)

I tell these two largely unrelated stories because remembering the second one made me feel (after I'd got over the minor urge to go and find him and yell WHAT THE SHIT WAS UP WITH THE FUCKING NEGGING OF THE SEVENTEEN YEAR OLD GIRL, DUDE) a hell of a lot better about the first one. That second story just wouldn't happen now. I wouldn't stay friends with a guy who gave me updates on my own body language every time he saw me and offered his various opinions and approval on the way my shoulders were facing. I would sit far, far away from that guy, and he would call me a stuck-up bitch to his friends, and everybody would be much better off. It wasn't until I started dancing that I realised I was even allowed to have boundaries, much less that I could enforce them, and though my methods aren't perfect yet, the knowledge that I have the power to get away from situations and people that make me uncomfortable does a lot for my peace of mind.

I deleted multiple versions of a paragraph justifying why I ignored Mr Loom-and-Smirk, because that's not the point of this story and I've written about such things previously (please see here for my feelings on creepy dance guys and women's socialisation to be silent, and here for my feelings on being told to "cut him some slack"). I don't want to set myself a benchmark of behaving perfectly in every situation because that's not fair; in an ideal situation I would have behaved differently, but then so would he. We all have imperfect ways of handling things and that has to be OK. Having this idea of The Perfect Human What I Am Going To Become in my head is immensely damaging and I'm trying my best to get rid of it. Dismantle unreasonable perfectionism, build comfortable boundaries - this is my plan for the next eight hundred years (or however bloody long it takes to do these things).

I have grown as a human this week. Or rather, the space around me has grown, making me a slightly more comfortable human. I think that's probably better.