No because I don’t want to

One thing I learned as a young woman who went out to bars was that the fastest way to get a man to stop talking to me was not to tell him I wasn’t interested, but to tell him that I had a boyfriend — even if that wasn’t true. If it was merely a matter of personal agency, there was more of a chance, so he might keep trying. But if there was something else in the way, like another man, that chance dropped to near-zero and he likely would leave me alone.

This type of boundary setting is not unique to the dating scene. It’s everywhere: at work, in our social lives, and with our families. The easiest and fastest way to get out of doing something is to say you have something else to do: I can’t go to the family reunion because I have a work trip. I can’t attend a work function because my child has a recital. I can’t go to this happy hour because I have another happy hour. We’ve grown accustomed to saying no by already having said yes to something else.

Now that we’re all (or should be) stuck at home, it’s a lot harder to set boundaries this way. There is an expectation that we don’t really have anything else going on, so obviously we’re available. If I FaceTime you and you don’t pick up, I have the right to be upset because I know you’re not doing anything anyway. If I send you a calendar invitation for a virtual baby shower and you respond “no,” I might be offended because there’s no possible way you could be doing anything else during that time. If I’m your boss and I Slack you at 8 PM, you’d damn well better respond because I know you’re home.

The challenge with is threefold: one, as I wrote about last time, is that some of us actually have less time, attention, and/or energy than we did before. Just because we’ve been ordered to stay at home doesn’t mean things got easier for us — for many, they’ve actually gotten harder. Maybe we used to have childcare and now we don’t. Maybe our workload has increased because our company laid off a lot of its employees. Maybe we got laid off ourselves and are searching endlessly for new jobs. Maybe we’re burned out from a lifetime of systemic discrimination and recent events have heightened our distress.

Two, it’s hard to take an in-person life and wholesale lift it into a virtual one. If I had energy for three social events per week before, that doesn’t mean I automatically have the energy or desire for three virtual social events per week now. Whereas it may have been fun to go to a party with 25 people before, that doesn’t mean that it’s fun to join a video conference with 25 people now (trust me, it’s not). There is evidence that shows that being on a video call is actually far more draining than having a conversation in-person or on the phone. At the end of the week, we might just be totally Zoomed out and want to hide our phones in the couch cushions so no one can ever contact us again.

Three, it doesn’t even matter how much your workload has changed or how Zoomed out you are. If you don’t want to do something that was optional to begin with, you shouldn’t have to do it — and you shouldn’t have to make an excuse for it. You should be able to say no, or politely decline, or postpone the engagement because you want to. “No, thank you” is and always should be enough when it comes to optional engagements, and setting boundaries with friends, family, and colleagues is one of the most effective ways to get your mental health and energy back.

There is an opportunity here for us to be more open to sharing how we’re really doing, and for us to be receptive and understanding of how others are doing. We can say no to something and say that it’s because we’re tired, or feeling down, or because we just don’t want to. We can similarly be good friends, family members, coworkers, and managers by creating space for others to share that kind of information with us, so that we can normalize it. We can initiate conversations with our coworkers and team members about boundaries and start to model having healthy boundaries ourselves.

There are things that we have to do — household chores, work assignments, caregiver responsibilities — but there are a lot of things, probably more than we realize, that we really don’t have to or shouldn’t have to do. This could be a time for us to gain clarity on what’s really important to us and to prioritize it. Get in touch with what is truly required and what just feels difficult to say no to, because the cost of not doing this is too high. Burnout can easily happen when we don’t set clear boundaries with others and end up taking on too much.

If someone says no to your optional invitation, don’t expect an excuse or conflicting commitment as a response. Let them say no and leave it at that. If you’re a manager and your team is working from home, ask your team members what boundaries they’d like to set with regards to work. Talk to them about how they would like to delineate between working at home and simply existing at home.

We’re all doing our best to adjust to this new way of living, and a new way of living requires a new way of setting boundaries. As we built up more physical boundaries between one another, the digital boundaries got weaker and we now must have hard conversations about personal needs and desires. Doing so requires a tremendous amount of strength and compassion, but it’s worth it.