Boundaries

As usual, it was tough getting back to work after a nice week of vacation, especially because today was the last day that my boss and I are simultaneously in the office until September, so there was lots to be done. I had a particularly acute bout of crabbiness just before lunch, when a co-worker initiated a meeting in which she was alternately passive-aggressive and just plain bitchy. So I was eagerly awaiting a lunch break with Minnams so I could vent and we could catch up, just the two of us.

We ended up sitting with two other people, which was fine; we chatted about our weekends and I got my mind off my crabbiness, particularly when one of our co-workers told us about her Saturday night, when she and her husband went to visit their best friends for an evening in.

It was their last weekend before the kids returned home from their summer camps, so the friends -- Sal and Janet, for purposes of this story -- invited Anne and Fred over for dinner and drinks. At sundown, a Jewish holiday of mourning began, and all of the parties are very observant, and Janet and Fred both wanted to go to temple after dinner. Anne wasn't feeling well, and had planned to go home after dinner, but Sal, who wasn't planning to join his wife at temple, said he'd rented some movies for him and Anne to watch while their spouses were attending services.

And he whipped out Monsters Ball and Unfaithful.

Anne was sort of horrified (her husband's not big on pop culture, I guess, and didn't quite absorb that both of these films include lots and lots of sex and nudity and infidelity), and declined.

She and Sal have the sort of flirty relationship you can have when all four members of two couples are very close friends, but Anne thought he'd sort of crossed a line there with those movie selections, but clearly Sal did not -- he didn't show them to her slyly or leeringly or suggestively; he just brought them out before dinner like they were, I don't know, Million Dollar Baby and Finding Nemo or something.

It's so unsettling when people violate the unspoken but -- you think -- understood boundaries of your relationship. People at our table talked about friends who introduced skinny dipping and trips to nude beaches into the equation, and how awkward it is to have to put on the prude hat in those instances. Because it's not necessarily about being a prude (although, admittedly, in my case it probably is), it's about feeling secure in your boundaries, and the specific rules of engagement you understand to apply in each of your relationships.

One of our lunchmates, a lesbian, said she finds it impossible to watch movies that feature homosexuality when she's with her family members, because they ask her a million questions that make her uncomfortable. I understand this anxiousness implicitly.

My best friend during childhood was the daughter of a film editor who worked on Dirty Dancing, so we watched that movie about a million times, and always oohed and aahed over the final dance sequence, which was primarily his responsibility (no disrespect to Baby and Johnny). But every time I watched it with my family, I made an excuse to flee the room as soon as the arm of the record player hit "These Arms of Mine" in Johnny's cabin -- shortly before the "Have you had many women?" discussion, in which you can totally see Patrick Swayze's butt-crack. Because that is just not something I need to see with my mother, so I would frantically get up and pull the "Anyone want a drink?!" or "I really have to pee!"

Even as an adult, I have this same reaction: my mom said she wanted to see Wedding Crashers, and I advised against it, then reconsidered and said, "As long as I don't have to watch it with you." And she laughed -- as she did in my adolescence when I fled the living room -- and humored me with an, "Okay, honey." How embarrassing: I'm more of a prude than my 65-year-old mother. But at least she respects -- even grudgingly -- my boundaries.