The Grief of Setting Boundaries in Female Friendships (Guest Post by Portia Bajwa)

Recently, I had an experience with my friend that led to a rupture of trust. It was one of those
situations that happens between friends that turns your stomach and threatens to ruin your day.
In short, we had planned to get together that day to meet for coffee. We had made these plans a
week prior, and my schedule was pretty tight that day, so I informed her I’d have a specific
window of time to meet without much flexibility. She said she could work with my schedule.
I was looking forward to it, and a couple of hours before we were set to meet she tried to
change the meeting location. I reminded her of my limited schedule for that day and how that
would cut into our time together. She responded by saying it felt like she was juggling too much
that day and that our plans were feeling rushed. She asked me what other days I’m free.
Now, as I read this text I’m immediately annoyed. I understood how our meeting could have felt
rushed, but she knew my limitations and agreed to them beforehand. What felt particularly icky
about her message was that she offered no acknowledgement for how canceling last minute
would impact me.
For context, this is a newer friend. We’re not super close, and I’ve enjoyed getting to know her
and our time together. Despite feeling like we have a good connection, I’ve noticed in the past
that she’s not been the most reliable friend; sometimes cutting plans short or switching them up
at the last minute.
This day felt like a friendship fork-in-the-road moment: I could seethe silently and take it out on
our relationship (which, in my case would have looked like ignoring her message for hours and
eventually responding with something passive-aggressive like, ‘okay–I’ll catch you next time.’
Period and all!) or I could take a risk and be honest with her about my feelings.
I opted for the latter.
I wrote back letting her know that I was frustrated by her canceling on short notice. My intention
in my message was to be honest with her about how her message and attempts to cancel
landed and to give her an opportunity to acknowledge and take some accountability for how her
actions were impacting me.
Unfortunately, my hopes were not met. It ended up turning into a string of back-and-forth
messages where she spent more time talking about her experience and her intentions. At one
point, she even said that I misinterpreted her text and she was not canceling our plans, but
trying to find a different day that would work better (tomato, tomat–huh?).
When it became clear I wasn’t going to receive the repair I was hoping for, I communicated a
clear boundary (‘I can sense now is not the right time for repair so I am going to stop engaging
in this conversation.’)

I left the interaction with my friend feeling angry and frustrated. I couldn’t believe she wouldn’t
acknowledge or apologize for canceling at the last minute. As I sat with my feelings longer,
though, I realized the underlying experience I was contending with was disappointment.
I took a risk in sharing my authentic experience around what didn’t feel okay. That risk ended up
leading to a friendship rupture, and that really sucked.
The Hard Truth
Setting the boundary with my friend didn’t make me feel better. In fact, it created a new type of
discomfort: facing the reality that being honest about my needs changed the relationship.
And this is what feels so sticky about boundary-setting. That, in saying yes to loving ourselves,
we can lose relationships that we love.
Defining Boundaries
Boundaries are one of those buzz words for which everyone uses and only some conceptually
understand.
I like Brene Brown’s definition of boundaries: defining what is and isn’t okay with me and living in
accordance with that knowledge.
It sounds simple enough, so why is it so hard for us to implement in our real life relationships,
particularly as women in relationship with other women?
Societal Expectations for Women
Women have long been perceived as the nurturers. The glue that can hold families and
societies together through altruism and caretaking.
In modern-day society, whether or not women actively fight against those historical roles, they
are still deeply ingrained in us, often highlighted through our social tendencies. It can be easy to
ignore our own needs and feelings and instead side with maintaining social harmony.
What this can look like in female friendships is a commitment to the status quo: keeping the
peace, not stating needs or communicating boundaries, and dealing with our own hurt outside of
the relational space it happened in.
Over time, this way of being in relationship leads to interpersonal drift. As the distance widens,
we lose the feelings we once had towards the friendship, the intimacy, and sometimes, the
relationship itself.

And while this method of maintaining the status quo and drifting apart may sound bleak
(because it is), it has one significant benefit: it tends to ward off the shame women feel when
they experience overt conflict in their friendships.
The Shame of Friendship Conflict
Danielle Bayard Jackson, a female friendship expert, often talks about the complexity of female
friendships. When women come into relationship with one another, we bring with us the multiple
intersectionalities of our lives and selfhood. She argues that female friendships are complicated,
and it’s precisely because of how dynamic women' s relationships with each other can be.
That complexity often leads to a beautiful and intimate depth of connection. It also inevitably
leads to conflict as so much of ourselves intersects with so much of our friends’ selves.
When conflict occurs, and especially if it leads to ruptures big enough that result in friendship
breakups, women tend to experience a lot of shame. Much of this shame comes from the
societal expectations placed on women coupled with the cultural allergy we have towards
conflict.
In fact, the shame associated with friendship breakups can lead them to feel more painful for
women than romantic relationship breakups.
The shame of a friendship breakup is easily triggered, as we can be more likely to personalize a
friendship not working out than a romantic relationship ending. Perhaps this is partly because
we typically have more friends than romantic partners, making the loss of one friendship feel like
a reflection of our ability to maintain our social relationships.
If the friendship didn’t work out, women are often left thinking about what’s wrong with them or
why they couldn’t make the relationship work.
What’s worse is the lack of space we have to mourn a friendship breakup. If you’re brave
enough to share that you had a falling out with your friend due to a conflict, there is often a fear
of being perceived as problematic, difficult, or contentious. Rather than being praised by our
candor and ability to take up space in our relationships, we’re judged for disrupting the status
quo.
Because we’ve been taught to think this way and feel this shame, we worry about the
judgement from others and being further ostracized from belonging to other social groups in
which we’re sharing something hard about what happened in a friendship.
This is where setting boundaries can become tricky. It becomes a balancing act of trying to
honor your own feelings and needs while simultaneously trying to hold on to our friendships and
not be perceived as needy or difficult. If it sounds impossible, it feels that way, too.

How Grief Can Set Us Free
The reality is that being more honest with ourselves and in our friendships is hard because it
creates a potential for friction inside of the relationship.
So, in order to say yes to being proactive in our friendships by being vulnerable and setting
boundaries when needed, we have to say yes to the potential for friction, for disappointment; for
grief.
It’s a brave choice.
It becomes easier to make when we feel okay to assume the consequences of that risk–the
potential for hurt. And that’s a choice point that everyone gets to make for themselves.
Friendship Boundaries, Applied
So, next time you find yourself in a friendship crossroads of being honest about your experience
or “keeping the peace,” ask yourself the following questions:
What am I willing to risk in order to create space for my experience in my friendship?
Am I willing to say yes to the potential for hurt or grief?
Am I okay with the relationship integrity slowly eroding by way of not being honest?
The beauty of boundary-setting is that these questions are entirely unique to each individual in
any given situation.
For me, I decided that I was willing to risk conflict in my friendship in order to create more space
for myself. I was willing to risk a rupture in service of being met well inside of my experience.
I chose authenticity over status quo, and I was able to do it because I was willing to be in grief if
it didn’t go the way I wanted.
In my case, I’m grieving the relationship. What I’m not