What’s a little consent among friends?
It turns out a little consent goes a long long way, especially with friends, and especially during a pandemic.
Check out our #hotgoss episode about consent, COVID-19 and friendship!
The coronavirus pandemic has shown that most of us are pretty bad at discussing our own boundaries and honoring others, even if those people are our friends. We love our friends, and while it is really hard to communicate with friends about COVID safety, affirmative consent can ensure that we can continue to have happy and rewarding relationships with them.
“Humans are meant to be with one another, and when we aren’t, the decay shows in our bodies,” writes Amanda Mull in The Atlantic. In this time of isolation and increasingly smaller social networks, many people are feeling mentally and physically strained right now. You are likely keeping up with only a few friends as opposed to spreading your socializing across various gatherings, work events, or even just trips to the grocery store. We need more social connection, but we have fewer people and fewer ways to fill our social cups. Need and scarcity create pressure, and our close friendships are feeling this weight. Likewise, friendships are more intimate than our professional relationships and often more stable than our romantic ones. This simultaneous sense of intimacy and comfort can create higher stakes for maintaining peace and ease in friendships. We desperately need our friends and don’t want to do anything that may push them away. This is a great recipe for a boundary-setting disaster.
But it doesn’t have to be! There’s lots of things we can apply from sex and consent education to communication around COVID with our friends. Here’s some tips:
COVID prevention conversations are similar to STI prevention conversations. (And we need to have more chill about both!)
Think about all those questions you’re supposed to ask someone before you hook up: Should we use protection? Are we seeing other people? What are you into? People feel awkward enough asking a partner these questions, but with friends, we rarely have these types of conversations at all. While it might feel awkward, know that these kinds of questions are simply a form of risk assessment and get comfortable asking your friends similar ones: When and with whom do you wear a mask? Who’s in your bubble? What are you comfortable with?
With STIs, some people don’t want to ask their partner’s status because they don’t want to offend their partner or they feel ashamed about their own status. We often stigmatize disease and conflate a need for a test as an indication of illness. When someone asks us to get tested or inquires about our social distancing practices, it can feel like a judgement or an assumption about your lack of safety. Similar to STIs, even asking about testing might imply that someone is “dirty.” Remember: You are not your diagnosis. You are not a bad person if you get COVID, the same way that you are not dirty if you have herpes. Testing is information and conversations about protection and social distancing are research. Whether positive or negative, a test provides you with information to make informed choices about what to do next.
The incubation period of COVID-19 is an added challenge because testing can’t be the only safety precaution we take. (This is true for numerous STIs too!) As we said, testing is information, but it’s not a perfect safeguard against infection. Everyone has different standards about what safeguards to employ. How do we navigate our friend’s different opinions, experiences, and levels of risk in order to stay safe and connected?
(Hint: With affirmative consent!)
We get it, it’s hard.
Own that this is difficult for everyone and give these conversations the time and attention they need. Think of your friendships as a brand, new, super-exciting thing with a cool person you’re starting to hang out with. You want to give them a little extra thought, energy, and care to make the time you spend together rewarding. Why? Because they’re exciting and they fulfill you. Same with your friends! Don’t take them for granted.
In taking this extra time and care, you may have more limited capacity. You might not be able to take up every offer for a socially distanced walk or Zoom trivia night. Get comfortable saying, “Not right now, but please text me next week.” Even better, offer to text them next week! Likewise, use the rules of consent: Listen to your friends, accept their no, and know they’re not rejecting you as a person, they just want something different right now.
Figure out your own boundaries.
Like we say in our show, “You have to learn how to drive your own car, before you lend it to someone else.” Do your research!
Think about what you’re comfortable with at this moment and know that it may change. Talk to friends and family about the choices they are making and why. Read up on local government guidelines where you live and in places where you don’t. Don’t be afraid to ask questions. Call your doctor, school nurse, teacher, or that friend in nursing school. Google stuff! And as you are gathering information, remember to ask yourself: Who is writing this, what experience informs what they write, and is this information verified by other sources? Here are some more tips on vetting information you find online.
It is so much easier to set boundaries in the moment when you’ve done some self-searching first. If you’re really struggling to figure out what is comfortable to you, journal or write your feelings down. Writing things down helps to reinforce ideas. You can also try practicing a conversation with a friend or even to yourself in the mirror. With practice, you’ll feel more comfortable and able to set a boundary in the moment.
No harm, no foul.
No activity that involves another human is 100% safe right now, but we want to employ a sex education concept called Harm Reduction. We need to think about the actions we can take that leave the least negative impact on the fewest people while we’re engaging in social behaviors that involve risk.
We suggest the following rule for making boundaries and allowances that protect yourself and others: You can take whatever risks affect you, but you cannot take a risk that affects another person, especially a person who did not consent to taking that risk. For example: You and your friends may be comfortable going to a mask-free party with 10 other people. But is your roommate okay with that? It can be hard, even frustrating, to have to think outside of your own direct bubble, but this is an important part of keeping yourself and others safe.
That said, this rule is also a great tool for communicating your boundaries to others. You might say, “Thanks for inviting me to your backyard barbecue. I really want to go, but I work at a nursing home. If it was just me, I’d be down, but I gotta keep those residents safe!”
When it comes to quaran-teams, bubbles, or households, it’s important to sit down and explicitly lay out some ground rules as you might do in a classroom. These rules must consider everyone’s boundaries, as our social choices can put others at risk. We often give this guidance for sexual situations: you can only go as far as the person who is least comfortable will go. So in hook-ups, if someone isn’t comfortable with penetrative sex you need to honor that boundary even if you want something else. The same goes for your COVID bubble. Make sure you’re only taking risks that the person who is least comfortable or who has the highest risk-profile is okay with. For example, if your roommate doesn’t want to do indoor dining even though you think it’s safe, you may consider sticking to take-out.
These can be difficult negotiations to have, so remember to not judge others’ desires. It’s okay to have desires and to want to meet those desires. (For example, it’s okay to really, really, really want to sit down at your favorite neighborhood coffee shop right now.) However, it is not okay to make your desires more important than the safety of others around you. (So you might need to make coffee at home because your dad is immunocompromised.) We’re all balancing a lot of needs and desires, and will need to make some sacrifices particularly around desires in the moment. The one thing we shouldn’t be sacrificing is the trust our friends and communities are putting in us.
Play to their strengths.
If a friend is having a hard time respecting your boundaries or following advised protocols, be strategic in communicating with them. Do they respond well to facts? Do some research. Will a personal story resonate? Make it about you or your family. An appeal to their ego? Start with, “I know you really care about being a strong and supportive friend…” Maybe there is a particular figure that they respect who might be able to reinforce a message you’re trying to share. Share an Instagram post or recruit another friend to help.
And at the end of the day, you deserve your boundaries to be respected. If a friend or family member doesn’t see that, you may need to create some distance for the time being. Likewise, if you have a friend who is entirely disregarding safety concerns, be clear about this, but don’t take it on yourself to be solely responsible for their behavior change. You may be able to make a difference, but people are influenced or swayed by so many different things., You need to be wary of your own capacity and emotional boundaries too.
Seek alternatives.
We negotiate different desires all the time. What do you want for dinner? I want pizza. Oh, I want Thai Food. Hmm, I don’t want Thai food, but I would love Chinese take out! That sounds great! A great way to negotiate boundaries without feeling like a buzzkill is to find and provide alternatives.
It can be hard to say no all the time, especially when it makes you feel like you’re resisting temptation. Try the “No, But” strategy. (This is like the opposite of the Yes, And thing they taught you in Improv class.) No, I don’t want to meet you and your roommates for drinks at the bar, but do you want to come here and do drinks on the porch? No, I don’t think I can go on a hike with you, but how about we do Zoom dinner on a different night?
Providing alternatives can offer validation to your friend—you’re saying, yes I want to hang out—while also stating your own terms.
Change is inevitable.
Your boundaries and comfort with various social and risk-taking activities can and will change. Your friends’ will too. Know that boundaries can change for so many different reasons, and it’s important not to take these changes personally. While your friend might be dropping out of the COVID bubble because you’ve started babysitting for your neighbor, that’s not about you. Your friend is just doing their best to make sure their own household/family/or self feels comfortable.
“Blanket consent” doesn’t really exist, and especially right now, it’s important to keep communicating and keep checking in with yourself and your friends. If we’ve learned anything from this pandemic it’s that circumstances are always changing, we gain access to new information all the time, and all of this has an impact on our day-to-day choices and the risks we’re willing to take. Just because your friend was down for a rooftop hang over the summer, doesn’t mean they’ll be down to keep doing it this spring. Check in!
No is always an option.
Kick that phrase “it’s better to ask for forgiveness than permission” right out the window, and #justask. Keep asking, and be sure to ask in ways that leave the door open for “No” to be an acceptable answer. Be explicit: Tell your friends that no is always an option. You modeling that behavior for them can be radical, and it is likely they’ll return the favor to you.
Communicating is actually mostly listening.
We might be called Speak About It, but to be a good communicator, you have to be a good listener first. Listening will make you much better at respecting friend’s boundaries, and will help you learn more about where they’re coming from too. While you can’t be expected to respect boundaries you don’t know about, listening for implicit boundaries can help strengthen trust. For example, if a friend talks a lot about how he’s worried for his little brother going to bars in your hometown, it might be safe to assume they might not be comfortable with you. if you’ve been going to bars and restaurants too. From listening, you should be able to intuit that you may want to be upfront with your friend before a mask-free hang out.
At the end of the day, keep speaking about it.
We know it’s hard, we know it takes extra time, but hopefully when all this is through, we’ll emerge victorious and also way better at communicating about boundaries. The silver lining: The pandemic is a great opportunity to get really really good at consent.