Hi all! I've been practicing enforcing boundaries on OLD (I know, I know, OLD is not recommended, but I'm not using it to find a serious relationship, just for practice!!) and I realized that the reason I used to ignore things that make me uncomfortable is because confrontation makes me even MORE uncomfortable.

Yesterday one of my matches tried to ask me out to meet. I asked if he was vaccinated and he had only gotten the first shot. I told him that I'm not comfortable meeting someone who is (apparently) very comfortable asking people to meet in person without checking vaccination status or anything (until I brought it up) and that we're not a good match.

I know I'm still far away from what the handbook recommends (block and delete) but this was a huge first step for me. I've never done anything like this before in my life and old me would probably have tried to hide my own comfort levels to try and accommodate the other person!!! He sent me a paragraph about how I'm overreacting and it made me SO. ANXIOUS. But I stuck to my guns and wow. I think it helped me respect myself more. Probably even more so than block and delete just because I had never stated my boundaries aloud before. Seeing them in my text was a revelation for me. This sounds horrible but for the first time in my life, looking at the text I made to this match, I realized, "Wow, I'm allowed to have boundaries. And even more, I'm allowed to enforce them, and if it pisses someone else off, that's okay."

My entire life I think I had internalized that everybody else could have boundaries but not me, because it was (for some reason) my job to make everyone happy. Imagine that!

I still feel incredible waves of anxiety whenever someone is upset because of a boundary I enforced, or something otherwise I did or said, but something has clicked in my mind. I'll be sticking to MY comfort levels regardless of what other people think, and I'm sure that if I do this again... and again... and again... someday the anxiety will go away. And I won't give a flying f anymore.

Thank you ladies for creating this sub.