read right as polite, because they get offended easily.
I’m a male nurse in a predominantly female unit.
How I see a job: I’m there to work and go home and don’t want to socialize. Each of my coworkers is welcomed to talk about work with me, but I don’t disclose my personal life, age or life goals with them. Work and let me work. If you need help, call me, we’ll work together.
How my unit works: there is a group that’s childish and gossipy, don’t know boundaries and act like a clique, but maybe 50% of the unit are people that work and let me work, help me and I help them (with the gossip clique this is not always the case).
I was sick for 4 weeks and I’ve decided this is a good opportunity to establish boundaries, something I’ve never done at my current unit. Why now? Being sick I had time to think what I don’t want in my life: faking interest in the sexual life or my coworkers, knowing who started dating who or what they think of Biden or the second amendment ain’t things I care about. I’ve had a coworker trying to find me a girlfriend a week after knowing me. No thanks.
I’m entertaining other job prospects and I still don’t know if I’m gonna jump ship, so for the time being, I’m here. Where I work I’m forced to eat with the rest of the team, including the gossips, so I’m trapped (because if I don’t eat with them they’ll start asking why I’m so unfriendly or if I’m angry at them and feel offended, they simply cannot understand that sometimes I want time to unwind without them).
What I think I could tell them, next time they start with their inquisitive questions:
‘I’ve worked here for a year already. It should be clear by now that I’m not a talkative person. This is a question I don’t want to answer. And I hope that you respect that.’
‘that I don’t talk doesn’t mean I hate you, it means I have nothing to say’ < I find it ludicrous even having to explain this.
‘I don’t see what that has to do with the job’
‘I don’t talk about religion, politics or my private life with coworkers and I hope you respect that’
should they keep pestering:
‘all right, I need time to unwind, which means today I’ll spend my pause somewhere else.’ and proceed to eat alone somewhere else.
And if they pester yet again:
‘leave me alone’
if by this point some of them start giving me the evil eye and afterwards start ignoring me or treat me differently, time to accelerate my transfer to another unit.
If you like keeping boundaries with your coworkers, what do you tell them that works?
Having a good relationship with coworkers is in general great in my opinion and talking about personal life, politics and religion can be avoided with for example:
- “I’m not that into politics”
- “sorry, I don’t like talking about religion”
- “Sorry, that’s a part I like to keep private” Also always steer conversations towards work topics and problems.
Then there are ways to differently stop conversations like
- “Sorry, I’m feeling tired today” < all nurses should relate
- “Sorry, I’m not in the mood for talking right now”
Then there’s the general fact that often you don’t really don’t have to say anything as long as you listen and ask exploratory questions. I’m autistic and can barely keep a conversation going but this goes pretty well for me without a lot of effort. Just say stuff like:
- “So you’re saying that [literally rephrasing their point]”
- “So does that mean that…”
- “That must have been tricky”
- “That sounds hard/tricky/difficult”
- “Did you manage?”
- “So what did you do/end up doing?”
- “That sucks”
And if they somehow end up being sad and almost crying which happens more often than I’d like to admit you can just say “That sucks” put a hand on their shoulder and wait.
Another option would be to invite them to silence like:
- “I’m spent, do you want to sit over there, relax and eat in silence?”
People are sometimes uncomfortable with silence but not as much when it’s on purpose.
It’s just conversation lubricant. If you feel like the conversation is interesting then “Have you thought about doing X?”.
I can’t stress enough how much people will like you by just actively listening.
But always, be like the British monarchy, never take sides. Instead propose neutral hypotheticals like “Maybe they were having a bad day”. I’ve been in my fair share of gossip but acting as Switzerland manages to just avoid most of it. When people say “Why are you hanging out with X” then responding with “They never did anything to me”. If really pressed for opinion then say “I don’t know all the details so I can’t really give an honest opinion”. If they still press you after that you have my condolences since that’s toxic.
I would go full chaos route and lie differently to each one. Just so they have no clue what is going on.
They ask about weekend plans. Went to a concert, stayed home doing nothing, went to the beach.
Pester you about relationship status. You have a partner, to just broke up, you have no interest in dating ATM, your divorced.
Throw a wrench at them. Confusing them for entertainment.
while I’m very tempted to follow this route, what do I tell them if 2 of them gang together with the contradictory info I fed them and confront me? ‘I don’t recall ever saying that, please let me work’?
It’s even worse when your supervisor sometimes acts like one of these people.
I’m not dating ass to mouth either.
That you know of.
This won’t go well
Some people are going to be offended unless you participate in their games. In the army I had someone tell me he was going to punch me if I didn’t drink at a get together. So I drank. I probably would’ve anyway, but he was super weird about it.
Redirect conversation, be noncommittal, let yourself get pulled away by duties, etc. Eventually if you’re lucky you just won’t be in the clique any more. But they’re never going to understand what you’re telling them without offense because they just don’t want to. There is no polite, easy way to do this that isn’t going to upset them. They will feel like you think you’re better than them.
Fuck those kinds of people.
You don’t owe them anything that you aren’t comfortable doing OP.
I didn’t say he did. I agree. Just trying to set expectations.
My whole team and I work remotely, so it’s not the exact same situation as you, but I made a concerted effort from day one to set social boundaries with my colleagues. First week on the job my manager found out I’m single and offered to set me up with people. I acted very weird about it, purposefully exaggerating how uncomfortable the offer made me, and she got the hint. We have a very friendly and cordial working relationship, but she no longer pries into my personal life unless I volunteer information. Been happily working under her for four years now.
That work/life separation quickly filtered down to the rest of my colleagues, to the point where now they act a little weird when a company call starts to get personal. Mission accomplished.
I think the key thing is that you’ll never get through to people if they can’t read social cues. Sounds like your workplace cliques are filled with those types of oblivious folks, so you might just need to be completely explicit about keeping things fully professional. I’m lucky that my manager is emotionally intelligent, but that’s pretty rare these days.
Good luck!!
Edit: queues to cues
I did the same, I’m polite, helpful and pleasant to be around. I also keep everyone at arms length and am very careful with how I phrase stuff, people in the office love me and understand I won’t be sharing personal stuff and I’m not interested in their personal stuff. If they wanna talk weather, TV shows or games I’m fine with that.
I was always polite and vague with how I declined their questions early on and eventually they got the hints.
am very careful with how I phrase stuff
I was always polite and vague with how I declined their questions early on
would you write some examples for me to use?
Humans are social animals, you’re the odd one out here from a social perspective, not that you’re not entitled to that choice but choices have consequences.
I’d suggest just ignoring them. You aren’t going to find a better work environment anywhere else unless you literally have no coworkers.
I sympathize with OP. I’m an introvert and have never felt even the slightest motivation to be friends with my coworkers. I don’t care about any of them. I just want to do my job. I understand how I may be the minority in these situations. It’s frustrating but I understand why it happens. It’s tough.
so how do you survive them? and on a daily basis?
Well working remotely helps, ha. But I do have to be on calls constantly with my manager and others. But before when i was office based, it was hard. I had the same struggles at OP. I often just didn’t have the emotional capacity to eat lunch with my team and to engage in bullshit small talk conversations for an hour. It was always the same conversations over and over again. One guy would talk about his kids and complain about his mean wife. Another guy would argue politics. One woman would just talk about other boring bullshit and she was incredibly judgemental whenever I’d talk about my life. The worst was when the COO would sit with us and just straight up brag about the expensive things he owned. No joke. This happened a ton.
I’d eat at my desk a lot. And you can bet your ass that people noticed and some even gave me shit for it to my face.
I may need to clarify this. I didn’t mean to say that I don’t want to speak to anyone at all. That’s just not realistic with most jobs. I just mean that I don’t feel the need to be friends with them, and I’m not interested in getting to know anyone outside of the immediate professional duties we have to perform. I don’t care about their personal opinions or their families. I just don’t fucking care. In fact, I actively don’t want to know about anyone at work. I just want to do my job and leave/sign off and talk to my actual friends/family. I have no room for work relationships. I only have a finite amount of energy and I rather just put that into my work.
‘I’ve worked here for a year already. It should be clear by now that I’m not a talkative person. This is a question I don’t want to answer. And I hope that you respect that.’
This won’t be taken well at all and sounds incredibly assholish.
‘that I don’t talk doesn’t mean I hate you, it means I have nothing to say’ < I find it ludicrous even having to explain this.
Still kinda rude IMO
‘I don’t see what that has to do with the job’
Depending on the situation could also be rude.
‘I don’t talk about religion, politics or my private life with coworkers and I hope you respect that’
Yes, this is good. Firm and clear.
‘all right, I need time to unwind, which means today I’ll spend my pause somewhere else.’ and proceed to eat alone somewhere else. And if they pester yet again: ‘leave me alone’
How about just “Sorry, I don’t feel like talking right now.” except you say that every time like a broken record. They’ll move on eventually since you never have anything to add.
I might just repeat like a broken record ‘I don’t want to talk about it and I hope you respect that’.
I still believe a nosy person will test this boundary, but I’ll try it and see what happens.
What about phrasing it so the effort isn’t on you, but them?
“I’ve never really felt comfortable around [describe group]”. This way, the failure isn’t yours to get comfortable, but on them to mwake you comfortable.
The only one of those responses you listed that might not make people upset is this one:
‘I don’t talk about religion, politics or my private life with coworkers and I hope you respect that’
All of the others are going to go over poorly, if you are concerned about that.
You absolutely can go have lunch elsewhere. I’ve been in similar situation. If asked, you can simply tell them, I enjoy having lunch by myself, it helps me recharge. Also, most of the time, boundaries are set through action not only words. Just do what you prefer without the concern of what others will think or feel, while being polite with your words. Most people will pick up on you actions and eventually leave up be. I’ve had serious boundary issues in my family and I’ve had to learn quite a bit about forming proper sustainable boundaries.
boy, people sure are thin skinned
thanks for your post.
Gossips will tend to respond to outright rejection by gossiping about you instead, and being a man in a predominantly woman’s field is gonna mean that gossip can get very dangerous for you and your career very quickly.
Remember, gossip doesn’t have to be true to still be hot, and scorned gossips will be more than happy to exploit that to the fullest to spite you.
Don’t tell them you don’t care about religion and politics either, because even if you don’t women have learned from shitbags to translate that to “I may or may not have been at the capital on Jan 6th and held a bonfire celebration burning IUDs when Dobbs came down, but I still want to get laid ever.”
My advise, try just being boring. Contribute duds to any conversations they try to involve you in where you’re uncomfortable.
Most importantly speak to a supervisor you feel you can trust to not tell the gossips and tell them the gossip makes you uncomfortable so that if the boring act doesn’t work and they start gossiping on you already, there’s a previous record indicating they might do that and it’ll at least insulate your future career prospects.
As for sex life talk, women are under two impressions, 1, that they aren’t being raunchy when they talk about their sex lives, and 2, that men do it way more and are way grosser about it.
It is entirely possible that they keep bringing up sex lives because they’re trying to relate to you and extravert adopt you, so if you gently explain that you don’t feel comfortable talking about sex with coworkers you might find yourself in a more open conversation about mixed signals and how you all can create a better working relationship.
Some people keep trying to talk to ya because they really do just want to be friends! That sounds obvious but trust me it’s hard to actually internalize that to the point that you can believe it when it’s happening to you. Missed out on chill compsci bonding time with this pretty cool dude named gabe because I didn’t get that he was being so spontaneously friendly to me so much because he’s just a friendly guy. I met tech wiz Ned Flanders and it didn’t register to me for a solid year lol.
You strike me as a bit of an introvert so I’ll add, uncomfortable but tactful conversations now can save you exponentially more awkward and embarrassing ones later.
Tldr, extroverts can be a real pita.
thanks a lot for all of this, so many things I didn’t even consider. I never thought they could be this dangerous. Petty and childish? Every day, but this dangerous? Nope. How naive of me.
As I guess you know, it’s very tiring to pretend interest when they bore me. It’s really dawning to me that the best outcome would be to work entirely somewhere else or follow your advice and ask my supervisor not to make me work with them.
I’m not that convinced about fake bonding with the nosy ones, because, why would I do that? I have no trouble discussing the weather or recipes with the other 50%, it’s just this clique that’s… childish and immature. And I don’t go to work to feel stressed.
You said you were out sick for 4 weeks? Do they know why? Maybe you could spin that, say “sorry, I got some scarring in my throat and talking can make it worse, so I really need to only talk about work or I’ll be up all night in pain”. Or something like that.
Or you could try “sorry, I like working with you, and I know I’ve talked in the past, but I need to admit that I have Asperger’s/autism, and trying to make small talk is very stressful for me, so I hope you’re not offended but I feel like I’m going to burn out unless I make some changes like sticking to only work-oriented discussions from now on. Thank you for your understanding.”
Bonus points if you type that up and hand it to people, like you can’t even tell it to then directly.
I know both my answers are “lie in a way that makes you look abnormal” which you may feel like isn’t something you should have to do. Which is true. But you want to minimize them thinking you’re judging them, and they KNOW you are able to talk, so the best way I see is to make them think it’s a problem you have, not about them.
🤷♂️ Good luck!
if I go the autism route, ain’t there a chance HR will ask for proof?