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?
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.
‘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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
