A Word About Boundaries (And the Man Who Measured Mine With a Tape)

A lovely question, Harold from Boise, Idaho. You ask how to tell your new girlfriend that you need "a little space" without hurting her feelings, and I want you to know that this question moved me, because it reminds me of the autumn of 2011, when I too believed that space was something you could simply ask for, politely, over dinner, and receive.

I was engaged then — engaged to a man named Dennis who restored antique weathervanes for a living, a profession I found charming right up until the day I understood it was actually a personality. Dennis did not believe in "space" in the way you and I understand it, Harold. Dennis believed in *perimeter*. He arrived at my apartment one Tuesday with a contractor's tape measure, a legal pad, and an expression of great tenderness, and he informed me that in order to "honor my need for autonomy," he intended to measure out a six-foot buffer around my reading chair that he would never physically enter, not even to hand me a cup of tea, which henceforth would be delivered via a small tray on a length of dowel he had sanded himself. He called it the Threshold. He spoke of it the way other men speak of anniversaries. And for eleven months, Harold, I drank lukewarm chamomile off a stick, and I told myself this was intimacy, because he had *asked*.

Do not make my mistake, Harold. When you tell this woman you need space, listen closely to what she does with the information. Does she nod and adjust, the way a reasonable person adjusts? Or does she return four days later with a rented theodolite — the surveying instrument, Harold, the one they use for interstate highways — and begin sighting lines across your shared kitchen with the calm, terrible focus of a woman who has found her calling? Because that is what Dennis did next. He hired what he called a "boundary consultant," a soft-spoken man named Alaric who wore a fanny pack full of stakes and orange flags, and together they subdivided my one-bedroom apartment into what Dennis referred to, without irony, as "emotional parcels." My reading chair became Parcel A. My side of the bed became Parcel C. The bathroom, Harold, was declared unincorporated territory, which meant that by the terms of a document I had apparently co-signed while distracted by feelings, neither of us technically had jurisdiction to flush.

I want to be honest with you, because you deserve honesty from your advice columnist: it did not stay at the apartment. Dennis's need for defined space metastasized. By spring he had commissioned an actual moat — a modest one, he said, "starter scale," eighteen inches deep, ringing the perimeter of what had once been our shared herb garden, and stocked, at his insistence, with three elderly snapping turtles he had rehomed from a man he met at a weathervane auction in Terre Haute. He named the turtles Prudence, Diligence, and Gary. He told me, tenderly, holding my hand across a bridge he had built out of a single plank, that the moat was not a barrier between us but a *demonstration* of trust — that he trusted the turtles more than he had ever trusted a human being, and that this was, in his words, "the healthiest relationship in the ecosystem." I remember standing on that plank, Harold, looking down at Gary, who looked back at me with the flat, ancient patience of a creature that has never once had to explain his feelings to anybody, and I remember thinking: *he may have a point*.

That is the part of the story I am least proud of, Harold, because it is the part where the lesson took. Not "leave the man who moats his fiancée." No. The lesson that lodged itself in me, the way a splinter lodges and then, over years, the body simply builds a small white wall around it and calls it healed, was this: *the turtles never disappointed me.* Prudence never left dishes in the sink. Diligence never forgot my birthday, mostly because Diligence, being a turtle, had no calendar and no birthday-adjacent obligations of any kind, which I began to find restful. By the time Dennis and I ended — and we did end, Harold, over what he called "a boundary violation" and what I called "asking to borrow the good scissors" — I did not go looking for another man. I went looking for a house with a wider lot.

I have that house now. I want you to picture it, Harold, because I picture it every night with enormous satisfaction: a modest colonial on two acres, ringed by a hedge I maintain myself with hand shears because I do not trust a service not to trample the perimeter, behind which sits a moat of my own design — deeper than Dennis's, four feet, professionally engineered, spring-fed — home to a rotating population of reptiles I have come to think of less as pets than as *colleagues*. I correspond with several former acquaintances exclusively by letter, under a rotating set of names, so that no single person retains an accurate map of where I am on a given Tuesday. My mail carrier believes I am four separate elderly aunts sharing a property. I have not been hugged since the Obama administration and I want you to know, Harold, truly, that I have never been happier or more at peace. This is not damage. This is architecture. I built a life with excellent sightlines and no one in it can surprise me, and if that sounds to you like loneliness, I would gently suggest that you have simply never sat by a moat at dusk and felt, for the first time in your life, completely and utterly unbetrayable.

So here is my actual advice, Harold, the advice underneath the story: tell her you need space, yes, but tell her plainly, over dinner, using your words, and then watch what she does with it. If she nods and gives you room, marry that woman tomorrow. If she reaches for a tape measure, Harold — if there is so much as a flicker of theodolite in her eye — you run, and you do not stop running until you have found land with good drainage and a hardware store that sells rebar by the pallet.

You have a good heart, Harold, and I would hate to see it fenced. But should things not go your way, know that there is a whole second kind of happiness on the other side of that particular heartbreak — quieter, colder, better defended — and that Gary, may he rest, lived to be sixty-one and never once asked me for anything but lettuce. Learn from my mistakes, Harold, all of them, and you too can be as content as I am.

Yours in devoted solitude, Priscilla