What follows is how this subject has appeared to me through conversation: an attempt to notice patterns, test feelings and sit with uncertainty—not to present a definitive account.
What feeling reduced to difference taught me about boundaries, uncertainty and choosing the right relational distance.
I recently found myself trying to understand what to do with a friendship that no longer felt right.
There had been no dramatic betrayal, explosive argument or obvious villain. I didn’t think my friend was fundamentally bad. Yet, over time, discomfort began to gather around the way we related to each other.
Some of his comments stayed with me. He sometimes spoke about attraction through ethnicity and nationality: wanting someone with visibly “ethnic” features; describing an attraction to people from a particular country that seemed to lose its charge once he was surrounded by them; referring to sleeping with someone as a “token.” Once, he described a social dynamic in which someone could be used sexually for experience before pursuing the person they actually wanted. What unsettled me was how ordinary this sounded in the telling.
No single comment gave me access to his intentions. Attraction is complicated. People have physical preferences. Casual sex can be entirely mutual. People also use clumsy language. I didn’t want to turn a handful of remarks into a diagnosis of someone’s character.
But together, they made me think about fetishisation, tokenism and the moment a person becomes an instrument.
There is a difference between being attracted to a person who happens to have a particular ethnicity and being attracted to ethnicity as an experience. There is a difference between consensual casual sex and treating another person as practice, a token or something to collect. I began to wonder whether difference itself—ethnicity, nationality, novelty—sometimes carried more weight for him than the individuality of the person.
Eventually, that discomfort became personal. I started to wonder whether some version of the same dynamic existed in our friendship.
At times, I felt othered and exoticised, as though part of my place in the friendship came from being perceived as different rather than simply being myself. Was I being encountered as a whole person, or was what I represented—my background, my difference, my perceived otherness—part of the appeal?
I couldn’t answer that question from inside his head. Trying to do so only pulled me deeper into analysis. But I could take seriously the fact that this was how the friendship had begun to feel.
That distinction changed everything.
— UNDERSTANDING THE DYNAMIC, NOT DIAGNOSING THE PERSON —
My first instinct was to work out why.
I analysed his upbringing, identity, insecurities and unresolved experiences. I wondered whether someone’s relationship with their own ethnicity might shape the way they relate to ethnicity in others. I wondered whether certain social environments teach people to approach relationships through status, novelty or usefulness.
What made the situation more confusing was that he was himself from a non-white background and deeply interested in spirituality. I had assumed those parts of his life might make him especially attentive to how difference can be objectified. But shared marginalisation does not automatically prevent someone from othering others, just as spiritual interest does not guarantee self-awareness in every relationship. The contradiction made me question my perceptions for longer.
Some of those theories might contain some truth. But I eventually recognised the difference between understanding my experience of someone and believing I understood his inner world.
His inner world belongs to him.
I could say, “This dynamic doesn’t feel good to me.”
I could not say with the same certainty, “This is happening because you haven’t healed from X.”
The first statement describes my experience. The second claims authority over somebody else’s. Once I saw the difference, the question was no longer whether I could solve him. It was whether I could trust myself.
— A BOUNDARY DOES NOT REQUIRE A DIAGNOSIS —
I had fallen into a trap: believing I needed to understand the friendship completely before I was allowed to change it.
I didn’t.
I didn’t need to build a psychological case against him. I didn’t need to prove that he was narcissistic, avoidant, manipulative, traumatised or emotionally unavailable.
The information I needed was simpler:
This friendship brings out something in me that I don’t want to continue.
That was enough.
I could believe my friend was good enough while recognising that our dynamic did not work for me. I could believe he had good intentions while acknowledging that some interactions made me uncomfortable. I did not have to turn him into a bad person to give myself permission to want more distance.
This helped me separate the person from the relationship we created together. Liking someone is not the same as liking who we become in each other’s company.
— TELLING MY TRUTH WITHOUT TELLING HIM HIS —
The next question was how to speak honestly without turning honesty into psychological intrusion.
I could say, “I’ve noticed that something between us hasn’t felt right to me.”
What I couldn’t honestly claim was, “I know why you behave this way.”
I had spent a long time reflecting on the friendship and had developed an elaborate theory about some of his behaviour. But having a theory did not mean I needed to share it.
Withholding that interpretation was not dishonesty. It was respect for his autonomy. His understanding of himself is his work, not mine.
My responsibility was narrower: to name what I had experienced, how it affected me and what I wanted to do differently. Then I could stop.
— DISTANCE IS NOT PUNISHMENT —
I was not trying to say, “You are bad, so I am removing you from my life.”
What I meant was much simpler: “The way we currently relate doesn’t work for me.”
I was still comfortable seeing him socially. What I no longer wanted was the intimacy of a one-to-one friendship. Group settings felt fine; meeting alone felt as though it might pull me back into a dynamic I was trying to leave.
So the boundary was not exile. It was a change in access.
Relationships do not have only two settings: closeness and disappearance. There are many distances at which two people can relate. Sometimes the right distance preserves goodwill that forced intimacy would eventually destroy.
That understanding also helped me keep the boundary from becoming a covert punishment. The point was not to make him suffer, admit wrongdoing or validate my interpretation. The point was to place myself where I could relate with greater ease and integrity.
— WHY I STAYED —
I also had to acknowledge my own participation.
For a while, I consciously stayed close to the dynamic because I wanted to understand it. I wanted to know what I was sensing, why it made me uncomfortable and what it revealed about the ways people can other, exoticise or instrumentalise one another.
Analysis gave me the feeling that I was doing something useful. Perhaps, if I observed long enough, I would reach a level of certainty that made leaving feel unquestionably justified.
But continued exposure was not the price of insight. I did not need to remain inside a dynamic to earn the right to understand it. Eventually, I had learned enough.
Leaving became possible when I stopped treating certainty as a moral requirement.
— LEAVING WITHOUT A VERDICT —
I withdrew before I had the language to explain why. Later, I understood that I did not need certainty about his intentions, and I did not need to decide whether he was a good or bad person.
I only needed to take seriously how the friendship felt to me.
I can care about someone while changing the distance between us. I can leave open the possibility that we might meet differently at another stage of life without waiting for that possibility to arrive. I can hold affection and discomfort at the same time.
The conclusion I reached was simple:
I don’t need to decide who you are. I only need to decide how I want to relate to you.
Sometimes leaving a dynamic is not a verdict on the other person. It is simply the recognition that I no longer need to stay inside something in order to understand it.