Tactics Tuesdays: How to Compartmentalize Your Lifestyles

Compartmentalization lets you keep separate areas of your life separate – and avoid fallout from ideological clashes or failing relationships.

As you become more active socially, some things get hairier. You meet more and different kinds of people. You start to run in some very different circles. And eventually you end up with friends and connections who are completely incompatible with one another. The broader and more diverse the people in your life become, the more you need to take care who you introduce to whom.

Further, the more integrated your various circles and lifestyles are, the easier it is for problems in one to snake their way into others.

To fend off mismatches and problems bleeding from one area into another, you use lifestyle compartmentalization.

The ability to compartmentalize your lifestyle is a handy one to have. It lets you prevent mismatched acquaintances clashing. It lets you avoid friends wanting you to choose themselves or others. It keeps you out of scenarios where your girlfriends judge your buddies and try to get you to stop hanging out with them.

It's easy to compartmentalize your lifestyle, yet it's something not a lot of people do. It feels good to introduce people we like to other people we like. It's lazier too - rather than do one thing and talk about certain topics with your buddy Eric, and do another thing and talk about other topics with your buddy Kevin, and do yet another thing and talk about still more/different topics with Kate, the girl you've been seeing for a couple months, why not invite them all to hang out together and do one thing, and talk about the same things with them all?

Yet failure to compartmentalize your life leads to a more limited life - because when those different people from different walks clash, they tend to decide a.) maybe they didn't know you as well as they thought, if you have this type of friend, and b.) you're going to have to decide who you really want to be with: themselves, or those other folks?

 

Who Needs to Compartmentalize?

The men who need to compartmentalize most are:

• Those who cold approach strange women/people

• Those with very active social lives where they meet lots of different people

• Those with very diverse social lives, where they meet people from different walks of life

The thing these attributes all have in common is they either increase the total number of people or activities in a man's life, or they increase the diversity of people or activities in it.

If you have a lot of people or activities in your life, by default many of those people will not necessarily get along with each other or agree with all your activities. Likewise, if you don't have a huge number of people or activities in your life, but the people and activities you do have are very different, it's usually safe to assume they won't all like each other or all your activities as much as they may like you and the activities they share with you.

There's another reason for compartmentalization aside from keeping people away from other people and activities they won't see eye-to-eye with, too. That other reason is to avoid fallout when you have relationships end.

I first learned about compartmentalizing your life in 2008 from a friend of mine with borderline personality disorder. This friend would always have falling outs with people, and while he had many high caliber friends, his life was also something of a revolving door. He slept with a lot of women and met a lot of people. At the time, I thought the concept was a little much - I didn't have falling outs with people. I'm good at keeping my bridges unburned. And there was nothing I enjoyed more than introducing different people I liked to one another and getting them together.

Yet not long after this friend talked to me about compartmentalization, I began to have women I was with pass judgment on other people in my life. Or pressure me to stop spending time with those people. One girl I'd slept with but did not want to date used her access to people in my life via a social media account I'd added her to to try to blackmail me into dating her. Girls I was dating who knew each other got into spats with each other over me and pressured me to view their competitors as unattractive or sluts. Male friends I introduced to other male friends would judge those friends poorly: "I don't know why you hang out with that guy," indirectly judging me as well (the company you keep reflects upon you). Other times I'd introduced two friends, and the one would try to latch onto the other, while the other would try to get away. I merged work and social circles, and soon my colleagues all decided I was a party guy and viewed me less professionally. I introduced a girlfriend to a married couple I was friends with, and the wife tried to turn my girlfriend against me (she told her she "deserved better" than me; my girlfriend got angry at this friend for that, and did not want to talk to her anymore, yet it clearly had an effect on her).

All this happened within a year or so after I'd spoken with that friend about compartmentalization. And one year later, in the summer of 2009, I looked around and said, "I need to do a better job compartmentalizing my life. Because letting all these people see and interact with each other, and all these people see all these different sides of my life, is just complete chaos."

If you already keep your life compartmentalized, you might shake your head at how silly I was to blend all those different parts of it together. Or if you've never had so many different people from such various walks of life in your life, it might seem (from the outside) like it'd be obvious not to mix all these folks.

But for me, for the first time in my life I was in a place where I had tons and tons of good friends, from all these different walks of life; I had lots of cool things I was engaged in; I had lots of women in my life... and it felt good. I wanted to show it off, and show each person all the other cool and attractive people I knew and neat things I was doing. Nothing was more fun than to introduce some cool folks or hot girls I knew to some other cool folks or other hot girls I knew, or tell them stories about what I did last night or how I spent the weekend.

Yet when I did it, I did it without accounting for the potential fallout - and, too often, chaos ensued.

What I lacked was lifestyle compartmentalization.

 

How to Compartmentalize Your Life

There are three (3) kinds of compartmentalization:

1. Compartmentalization by role
2. Compartmentalization by ideology
3. Compartmentalization by circle

Each works to compartmentalize your various lifestyles and the people within them to separate compartments, along different criteria.

You can use all these styles. And if you have a lot of different sorts of people in your life, you most likely should use them all.

 

Compartmentalization by Role

You have your party friends. You have your martial arts buddies. You have your coworkers. You have your old college pals. You have your entrepreneur friends. You have your girlfriend, whom you met in a coffee shop. Each type of person serves a different role in your life:

• Party friends are for when you want to go out to party

• Martial arts friends you chat with in martial arts class, and maybe occasionally get food/a beer with

• Coworkers have your back at work (or, if they're not nice coworkers, might stab your back at work!), and sometimes you get a happy hour with them or attend a coworker's barbecue

• University friends you hang out with and catch up with when you're back in town or they are

• Entrepreneur friends compare notes on the things you're each working on and give each other advice and support as you each try to get something off the ground, or scale that thing once it's up and running

• Girlfriends are for what girlfriends are for: female companionship, cooking you good food, helping you clean, sex

If you meet a new person - a new party person, for instance; or a new person from martial arts - you slot this person into the corresponding compartment.

Meet a cool new guy at the lounge one night? Invite him along when you go out with some of your other party friends you think he might get along with. But don't invite him to beers with your martial arts buddies.

Your martial arts friends' reaction when Lounge Guy starts to talk about harder party drugs and looser women than your martial arts friends like.

Recently reconnected with one of your old university pals? Take him along next time you meet up with the other guys you still hang with from university. But don't invite him to join your entrepreneur chat group.

This kind of compartmentalization minimizes conflict by keeping people who have different roles in your life away from each other.

No doubt you've been to one of those coworker barbecues where it's half colleagues and half random friends of the coworker who throws the barbecue. Or one of those dinners a party person friend of yours invited you to and when you show up half the people there are not really partiers, they're friends of hers from her ski lodge. What usually happens is the different groups isolate themselves from each other in their own bubbles... often with at least one of them looking down on the other.

Worse still is when you introduce your girlfriend to friends and she decides she doesn't like them and starts to try to influence you against them or separate you from them. Or the friends decide your girlfriend is bad news for you and try to get you to ditch her. Problems soon ensue.

Beyond the obvious problems though, there are also the follow-on issues. Partying tends to get thought of as immature behavior; and women in relationships additionally will take pains to keep their men away from party-prone friends. If you introduce party friends to your other friends who are not partiers, be prepared for some of them to judge you in unfavorable ways, or for their girlfriends/wives to discourage their friendships with you.

Compartmentalization extends beyond just introducing people, and stretches into what you talk about with people. Talking about partying with your non-partying friends is as bad as introducing them to your party people friends. You might think it makes you sound cool to showcase how much you party and how awesome your life is; but if the people you're talking to aren't party people, there's a good chance they'll be turned off, rather than impressed. And this goes for everything.

Start talking about martial arts to someone who does not do or care about martial arts? You may bore/alienate him. Same with talking about entrepreneurship. Same with talking about your university sports teams or the new college president. Same with talking about what you and your girlfriend like to do on the weekends.

Lifting weights gets thought of as an activity of meatheads by some people. Professional or academic work gets thought of as smug ivory tower work by some folks. And so on, and so forth.

Compartmentalize away conversation that is not relevant to the people you're with. You'll avoid alienating them and allow these relationships to stick safely to their own compartments.

 

Compartmentalization by Ideology

People - all people, more or less - tend to be pretty rigid about their own ideologies. Even most open-minded people have at least some things they get up-in-arms about ideologically.

That old George Carlin quote comes to mind:

"Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac?"

In political ideology, we might say something like "anyone to the right of you is a paranoiac, and anyone to the left of you is a naïf." In dating, we might say "anyone more traditionalist than you is a prude, and anyone more sexually liberal than you is degenerate." In spirituality, we might say "anyone more spiritual than you is too detached from reality, and anyone less spiritual than you is too caught up in the world."

There are also multi-directional ideologies, like "Which sport is the best?" If you think American football is the best, for instance, you may think baseball is boring, basketball is simplistic, and rugby is football for Europeans.

I don't think there's anyone on Earth who 100% matches any other person on Earth in all ideological positions on all things. However, there are various people who fit more or less well together in various compartments. And different people feature different ideologies more or less prominently.

For instance, you may have a girlfriend who is slightly sexually conservative. She's a professional woman and likes other professional people, but has no strong political opinions. It would probably be fine to bring her to a work dinner where your professional colleagues will not be expressing any strong opinions and will mostly all be dressed well and talking about work or maybe some very light political conversation (without going to extremes). Ideologically, she matches fine with these folks and how they'll conduct themselves in that environment.

On the other hand, it is not as prudent to bring that same girlfriend to meet your dive bar friends with tattoos, drug habits, and non-professional careers.

Ideological compartmentalization gives you a way to mix-and-match people outside the roles you meet them in. For instance, if you have one coworker who is really into martial arts, and he otherwise seems ideologically similar to your current martial arts buddies (e.g., it is not the case that your other martial arts buddies are all practicing Christians and your martial arts colleague is an avowed atheist), maybe you invite him to get beers with your martial art friends and you. He may actually be a great fit for that ideological group, even though his main role for you is as a coworker and not a martial arts buddy.

 

Compartmentalization by Circle

The third way to compartmentalize is by circle.

That is to say, simply keep people locked into the circles you meet them in.

This option is perhaps less fun, because you don't get to merge circles, introduce people to new people, talk about your likes and interests from one circle with folks in another, and so on.

However, it is (for obvious reasons) most definitely the safest way to compartmentalize.

If she does not know your boss, your work is safer from her drama.. and vice versa.

All you do with compartmentalization by circle is stick to discussing things related to that circle with the people inside a circle. And don't invite them to things or introduce them to people outside the circle.

This strategy works best for people involved in many circles of diverse natures. If you're only in a few small, similar circles, it's less important to compartmentalize by circle. However, if you participate in a lot of different circles, and each of those circles is quite different from the next, the safest way to go will often be to just fully compartmentalize each part of your life to the circle it's tied to.

 

How to Choose a Compartmentalization Style

How do you choose to compartmentalize by role, ideology, or circle?

If you have an active social life, it's useful to have all three at your disposal. My general recommendation on how to choose a compartmentalization style:

• The more you have to lose by exposing someone to other compartments, the safer you should play things with him

• The more opinionated an individual is, the safer you should play things with him

• The more single-focus an individual is, the safer you should play things with him

So, someone who is open-minded and curious and will not be costly to you if things don't go perfectly when you expose him to other compartments of your lifestyle, that person is safe to be less restrictive with your compartmentalization on.

Someone who is closed-minded, or incurious, or will be costly to you if things don't go perfectly: this is someone to play it safe with.

And if someone is an unknown to you (i.e., you don't know if this person will get along with others from another compartment or not; you don't know if he is open-minded, or curious, or a fallout risk), play it safe.

The safest ways to compartmentalize, in order:

1. By circle. Keeping people strictly to the circles you meet them in is the safest possible route. You introduce no new factors that might cause chaos. Don't bring him to events from outside the circle, don't talk about your activities outside the circle with him, and don't introduce him to people from outside his circle.

2. By role. If you have party friends from two different party circles (let's say you have your circle that likes to go to high-end nightclubs, and your circle that likes to hit up college bars), the safest way to compartmentalize them is by keeping those two circles discrete. However, if you want to mix things up more, the next safest is to stick to roles. If the high-end nightclub and college bar circles are both party roles for you, and you want to invite some of your high-end nightclub friends and some of your college bar friends to some house party you're going to, it'll usually be fairly safe. They're all still in the 'party friend' role, and a house party is a fairly neutral ground for both groups.

3. By ideology. The least safe way to compartmentalize is exclusively by ideology. You can introduce your politically-similar entrepreneur friend to your politically-similar rock-climbing friend, and they may bond over politics. But they aren't likely to get along on much else. However, if you don't have much to lose by introducing them, this may still be fine to do.

You can also combine compartmentalization styles for safer intermingling. For instance, you decide you won't stay strictly to by-circle compartmentalization (i.e., you'd like to introduce some of your friends from different circles to each other, or you'd like to discuss your activities in other circles with them). However, you will still compartmentalize both by role and ideology. So before you talk about sleeping with foreign girls overseas with your colleague, you make sure he both likes to travel (i.e., he goes outside his country sometimes) and is at least a little sexually open-minded (i.e., he isn't a "no sex before marriage" guy, nor does he think sleeping with foreign women means you are "taking advantage" of foreign women, or anything else that might oppose him to sex with non-countrywomen).

 

When to Cut Back Compartmentalization

When do you decide to cut back compartmentalization?

Over time, most of your compartments will dwindle. People move away, get older, get into relationships, get married, have children, take promotions that suck up all their time. They quit coming to martial arts class and hanging out with their martial arts friends, for instance, or they no longer want to hit the slopes for a weekend of snowboarding.

As some of your compartments grow smaller, they can become non-viable. They may reach a point where it is just you hanging out with one other friend, and these meetings are less and less frequent because you have no other ties between you.

When this happens, it can make sense to relax compartmentalization and merge people from small compartments into larger ones.

If that compartment was in danger of extinction, then go ahead - merge that compartment with another.

You'll still want to try to merge people who will get along in other compartments. No sense introducing your religious conservative friend to your sexual wild party friends. But your religious conservative friend might enjoy some of your work events, and you know he won't be a liability to you there since he won't do anything crazy or have any shocking stories about you to share.

You may also choose to reduce compartmentalization when certain compartments become less important to you. If you find yourself hanging out with your entrepreneur friends less, as you advance in your career and drift away from your flirtations with entrepreneurship, maybe you invite them out with your travel buddies one day and see if you can merge those groups. Or as you start to pull away from your friend-with-benefits, perhaps you invite her out with your going-out friends, because you think she'd be fun to have in your going-out group and it'll be an easier transition to "just friends" that way.

Your two chief reasons to reduce compartmentalization end up being:

1. To salvage a vanishing compartment by merging it with another

2. Because you're less concerned with fallout from a compartment than you used to be and decide to integrate it more freely with others now

 

Conclusion

Compartmentalization of your lifestyle allows you to keep separate aspects of how you live your life separate, and protects one area of your life from damaging or interfering with others.

Remember: the less people know about you, the more they will fill in the blanks however they care to fill in the blanks. As much as you may be tempted to share everything about yourself with everyone you know because it feels good to do it, keep in mind that most people will relate to you on some things, and not relate to you on other things. Not every person in your life needs to be totally aligned with you on everything. Not everyone needs to know everything about you - and most relationships will be healthier with a little mystery.

Most parts of your life are safer with compartmentalization than they would be without it. How many times have you heard a guy tell you "After we broke up, she turned all my friends against me"? Or "When my work found out about my [some other compartment], it got a lot harder for me and I eventually had to quit"?

By keeping your lifestyles compartmentalized, you avoid compartments affecting each other. The girl can't turn your friends against you, because she doesn't know your friends or have a way to reach them. The job can't get worse because your boss or colleagues don't agree with your extracurricular activities, because they don't know what they are.

Social media and your online presence obviously plays a key role in this too. If you're on social media, you're at a disadvantage (generally, my recommendation is that you not be on social media). You should use any privacy protections available to you to keep your compartments separate. Or, just use social media for your most vanilla compartments - or even have separate accounts for separate compartments (one account for coworkers and family members; another account where you're plugged into all the local rave scenes and after parties). And if you have anything embarrassing tied to your real name and photograph on the public web, you may want to check into the various online 'reputation services' that have sprung up to scrub bad results off the search engines (or, at the very least, push them down to page 10, where no one's likely to ever find them).

Lifestyle compartmentalization lets you live the lives you want without being hamstrung by the judgment or opinions of others in your life. It lets you put different people and environments into their own compartments, and keep them isolated from each other to minimize reputation damage and relationship fallout.

Above all, there's one rule to hew to when it comes to successful lifestyle compartmentalization: people only know what you tell them, or show them.

So, if you want to keep one part of your life compartmentalized away from another part, keep your lips shut about that part... and don't go advertising it all over.

Chase