If your foot hurts, you say so. If the person who stepped on it tells you your foot is too sensitive—that it shouldn't hurt, that you shouldn't have put it there, that anyone else's foot would be fine—something has gone wrong.
Not just in the conversation. In the structure of what you're accepting as a valid response to pain.
Terms of engagement are the conditions you set for what valid responses look like. Not what he should do. What you will do. Those are different, and the difference is everything.
Step one: name the thing you won't accept.
Not in general terms. Specifically. 'Passive-aggressive comments' is vague enough to argue about. 'A comment framed as a joke that you then tell me I shouldn't find insulting' is specific enough to identify when it happens.
The more specific the term, the harder it is to claim it didn't happen. And 'you're being too sensitive' stops being a useful rebuttal when the thing you're describing is concrete and observable.
Start small. One thing. The most obvious one, the one that happens most reliably. You don't have to address everything at once. You just have to be able to say: this specific thing, when it happens, will result in this specific response from me.
Don't tell him you don't like it and then continue in the conversation where it keeps happening. Continuing is permission. Your behavior is the actual message—not the words.
Step two: define what happens next.
Not what he should do. What you will do. 'If that happens again, I'm leaving this conversation.' Not 'I hope you'll stop.' Not 'please don't do that.' A commitment about your own behavior.
Then that's what you do. Without announcement. Without explanation. Without giving him the opportunity to argue about whether it qualified. The thing happened. The consequence follows. Discussion ends.
The first time, he may continue talking. That's fine. You're already gone. The second time, he starts to understand that the consequence is real. Not because you've convinced him. Because you've demonstrated it.
What happens when you're consistent.
He has to change strategies. Not his character—his strategies. The passive-aggressive joke that always got a reaction stopped getting one. So that move lost its value. He reaches for it less. Something else shows up instead—maybe something more direct, maybe something more honest. The bag doesn't disappear. But the entry that used to work gets removed.
This is slow. It takes more consistency than feels reasonable. You'll hold the limit thirty times before it starts to register, and there will be iterations where you don't hold it perfectly.
The imperfect iterations still count. 'I'll hold it next time' said out loud after a slip is not failure. It's recalibration. You're building the consistency, not demonstrating the finished version.
You're not trying to convince him to stop. You're removing the audience for the behavior. When the behavior stops producing what it was designed to produce, it stops. Not because he changed. Because the condition that made it worth doing is gone.
