What Are Healthy Marriage Boundaries and Why Are They Important?
Boundaries are as important to maintaining a healthy marriage as spending quality time together.
Read more: What Are Healthy Marriage Boundaries and Why Are They Important?
Most everyone has heard the term “boundaries,” yet what boundaries actually are and the best way to use them continues to be somewhat mysterious for many people. Today, I will help you to better understand what boundaries are and when to use them in your marriage.
First, let’s go over a common misconception about boundaries.
Boundaries are often thought of rules we impose on others.
That is a misconception.
Boundaries are not what we tell other people to do or not do.
Although boundaries are often thought of as rules we give others, there is a big difference. Rules can be freely broken by other people, whereas boundaries cannot.
If I have a rule that you can’t climb over my fence and onto my property, it still leaves you free to do so. If I make a rule that you are not to call me bad names, of course that still leaves you free to do so. In fact, people break rules all the time when it suits them and this is why we need boundaries in the first place.
People who say that boundaries don’t work are often making rules rather than boundaries.
They discover that their spouse breaks the rules. Rules are only helpful for those who will follow them, and for justifying consequences. All laws are rules because people can still break them. They guide people’s behavior, though they also can compete with morality or God’s laws.
A person can break laws or rules for good reasons as well as bad one. When they do, they have to take the cost of breaking those laws or rules into account. The cost is the boundary aspect. For some spouses, knowing that something is harmful for the marriage is enough to deter them from doing the behavior.
For others, boundaries are required.
If your spouse knows you don’t like to be criticized and so doesn’t do it, then no boundary is required. It may be enough just to help your spouse to know that he or she makes you feel criticized. For other spouses, it might be necessary to walk away or end a communication whenever the criticism happens.
Following rules, like not criticizing, is voluntary—boundaries are not. Boundaries are imposed from the outside. Your spouse can choose to criticize you, but it is you who chooses how to respond. Your spouse doesn’t get to do that. A healthy boundary, like walking away as soon as you are criticized can provide added incentive for your spouse to stop that behavior.
Good boundaries either:
- prevent harmful actions,
- make them more difficult to do,
- take away the rewards of the bad behavior, and/or
- provide increased reasons not to do a harmful behavior.
An example of this is that while adultery is the breaking of a marriage covenant, the ability of a spouse to divorce helps many people to stay faithful, particularly in a good marriage. I believe one of the reasons God allows divorce in this situation is to prevent many people from being unfaithful.
A person who tells their spouse, “Even if you cheat on me, I will never divorce you,” is not saying a loving thing. That person has removed a boundary which helps to protect the marriage. It’s like having a sign on a store window that says, “Shoplifters will not be prosecuted.”
Boundaries are not for revenge, which damages relationships. They are for protecting and restoring relationships by preventing or stopping bad behavior.
Boundaries are also not a way to re-make our spouse.
Depending on how much your spouse matches you and how well both of you have maintained the emotional connection in your marriage, there may be few or many things you would like to change about your spouse. Boundaries are not a way to shape our spouse into just the kind of person we want.
Trying to do so would cause more damage to the relationship than our spouse’s behavior. Even if you are a master at using boundaries, there will always be things about your spouse that you wish were different.
You have to have a way to decide when to use a boundary and when not to.
Some of the most important times to use boundaries are if you’ve been feeling disrespected, neglected, or stuck in damaging patterns with your spouse. They are the healthy substitute for needy behaviors such as blaming, arguing, and repeatedly talking about problems. These needy behaviors make relationships worse.
You can’t argue or blame your way to a better relationship, and repeatedly talking about problems while taking no good actions, will lose you respect.
Boundaries don’t improve relationships in which people don’t care about each other. This is why building comes before boundaries and why our boundaries should be few in comparison to our loving behaviors.
Our love motivates our spouses to love us, while our boundaries motivate them not to harm us or the relationship.
Let me give you a simple definition for boundaries.
Boundaries in marriage are our decision about what we will and will not participate in, and how we will respond to damaging behaviors that our spouse does. Because they are our decision and our behavior, they are under our control.
This means that our spouse cannot “violate” our boundaries. If your spouse violates your boundary, then it is not a boundary at all, but a rule that you have given your spouse. Rules can be freely violated because they are under your spouse’s control—your boundaries are not. Because of that, your spouse is always going to feel like your boundaries are consequences or punishments that you dole out for their behavior.
Don’t expect your spouse to like your boundaries.
In the face of your boundaries, your spouse will be angry and defensive. Refusing to do something your spouse wants, like having an open marriage, is a good boundary which will protect your marriage. Don’t expect your spouse to like it or agree with it, however.
Letting your spouse know that if he or she ever cheated on you that you would divorce, would not stop your spouse from cheating. But, if you maintain your marriage well and come across as a secure person, then your spouse is much less likely to cheat. Boundaries are preventative because they decrease the motivation for bad behavior to continue or even start in the first place.
If your spouse is continuing to do behavior damaging to your relationship, there are three reasons.
One is that he or she wants to, another is that he or she can, and another is that the consequences (your boundaries), do not provide enough incentive for your spouse to stop doing the damaging behavior.
People often overcomplicate why their spouse, kids, elected officials, or others do bad things. The answer is simple—because they want to, because they can, and because the consequences for doing so don’t outweigh the benefits for them to do what they do.
While we are on the topic, I want to mention that many people try to explain to their spouse how hurtful or harmful their behavior is. This is an attempt to take away the spouse’s desire to do something. “If I tell her how much this hurts me, she will want to stop.” Unfortunately, rarely does explanation take away a spouse’s desire to do a bad thing.
Everyone has a sin nature, including you and your spouse. Knowing something is a sin, bad, harmful, doesn’t take away our desire to do it. Bible would fix all that’s wrong with society. Open and honest communication will not remove your spouse’s desire to do harmful things. Unconditional love will not remove your spouse’s desire to do harmful things.
God’s boundaries are part of the demonstration of His love for us. Your healthy boundaries, whether with your spouse, children, or others, are also an expression of your love for them. They show how important your relationships are to you.
Explanations do help sometimes.
But, they are helpful only to the extent that they help others to know what they didn’t know already. Past that point, continued explanation only leads to emotional distancing.
If you are repeatedly explaining to your spouse why you don’t like something, consider that it may be time to use a healthy boundary instead.
Boundaries are the loving and secure alternative to needy behaviors.
Boundaries help our spouses not to continue behavior which damages their relationship with us. Although our spouses won’t like them, they are the loving thing to do. Our spouse will become angry and distancing at first, but our relationship will gradually improve and the end result will be a better relationship.
Boundaries are for creating win-win situations, even though our spouses initially won’t like giving up their damaging behavior.
Let me give you some specific examples of damaging behaviors that may require boundaries.
I think of the need for boundaries as falling into two categories—intangible damage and tangible damage.
Intangible damage is something you feel, but can’t necessarily show, such as feeling hurt or disrespected.
Tangible damage is observable, such as unfaithfulness, drug use, mistreatment of the children or other family members, failure to do responsibilities, overspending when money is needed for more important things, refusal to have sex, date, or spend one on one time together despite the relationship being otherwise good.
Of course tangible damage also will make you feel hurt, angry, and disrespected.
Would you like to hear about how one woman used boundaries to improve her marriage?
Let me tell you about a client who I will call Linda.
Linda was fed up with her husband Michael going out several nights a week, leaving her alone with two young children. She felt both overwhelmed and unloved. She also felt like Michael preferred being with his friends over being with her. She let him know—frequently—how selfish she thought he was.
Sometimes Michael would help or spend time with the family, but not often. After living in this situation for a long time, Linda eventually signed up for my coaching package for dealing with difficult spouses.
I certainly could empathize with Linda’s feelings.
Taking care of two young children without time off and with little help from a spouse would quickly empty anyone’s love bank. Her husband putting in a few tokens of love now and then couldn’t sustain their marriage.
But, I could also guess that since Linda often criticized Michael, he felt like he was never good enough no matter what he did. Many people in this situation lose their loving feelings and emotionally abandon their marriage. It seemed like only a matter of time before Michael had an affair or divorced, if Linda didn’t beat him to it.
I told Linda that I definitely did not want her to have to continue in a situation like that, but that I thought it was possible to greatly improve her relationship if she used a three step approach.
The steps would include:
- Linda stopping all critical behavior of her husband
- Linda learning how to validate her husband so he could begin to enjoy spending time with her again, even if he was still being selfish. And then,
- Using boundaries so that she would be able to have as much time for herself as her husband had.
Helping people with boundaries is almost always like this.
Boundaries are rarely a good first step unless the relationship is otherwise strong.
If Linda just started out using boundaries, they would escalate conflict and likely push her husband into an affair or divorce. Even it they didn’t, they would make their relationship even worse.
Linda agreed to this three step plan and was only able to do the first two steps because she knew she could then use boundaries to stop her husband’s damaging behavior. If I had merely try to get her to treat her husband better, she would have become increasingly resentful and would have lashed out once her resentment hit a critical mass.
A relationship plan needs to take clients all the way to a relationship that both spouses enjoy.
In this three step plan, the first two steps would reduce the bad behavior and improve the relationship some, while the third, boundaries step, would help the relationship to build all the way. In Linda’s case, although the damage had gone on for a long time, by the end of a month, she and her husband were enjoying their relationship more than they had in a long time.
Although it may seem surprising, correct relationship skills result in improvement in a short period of time, even if it takes much longer to get all the way. Use improvement as a measure of how effective are the things that you are doing to fix your marriage.
Used the right way, boundaries, prevent, reduce, or stop damaging behavior.
They improve relationships for both partners, and, they build respect.
My recommendation for you now is to consider if your relationship is strong enough to use boundaries. That will help you to know which step you need to get started on. If your relationship is not strong enough for boundaries, you must strengthen it first. If your relationship is strong except for your spouse’s damaging behaviors, then you can begin with boundaries.
I will put link to a free quiz on my website that will allow you to assess how effective your marriage boundaries are.
