Defining Relationship Guardrails

Daily writing prompt

Write your guide to setting healthy boundaries in relationships.

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My guide for setting healthy boundaries in relationships is very simple: Don’t become entangled in relationships.

I think that the idea of “relationship boundaries” is weird. Of course, I’m getting old and the social values of my youth are quite a bit more reserved than those I see in our culture now. There were just things you didn’t do, lines you didn’t cross. Young people today probably need to establish such boundaries because we’ve abandoned basic respect, common decency and social norms.

The disciples said to him, “If such is the case of a man with his wife, it is better not to marry.”

Matthew 19:10 (ESV)

I know that verse is out of context. It is actually a teaching about divorce. But look, there was this one time that I remember. I was seeing a certain woman, and on a holiday that we both had off from work, we made plans to spend the day together.

Before we could get to the things we wanted to do, we had to make one stop: she had a doctor’s appointment, which she expected to be brief. We drove together in my car to her doctor’s office. When they called her into the exam room, I remained in the waiting room, reading magazines and doom-scrolling on my phone. After the appointment, we went on our way, and aside from a minor disagreement about money, we had a nice time.

Later, when the relationship was falling apart and we began to argue quite often, she said that I didn’t respect her boundaries. The example she cited was that time I just described, waiting for her … in the waiting room of her doctor’s office.

What?

You do understand that the only reason I was even at her doctor’s office was that the two of us already had plans together. We both thought that it would be more efficient if I took her to the appointment on the way to our planned activities. It’s not as if I tried to go into the exam room. How was that a violation of her boundaries? Was I supposed to wait out in the car? It was winter!

See, our relationship had all kinds of problems, but her “boundaries” seemed designed only to keep me from discovering that she was seeing another man (it was actually somebody I knew independent of my relationship with her). She sought to conceal that fact by framing the normal interactions two people might have while dating as a “violation of her boundaries.”

So yeah, of course two people do need to have their own space; the freedom to be with their own friends and families, without being smothered by an overly clingy partner. I just think the concept of having to negotiate that is a symptom of our broken culture.