The Need for Healthy Boundaries

Neither Sven nor Rose, both in their 40s, have been married or even in a long-term monogamous relationship.

However, they started dating last year, fell deeply in love, and now want to get married and live together. That said, they’ve each been on their own for a couple of decades and are not used to sharing space, decisions, finances, or other domains of life.

They have entered couples counselling, pre-wedding, not because they are struggling but because they want to establish healthy individual and relational boundaries before they start to clash.

From my perspective as a therapist, Sven and Rose are doing themselves and their relationship a huge favour. Each has been living alone for a very long time, and they know that a small dose of give-and-take and a large dose of mutual respect will be needed if they’re going to be happy together long-term.

What Sven and Rose seem to understand (that many couples don’t) is that healthy boundaries are an essential element in all successful relationships. The best relationships are those with well-defined, properly maintained, fully respected limits.

If we lack such boundaries, we will find ourselves trampling the needs, values, and beliefs of the people around us while also having our own needs, values, and beliefs violated.

But what, exactly, are healthy relationship boundaries? Moreover, how can two people in a long-term romantic relationship set and define the boundaries that will work best for them as a couple?

To help answer these questions, I will posit two basic ideas about healthy boundaries.

• Healthy boundaries protect us from other people.
• Healthy boundaries protect other people from us.

In other words, healthy boundaries are a two-way street. When I set boundaries, I do so to protect myself and to protect the people around me. I want others to respect my physical self, my emotional self, and my sense of reality. In turn, I agree to do the same for them.

This does not, however, mean that healthy boundaries are walls that keep us in and others out. Rather, they’re about letting others in safely, and others letting us in safely. If other people behave in ways that are safe for us, we can choose to let them in. If other people behave in ways that are not safe for us, we can choose to keep them out. Meanwhile, others can choose to let us in when we are safe and keep us out when we’re not.

Beyond this, the most important thing to know is that healthy boundaries are not about controlling the behaviour of other people; they’re about controlling our behaviour in relation to other people. Their behaviour belongs to them; our behaviour belongs to us.

In non-clinical but highly useful terms, this means that we need to stay within the confines of our own hula hoop, and we should expect others to stay within the confines of theirs.

Of course, when we’re in a long-term romantic relationship with someone, our hula hoops will often and necessarily overlap.

Yes, we are two individuals with quite a lot of autonomy, but we are also a couple, and our coupleship—the area in which our hula hoops overlap —must be defined and respected as an entity in and of itself. This means that we must, as a couple, decide upon things like the following:

• How will we handle finances?
• Who will handle which household responsibilities?
• What defines fidelity and what does not?

These are just a few of the various areas of life in which individuals and couples need healthy boundaries.

Beyond the basics of shared coupleship that must be mutually defined and agreed upon, we must each set and maintain our individual healthy boundaries while respecting our partner’s individual healthy boundaries.

Having healthy individual and coupleship boundaries facilitates both individual identity and relationship trust, making for a happy, safe, and mutually beneficial relationship. If we fail to set and maintain healthy individual and relationship boundaries, we are likely to feel mistreated and taken advantage of. Thus, the need for healthy boundaries.

As Brené Brown states, “I trust you if you are clear about your boundaries and you hold them, and you are clear about my boundaries and you respect them. There is no trust without boundaries.”