Ever heard the expression, good fences make good neighbors?
Well, it turns out, strong boundaries make for healthy relationships.
Boundaries are essential to make sure that relationships are healthy and fulfilling for everyone involved.
But it’s important to remember what boundaries are. Establishing boundaries is not a way of controlling the behavior of other people. Instead, it is about controlling yourself.
Boundaries help you tell your partner what behavior you will and won’t accept. So if someone tries to tell you who you can be friends with, for instance, boundaries don’t mean stopping them from doing that. They mean that you can leave the situation, or the person who’s trying to control you.
Boundaries can protect us from abusive relationships. They are also important in any relationship to establish the ground rules for how you will treat each other.
And while everybody has their own boundaries, there are some nonnegotiable boundaries that everyone should enforce if they want a healthy relationship.
1) Emotional and physical safety
Let’s get this one out of the way immediately, because this is perhaps the clearest, most obvious, and most important of all boundaries in relationships.
No one has any right to make you feel either emotionally or physically unsafe. So if someone threatens you with abandonment or with violence, not only can you remove yourself from that situation, but you absolutely must.
There is no place for violence of any kind in a healthy relationship. There is no excuse for anyone to deliberately hurt or try to control their partner.
This is the hardest of hard lines. This is a nonnegotiable boundary that should go without saying, but unfortunately, all too often, it’s ignored.
2) Respecting personal space
Of course, there are ways to overstep boundaries in a relationship that are not as obvious and destructive as physical or emotional violence. However, they can still create issues and prevent your relationship from being as fulfilling and rewarding as it could be.
The thing is, no matter how much you love each other, you will always be separate people. And people, even the most extroverted, occasionally need personal space.
Don’t make the mistake of thinking that because you are in a relationship, you need to spend every waking hour with each other. And don’t think that if your partner wants to spend some time alone, it means they don’t love you or that you have done something wrong.
Give each other the personal space you need to follow your own interests or practice self-care. Then, you’ll be better equipped to really enjoy the time you spend together.
3) Honesty
To be clear, I’m not talking about little white lies here. You don’t need to tell your partner every thought that pops into your head, especially if it’s not helpful or constructive.
But it’s impossible to build a healthy relationship on lies. So honesty should be a nonnegotiable boundary in any functioning relationship.
You need to be able to trust your partner, and that means you need to be sure they aren’t lying to you. When it comes to the important things in a relationship, honesty is everything.
And if someone won’t be honest with you, you’re probably better off removing yourself from that dysfunctional relationship.
4) Financial independence
Every relationship has a different approach to finances. But the important thing is that you both agree to handle your finances the way you do, and you both have some independence when it comes to your money.
If you both work, you should both have input into how your money is spent. If you want, you can both maintain separate accounts to keep your own money accessible. Or you can put it in a joint account, but you should both still have access to it.
Even if one of you is supporting the other, you should still have some degree of financial independence. After all, you’re partners, not the other person’s parent.
Your partner shouldn’t have to ask you for every single purchase they want to make, nor should you have to ask them for pocket money.
5) Privacy
Thinking about privacy in a long-term, committed relationship might seem strange. After all, relationships are built on intimacy, and if you are together long enough, you will see each other at both your best and your worst.
However, privacy is an important boundary to have in relationships.
Everyone will have different definitions of the kind of privacy they should be able to maintain. What’s most important is that it is equal. If you don’t want your partner snooping through your emails or reading the text messages you send to other people, remember that you don’t have any right to ask it of them.
“In a flourishing relationship, the importance of a significant personal space cannot be exaggerated,” writes author and psychologist Aaron Ben-Zeév.
“In profound love, lovers may want to be with each other as much as possible, but they do not want to erase their own or their partner’s identity and privacy. Love can only be sustained if it is between two willing and separate people,” he adds.
It’s kind of hard to put it any better than that.
6) Mutual respect
This is another bedrock boundary that should be a guaranteed part of every healthy relationship.
And yet, it often amazes me how often I see people in sometimes long-term relationships who don’t seem to have much respect for each other at all.
Ultimately, respecting your partner means appreciating that they are a fully formed person with their own needs and desires, rather than just something that exists to make you happy.
Respect includes:
- Listening to one another
- Appreciating the other person’s point of view
- Communicating honestly
- Supporting one another
- Sharing tasks and responsibilities in a way that you both agree is fair
It may sound simple, but it can be the work of a lifetime to get the balance right. Still, insisting on respect in a relationship is fundamental to preserving it.
7) Loyalty
Loyalty is another thing that you should absolutely demand from a partner.
But like most things in relationships, what loyalty means to you is up for negotiation.
For people in a monogamous relationship, it means that you will be sexually exclusive to each other. In other forms of relationship, such as polyamory, that may not be necessary. However, you will have to define other boundaries around your sexual behavior to maintain loyalty as you see it.
Loyalty isn’t just about not cheating on each other. It also means having your partner’s back. It means that you don’t talk badly about them to others. It means you don’t betray their confidence.
That’s a boundary that should be nonnegotiable in any relationship.
8) Equal decision-making
Relationships always require compromise. But not every decision is made equally by both partners at all times.
For example, my partner does almost all the grocery shopping for us, which means she gets to decide what we eat. I have absolutely no problem with that, because it means I don’t have to do it myself.
However, when it comes to the big things, such as where we will live, how we will spend our money, and what we want our future to look like, we both have an equal say.
That can be tricky, because with only two partners, when you don’t agree, there’s no obvious way to break the tie. That’s when compromise comes into play.
“In adult relationships, decision-making should be on an equal input basis,” writes therapist Gwen Randall-Young. “If not, then they need to work together to develop a process that they will use so that decision making is more equitable.”
You can’t expect to get your way all the time in a relationship. But neither can your partner. Insisting that you both have an equal say important decisions is key to having a healthy relationship.
9) Consent
This is another nonnegotiable boundary that is absolutely essential to having a healthy relationship.
It’s especially important when it comes to sex. Remember, consent is something that can be withdrawn at any time, by any partner, for any reason or for no reason.
Just because you have agreed to do something in the past doesn’t mean you are obligated to agree to it in the future.
Consent needs to be freely given, enthusiastic, informed, and withdrawable. That means you can’t be guilt-tripped into doing something you’re not really into, or blackmailed by your partner refusing to do something you want them to do in exchange.
10) Mutual support
Finally, there’s not much point being in a relationship if you don’t support each other.
That means being there for each other in the hard times. It also means being each other’s biggest cheerleader when times are good.
If your partner doesn’t support you, either to help you chase your dreams or to commiserate when things go wrong, you have to ask yourself, why are you in a relationship with them at all?
Building boundaries
Relationship boundaries aren’t a list of rules you both have to follow. Instead, they are standards of behavior that you offer toward one another.
And they are the basis of healthy relationships.
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