Acceptance - Yeah, We Need Boundaries

Did you know that people hate having limits placed on them?

School has limits like bedtime hours, test time limits, scores you have to meet or exceed to pass, appropriate behavior, time frames to be in class to avoid being tardy, what courses you can take, and morning alarms that come way too early.

Work has limits as well, such as your official duties, meeting agendas, deadlines, budgets, and morning alarms that come way too early.

We have limits on how we drive, eat, spend, act in public, and even act in private.

People just want to be free, but even the freedoms we may enjoy come with limits. That’s part of why we have a legal system.

If you try to go beyond any of those limits, there are consequences. Some may not be huge; some might change your life or even end it.

Relationships have limits too, as well as consequences for violating them. And yet there is one big limit, invisible to the naked eye, that many relationships see violated regularly. Worse yet, violating this limit is celebrated pretty regularly in music, film, and popular society.

The limit is called Personal Boundaries.

I’m going to look into Boundaries deeper in another set of posts, but for now I’m going to concentrate on how Acceptance and Boundaries relate.

I needed to accept that my partner had sovereignty over herself. That means that she had the right and obligation to rule herself and no one else. That is, she had no right to rule anyone else, and no one else had the right to rule her.

My big failure in that respect meant that I tried to rule over her. We had that Parent-Child dynamic going on. And this wasn’t being helped by the fact that we were Jehovah’s Witnesses for most of our marriage, and the emphasis on Biblical Headship was a touchy spot. “The Man Of The House” isn’t just a job title; it is viewed as Divine Right.

Since Eve was created with the rib of Adam, per Genesis, this led to a mindset of the woman being an attachment, an appendage, an extension of the man instead of her own individual person with her own rights, freedoms, and needs.

So instead of accepting her as she was, I struggled against her, taking away her right to behave true to her character, her nature. I tried to mold her into a form I wanted. I wanted to have my cake and eat it too. Only in this case I had German Chocolate and I was trying to turn it into Pineapple Upside-down.

That’s one of the biggest problems with men and women in relationships. We don’t shop around for someone who would be best for us. We shop around for someone who meets a few criteria (usually physical) and then start working on them, trying to turn them into what we should have been looking for in the first place.

What’s that? There aren’t any people around you who meet your “Need” criteria? Check real quick: do you know what you really need, or what you think you need? There’s a difference.

Or is your idea of finding Mister or Miss Right based on the definition of art? “I’ll know it when I see it.”

That was kinda my approach. No one helped me know what would make a good wife for me. It was just assumed I’d know it when I saw it. Yeah, okay.

But no matter. I should have chosen to either maintain my our boundaries as separate people and accept her as she was, or I should have ended the relationship before the inevitable heartbreak. The short term pain would have been way less than what I would face staying in an unhappy relationship.

So like so many guys and girls, I chose to stay and force her to change to make me happy. Men and women do that all the time, one failed relationship after another, swearing not to ever do that again, then suffering friction burns because they run so fast into a new relationship with someone they tell everyone “Oh, no. He (or she) is DIFFERENT!”

Again: yeah, okay.

For me, it only increased the stress in the home. Soon I noticed she was raising her voice at me regularly. I refused to be in a relationship where I was going to be yelled at all the time (especially since yelling back only escalated things), but again instead of seeing the signs and leaving, I gave in. I fought it in many ways, but over time I just decided to hunker down and reduce my encounters.

I tried to undermine her sovereignty over herself, and when that didn’t get the results I wanted, I decided to surrender my sovereignty over myself. Gave it right to her. Oh, there was no ceremony and no grand declaration; shoot, it wasn’t even a conscious decision.

I went from having a backbone to slinking away. If I was right I would still back down and admit how I was wrong. I wasn’t doing it to preserve the harmony of the home; I was doing it to cope with the fact that I refused to do the right thing and either shape up my head or get out.

She regularly apologized for how much she was hurting me. So we both saw the signs but neither was prepared to do anything really about it.

My anxiety led t depression. My depression led to bad ideas. One day I simply took a bunch of Xanax tablets and told her about it, telling her I was prepared to take the rest of the bottle. I don’t recommend doing that, by the way. All I ended up doing was having my wife drive the family to Best Buy to go shopping. And I was the one who didn’t end up getting anything!!!!

Can you believe that? I was so boundary-less that I was thinking of how I could step in front of a semi on the highway, and I was swallowing a handful of Xanax tablets. Self-destructive behavior was preferable to leaving the bad relationship!

It may sound stupid, but that’s what happened. And I know I’m not the first or last person to put himself or herself in that same torment. (And before anyone judges me, just let me say that everyone does stuff that’s dumb to someone else. Don’t judge other people.)

So I didn’t accept the need for the boundaries, and I almost died because of it. So there will be a deeper examination of boundaries later. Safe to say, I failed to practice Acceptance. Accepting her as she was would have prevented so much junk. Once there was too many checkmarks in the MINUS column, I should have accepted the need to leave. Instead I didn’t accept spit.

Usually if someone won’t accept, it’s because they are trying to control. Like controlling others, or our environment, or a billion other variables, will make our lives happy. Not so much. More on that next.