Mark Manson, The Guide to Strong Relationship Boundaries

The Guide to Strong Relationship Boundaries

Metadata

• Author: Mark Manson
• Full Title: The Guide to Strong Relationship Boundaries
• Category:articles
• Published Date: 2021-02-17
• Summary: Strong boundaries form the foundation in any healthy relationship. Learn how to develop them here.
• URL: https://markmanson.net/boundaries

Highlights

• Clearly defining your boundaries is as close to a cure for relationship problems as I’ve ever come across. (View Highlight)
• Boundaries in relationships work both ways: they create emotional health and are created by people with emotional health. They are something you can start working on today with the people close to you and you’ll begin to notice a difference in your self-esteem, confidence, emotional stability, and so on. (View Highlight)
• Do you ever feel like you’re constantly having to “save” people close to you and fix their problems all the time? (View Highlight)
  • Note: I feel this way with Drew sometimes, honestly. And as much as I hate to say it, I feel as if I’ve been using my busyness as an excuse for not responding to her recent messages. It’s sucky, I know. And it might have also been the reason why I have become unresponsive to Kyle.
• Healthy Personal Boundaries = Taking responsibility for your own actions and emotions, while NOT taking responsibility for the actions or emotions of others. (View Highlight)
• People with poor boundaries typically come in two flavors: those who take too much responsibility for the emotions/actions of others and those who expect others to take too much responsibility for their own emotions/actions. (View Highlight)
• Do you find yourself faaaaar more invested or attracted to a person than you should be for how long you’ve known them? (View Highlight)
  • Note: A little? I’m not sure.
• Some examples of poor boundaries: (View Highlight)
• “You can’t go out with your friends without me. You know how jealous I get. You have to stay home with me.” (View Highlight)
  • Note: This reminds me of a few people. Specifically, someone from high school Khayil told me about.
• “I’d love to take that job in Milwaukee, but my mother would never forgive me for moving so far away.” (View Highlight)
  • Note: This reminds me of a few people in my life, and I feel really sorry for them.
• People with high self-esteem have strong personal boundaries. And practicing strong personal boundaries is one way to build self-esteem. (View Highlight)
• Another way is to think of boundaries in terms of identity. When you have these murky areas of responsibility for your emotions and actions—areas where it’s unclear who is responsible for what, who’s at fault, why you’re doing what you’re doing—you never develop a solid identity for yourself. (View Highlight)
• For instance, if you’re really into Judo, but you’re always blaming your teacher for your lack of progress and feel guilty about going to classes because your wife gets lonely when you’re not around, then you’re not owning that aspect of your identity. Judo is now something you do and not something you are. It becomes inauthentic, another tool in the game of getting social approval, rather than to satisfy your own desire to express yourself. This is neediness. And the dependence on external approval will drive your self-esteem lower and make your behavior less attractive. (View Highlight)
  • Note: This explains why I always feel bad after not having journaled for a while. It makes me feel as if I’m “not myself” anymore, and it’s one of the worst feelings ever.
• Not only do personal boundaries boost your self-esteem and bolster your sense of identity, they also make life a hell lot easier. (View Highlight)
• embroiled (View Highlight)
  • Note: From Oxford Dictionary: involve (someone) deeply in an argument, conflict, or difficult situation.
• I believe boundary issues are the most difficult to deal with at the family level. You can always dump that ass-hat of a boyfriend/girlfriend, a divorce is always but a phone call or twelve away, but you can never dump your parents. (View Highlight)
• If you have boundary issues in your family, then it’s very likely you have them in your romantic relationships as well. And your relationships are the best place to begin fixing them. (View Highlight)
• Chances are at some point you’ve been in a relationship that felt like a roller coaster: when things were good, they were great; when things were bad, they were a disaster. And there was an almost-predictable oscillation between the two—two weeks of bliss, followed by one week of hell, followed by a month of bliss, followed by a horrible breakup and then a dramatic reunion. It’s a hallmark of a codependent relationship and usually represents two people incapable of strong personal boundaries. (View Highlight)
  • Note: This reminds me of my ex, and it sucked so much being in that relationship. Apparently, it was a codependent relationship, according to this article. In hindsight, I feel really bad for allowing myself to be involved in that type of relationship. It was the worst. I can’t see myself experiencing the same thing with my current (and hopefully last 🥹) relationship (with Krea 🩵), and that’s probably why I’m reading up on the topic of relationships, love, and/or romance.
• People lack boundaries because they have a high level of neediness (or in psych terms, codependence). People who are needy or codependent have a desperate need for love and affection from others. To receive this love and affection, they sacrifice their identity and remove their boundaries. (View Highlight)
• People who blame others for their own emotions and actions do so because they believe that if they put the responsibility on those around them, they’ll receive the love they’ve always wanted and needed. If they constantly paint themselves as a victim, eventually someone will come to save them. (View Highlight)
• People who take the blame for other people’s emotions and actions are always looking to save someone. They believe that if they can “fix” their partner, then they will receive the love and appreciation they’ve always wanted. (View Highlight)
• Victims and savers both get kind of an emotional high off one another. It’s like an addiction they fulfill in one another, and when presented with emotionally healthy people to date, they usually feel bored or a lack of “chemistry.” They’ll pass on healthy, secure individuals because the secure partner’s solid boundaries will not excite the loose emotional boundaries of the needy person. (View Highlight)
• Some friends are maybe a little bit too close for comfort. This situation comes up in various forms in everybody’s life: long-time friend screws up, but instead of taking personal responsibility, expects you to shoulder some of the responsibility with them because “that’s what friends do.” (View Highlight)
• Yes, even friendships can be needy and unattractive. Ever met two friends who are constantly complaining about one another or saying things behind each other’s backs, but when they’re together everything seems great? Chances are they have some serious boundary issues (View Highlight)
• Guilt is important when it’s legitimate and self-imposed. (View Highlight)
• Where guilt is useless and harmful is when it is used as a tool to manipulate those close to you. Guilt can be incredibly painful when used this way, not only because it demands responsibility from you for emotions which are not yours, but it also implies that you’re faulty or a bad person in some way for not doing it. (View Highlight)
• Poor boundaries are almost always a reflection of low self-esteem (and vice versa), and something needs to be done to address the one for the other to improve. Let’s start with self-esteem. (View Highlight)
• To build self-esteem, you need to first understand that it’s simply the by-product of being a competent, well-adjusted human being. (View Highlight)
• Self-esteem is not something that you pursue for its own sake. Doing that isn’t only unhelpful—it’s toxic. (View Highlight)
• Self-esteem is how you think you’re doing in your life, relative to how everyone else is doing. If you have low self-esteem, most likely you’re not doing well by some metric or other. (View Highlight)
• Everyone lacks something or fails in some ways. Don’t be so hard on yourself. Accept your flaws and learn to be comfortable with them, then work on becoming better. (View Highlight)
• It’s by accepting yourself as you are, and then working on yourself that you can build self-esteem. This is hard work, and it takes time. But you’ll end up in a far nicer place than you are in now. (View Highlight)
• As you come to feel higher esteem for yourself, healthy boundaries will slowly emerge in your life. You will instinctively know what you will or will not tolerate from others, you will draw the line and enforce it, and remove yourself from toxic relationships. (View Highlight)
• Set your boundaries, literally. This is easier said than done. But you will get nowhere unless you define what your personal boundaries are. What will you tolerate or not tolerate in your life? What behaviors will you accept or not accept? From your family, your partner, your friends, your colleagues, your mailman, the guy upstairs, your Tinder date. (View Highlight)
• Decide what the consequences are if someone breaks one of your rules. This is bound to happen, and often. And it will be difficult to think of what the consequences should be once it does. You’ll be biased by the person, the context, and a myriad other factors. So decide from the get-go. (View Highlight)
• Communicate the above clearly. Make your boundaries known. This is particularly important for the people closest to you. It’s probably okay for the mailman to not know all your boundaries (save for the basic ones like not breaking down your door to deliver mail), but it’s absolutely not alright for your partner to not know when they’d be crossing the line. (View Highlight)
• Follow through. If someone crosses your boundaries, do what you said you would. Be compassionate, but be firm. (View Highlight)
• The biggest counter-argument to implementing strict personal boundaries—or rationalization, depending on your perspective—is that sometimes you have to make sacrifices for the people you love. This is true. If your girlfriend/boyfriend has an unreasonable need for you to call them every day, even if it’s just to talk for three minutes, then it may be reasonable to make a small sacrifice to make them happy. But here’s the catch:

  If you make a sacrifice for someone you care about, it needs to be because you want to, not because you feel obligated or because you fear the consequences of not doing it. It comes back to the point that acts of affection and interest are only valid if they’re performed without expectations. (View Highlight)

• So if you call your girlfriend/boyfriend every day but hate it and feel like they’re impeding on your independence and you resent them and you’re terrified of how angry they’ll be if you don’t, then you have a boundary problem. If you do it because you love them and don’t mind, then do it. (View Highlight)
• litmus test (View Highlight)
  • Note: From Oxford Dictionary: a decisively indicative test.
• if there’s a boundary issue then you will fear the loss of that cross-responsibility for one another. If there’s not a boundary issue, i.e., you’re doing it as a gift without expectations, then you’re OK with the repercussions of not doing it. A person with strong boundaries is not afraid of a temper tantrum, an argument, or getting hurt. A person with weak boundaries is terrified of it. (View Highlight)
• A person with strong boundaries understands that it’s unreasonable to expect two people to accommodate each other 100% and fulfill every need the other has. A person with strong boundaries understands that they may hurt someone’s feelings sometimes, but ultimately they can’t determine how other people feel. (View Highlight)
• A person with strong boundaries understands that a healthy relationship is not controlling one another’s emotions, but rather each partner supporting each other in their growth and path to self-actualization. (View Highlight)