Rules, Agreements, and Boundaries

This post is another one where I mostly just link to someone else’s work and say “Hey! They make a really good point! Go read this!

Like so: Kimchi Cuddles: Rules, Agreements, and Boundaries

Let’s use the Billy Graham Rule as an example, because it’s atrocious, and thus nobody here will argue with me on the *merits* of the rule, so it stays all hypothetical.

In brief, the idea is that it’s not healthy to put a Rule on another adult. Instead, you can only choose to control your own behavior.

Rule: “You, Billy, cannot be alone in a room with another woman.”

The Rule tries to control what another person does.

Agreement: “We, Billy and Ruth, agree that we will not be alone in a room with a member of a different sex.”

The Agreement is something that two people agree to, together, about their behaviors.

Boundary: “Billy, if you ever spend time alone in a room with another woman, I will no longer spend time with you.”

The boundary is controlling your own behavior and your own response to the actions of others.

I think part of why Rule/Boundary gets blurred a lot is because of our whole cultural idea that marriage means two people become one unit. That’s a very romantic idea, of course; but it’s not practical even as a metaphor. Even in a marriage, we remain separate individuals with our own needs and wants. (I recently had someone try to tell me that legal marriage makes two people legally one entity, which, LOL nope. That’s not how that works at all.) One heart cannot hold all of this.

As a coda: Kimchi Cuddles is an explicitly non-monogamous comic, but I’ve appreciated it for a long time. I find it has a lot of observations that apply just as well for monogamous people as they do for non-mono folks.

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Some of the comments in this Reddit post are also pretty on point. It’s not possible for another person to “break” your boundaries. There’s a verb that’s more applicable to the direct object “rules.” If someone violates your boundaries, then you just proceed with the action that you said would happen when your boundary got crossed. You can’t control the other person. You can’t push with a rope. You can only control your own actions, and reactions, and so forth.