I need to save this for every time some person is like “waaah they crossed my boundaries” and then does nothing about it.
https://www.instagram.com/p/DL7TYCpsEDe/
Rules and Boundaries, cat edition
Last night, I accidentally taught my kid about the difference between Rules and Boundaries by using my cat as an example. See, my cat (Cloud, 2M) is a bit of an asshole sometimes. He likes to jump up on my dresser while I’m sleeping and bat things around and make noise. As a result, I’ve started locking him out of my bedroom at night, so that I can have good sleep hygiene (a serious issue for me right now in my life).
So last night, my daughter was like “Why are you punishing him? He’s just being a cat!” And, you know, she’s right! But also, I have the right to sleep without disturbance. So I launched into the explanation that I cannot control Cloud, but I can control what doors are open or closed in my house.
Then, I realized that this was a perfect way to segue into the difference between making rules for someone else versus setting a boundary for your own self!
I emphasized that I cannot control Cloud or his actions myself. I can say ”stay off the dresser” until I’m blue in the face, but ultimately I’m not the one that controls his actions. What I can control is my actions. I can lock him out of my room in order to be healthy and get enough sleep. That’s within my locus of control.
Then I drew a parallel to a real life conundrum she might face someday: say, dating a person who is a smoker. She can say “You can’t smoke in my house.” She can say “If you smoke, I will break up with you.” But she can’t say “You are not allowed to smoke.” That’s not within her locus of control.
Anyway. I hope this lesson sticks with her as she grows up and makes her own way in the world.
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.
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.
Emilybook 