How Boundaries Can Improve Your Marriage
After another extremely busy and stressful day, you and your spouse are struggling through the witching hour, making dinner, and managing fights between the kids. You think your spouse should be helping you more and they think you aren’t doing anything to help them. You push through bedtime with clenched jaws and flop down on the couch quietly resenting one another.
After a bit, one of you says something passive aggressive, which prompts an overreaction from the other and the night crumbles into another disagreement about not understanding each other and saying things you don’t mean. This has become the pattern and it’s really starting to weigh on you especially because the resentment is carrying over and building up between the two of you.
Does this sound familiar? Listen, relationships, marriage, raising children, managing finances, navigating family matters, working, all of it causes stress. Boundaries can help manage your stress and prevent you from catapulting into full blown resentment and burn out.
We all have limits, whether they’re physical, emotional, social, or energetic. The problem arises when you don’t communicate your limits (boundaries) or even honor them yourself.
If you’re piling up your responsibilities past your energetic limit and then your spouse asks a tiny favor of you, that can lead to conflict, right? Or if your spouse has been emotionally rocked by their day at work and walk through the door to you throwing fifteen tasks at them, that can lead to conflict.
Conversely, if you know your spouse’s boundaries and welcome them home, check in with them and wait for them to ask how they can help, conflict is avoided and you can appreciate their desire to help. Or if your spouse knows you need a few minutes after dinner to decompress, they can take the kids upstairs and start bath time and you can head up refreshed and calm to put the babies to bed.
It’s understandable to be resistant to boundaries because it can feel like you’re putting a wall up or creating a less intimate relationship. That could not be further from the truth. When boundaries are communicated, respected, and upheld, it creates a set of parameters for your relationship to blossom and grow.
