Boundaries in Marriage

Hello! This week I'm going to be touching base on boundaries and the certain extent of boundaries that need to be set in a marriage. 

First things first, boundaries should be personal and meaningful to your specific relationship. Mulitple conversations on what your boundaries are, need to be had with your partner throughout your relationship and need to happen often, especially after getting married. If special attention is put toward your marriage early on, this could prevent very extreme and real problems later on. 

Let's talk about attachment. Attachment is something that is crucial to any relationship, but especially marriage. There are three basic things that could prevent a developing attachment toward your spouse. Friends, famiy, and media. You should never do anything that will end up getting you attached to anyone but your spouse. This includes our three subjects, friends, family, and media. Some examples of these things could exist as parents, siblings, any friends, especially opposite sex gender friends, social media platforms, pornography, including supernormal stimuli and infedelity, and a lot of other things. Serious boundaries need to be set from these things, and you should always be respected by your partner as well as yourself. Your spouse should always come before anyone and anything else, this includes all of the things I just mentioned. Just because some of these examples are culturally acceptable, does not mean that they are wise.

Regarding friends and family, instead of going to talk to them about problems in your marriage, talk to your partner. Confiding in someone else, whether it's your mom, dad, or close friend created an emotional attachment to someone other than your spouse and needs to be avoided. Avoiding an emotional conversation in a friend of the opposite gender could avoid an emotional attachment. This is important because an emotional attachment could result in cheating on your partner, and it happens more than you think. In a marriage, friends of the opposite gender are not okay, and especially not okay to associate with alone without your partner present. 

Media, especially now, plays such an important role in marriage and is almost unavoidable. Because of it being almost impossible to avoide, it's so important to set boundaries. Whether it's looking at half naked women on Instagram, overusing the use of screentime, watching pornography, or even lusting over women in public, viewing them sexually, is a violation to your marriage as well as your partner. This could apply to both men and women, but is more common in men. It's very easy to look at your partner as inferior when you're always looking at and fantasizing over unrealistic, "fake" women. This is a common result of supernormal stimuli. If you're unfamiliar with what supernormal stimuli is, an example of it could be both male and female butterflies, as well as one large cardboard cutout of a fake female butterfly. To begin with, the male butterflies are interacting or interested in the already real existing female butterflies and are happy. As soon as they bring the fake female butterfly in, every single one of the male butterflies congregate towards the cardboard cutout not realising that it's fake. Why is this? It's because they like what they see in the unrealistic fake butterfly more than the real imperfect butterflies. Admiring another woman's body other than your wife's will cause problems in your marriage, whether it's online or in real life. Although this is true, boundaries can solve a lot of these problems. 

Another example that my college profesor mentioned in a course I'm taking, is a story of a man that found pleasure in getting massages with no clothes on from attractive women who weren't his wife, and got these massages on an often and regular basis. In therapy, this man mentioned that he feels that this activity of getting massages for pleasure could potentially lead to him commiting adultery and he expressed that he needed help because he really did not want to cheat on his wife. This man along with finding pleasure this way, also viewed pornography on a daily basis as well as viewed woman he saw in public in a very sexual way. The thereapist asked him where he was willing to draw the line and what he was willing to give up so that he could prevent comitting adultery. He said, "well I could maybe put some of my clothes on while getting my massages". The therapist then expressed that he couldn't help this man. He coulnd't be helped because he was willing to give up such a small thing for an even bigger problem. He was still going to get massages from women he thought were attractive, we was still going to watch porn, and he was still going to lust over women who were not his wife. He wasn't willing to set an effective boundary. A boundary needed to be set and a decision to not get massages at all anymore, to stop watching porn, and to stop sexualizing women in public needed to be made in order for his marriage to survive. This is the importance of boundaries. Your spouse needs to come first. If infedelity is a problem at all in your marriage, it's important to get professional help, because it's something that needs to be resolved. 

All in all, boundaries are such a crucial thing that needs to be figured out and respected in any marriage in order for it to work. Make sure that you are putting your spouse as well as their boundaries first. If boundaries are not set, or kept, your marriage will fail.