How to Use Boundaries in Marriage: 2 Words, 3 Steps

Every now and then a guy comes to me because he is trying to decide whether to keep going in his marriage at all.

A lot of what I end up doing in those conversations is trying to help that man find a third path. One that lets him stay committed to the marriage and still say no to the behavior.

Last time I laid out why the standard boundary advice keeps pointing men away from their marriages:

• Triggered by hurt feelings, which is subjective and deceptive.
• Built on limit-plus-consequence, which puts the substance of your boundary in your spouse’s hands.
• Heavy on how to set one and nearly silent on how to lift one.

This episode is the other half. This is how I actually think about it now.

A boundary should let you say no to the behavior, and still say yes to the marriage.

Two words: conditional and protective

Conditional, not unconditional. You have to be able to point at a specific thing. A specific behavior, a specific pattern. Not a mood, not an atmosphere.

Protective, not punitive. The whole purpose of a boundary is protection. That is it. It is not there to teach her a lesson.

Those two words do a lot of work before you have done anything else, because they force you to be honest about both halves. The condition is the trigger. The protection is the substance.

The condition has to be a disregard for safety

That is the threshold. A repeated disregard for safety. Boundaries are not the tool you should be reaching for every day. They are not the daily driver, the everyday-carry tool in your marriage.

And I want to be clear that the disregard can come in more than one form. It can be intentional. It can be reckless. It can be compulsive, and addiction is the case that comes to mind, where in some sense of the word she cannot really help the unsafe behavior and you might still need the boundary.

The question to ask yourself is simple. What is the simplest way to describe the unsafe pattern I am experiencing here?

Truth matters in a marriage, and truth neither minimizes nor exaggerates. Men get tempted in both directions on that. What you want to be able to say honestly is, when you do that thing, it causes me this particular hurt. You are framing it against a behavior, never against the person.

One thing that surprises people. What you are going to hear from this is not that you should hold boundaries off longer. I think a lot of people would do better if they set smaller boundaries earlier, before the hurt and the discontent build up through the frustration of the thing never changing.

Protection is two questions

Before you do anything, answer these.

• What is the smallest thing she could do to restore my belief that she cares about my safety?
• If she won’t do that, what is the smallest step I can take that sufficiently protects me from further harm?

Hold onto both. The three steps below are built directly out of those two answers.

The three steps, and you go only as far as you have to

Step one. Express the hurt and seek buy-in.

Start here every single time, even when you are sure you have already done it. Do it in good faith, and give her the benefit of the doubt that if she really understood the harm, she would adjust. Use some emotional language. When you do this, it really hurts me. It makes me feel unsafe in this particular way.

Step two. The boundary of insistence.

She didn’t take the buy-in. So now we stop asking for agreement and start asking for compliance. This is where you name the smallest thing she could do. I need you to acknowledge that what you just said was hurtful. I need you to lower your voice for us to keep talking. I have to insist we get a third party involved.

Notice this one still depends on her. That is exactly why it is not the last step.

Step three. The boundary of refusal.

She refused. Now you move to the only thing you actually control, which is you. If you will not do the thing I’m asking to restore trust, then here is the thing I am going to refuse to do to keep myself safe.

And plenty of the time you never get here. Sometimes step two is the whole boundary. If she stonewalls a conversation you need to finish, you can leave that insistence standing and simply re-state it every time she tries to sweep it under the rug. Hold on. Remember, there was that conversation we need to finish. The boundary of insistence is still active. It never has to escalate.

Then, here’s how you lift the boundary:

This is the half almost nobody teaches, and it is what makes “conditional” mean anything at all.

Every condition traces back to disregard for safety. So the thing that lifts every boundary is, put simply, regard for safety.

And here is the part men get wrong: compliance is enough. She does not have to agree with you. She does not have to see it your way. If the behavior stops, the boundary comes down.

When it does, say thank you. Say it humbly, because even when a boundary is completely deserved, it does not feel good to have one set on you. Restate that you are committed to the marriage. Tell her the boundary was never against her. And then do not immediately try to convert her compliance into buy-in. You can get to buy-in later.

Other Stuff to Know

”Am I still protected even if she doesn’t care?”

This is the part that a consequence-based framework cannot answer.

Say you tell her you cannot be in the room while she is texting the affair partner. And she says, fine, do what you want, I’ll enjoy the extra space.

If your framework runs on consequences, you look at that and say uh-oh, my boundary is not good enough. The consequence was not proportional to the hurt.

But our word is not consequences. Our word is protection. So the question is not did that hurt her enough. The question is am I still protected even if she doesn’t care? And you are. As long as you don’t have to watch it happen, the boundary is doing its job.

She can care or not care. My boundary is not affected by that.

Standards are not boundaries

Back in episode 28 I talked about the word should and how it poisons a marriage. This is the same fault line.

Your standards are the bar you are trying to meet. Your boundaries are the line you won’t cross.

There is a gray middle between them, and a lot of the time that gray middle is where people get into trouble, because they reach for the boundary tool to close a standards gap. If you are below your standards but nothing unsafe is happening, most of the time you are going to need just those first two steps.

One asterisk before the good part. If you are facing physical abuse or something genuinely dangerous, please do not make a podcast episode your one lone hope. A well-built system for boundaries might not be enough. Get third-party help and get yourself safe in a more substantial way.

Three ways a boundary actually serves your marriage

It guards your contentment. Smaller boundaries set earlier keep the hurt and the discontent from building up through the frustration of a thing that never changes. They are guardrails on your marital satisfaction.

It serves the spouse who is doing the unsafe thing, and to be clear that might be either of you, over different issues or in different seasons. Take the spouse who escalates and starts saying things they would be ashamed of once they are thinking clearly. A boundary drawn around that behavior means that when they snap out of it the next morning, they do not have as big a pile of verbal craters behind them. It prevents the accrual of guilt.

It serves you. Especially in a relationship with one aggressor and one more passive spouse, a lot of the time that passive spouse is not very good at expression. This framework will not let you skip it. Step one is expression. Doing boundaries this way forces you, trains you to express yourself, and it builds boldness on that front.

Closing Thoughts

I am sure that if more people would adopt this understanding of boundaries, many marriages could be spared divorce.

I do think the approach described in this episode corrects a lot of the problems with how boundaries get taught normally. If you think I could clarify something better, let me know. I love getting feedback like that.

The free cheat sheet for this episode is at husbandhelphaven.com/episode-39. No email required, it is just a PDF with the whole framework on one page. And if you want to work through the harder version of these decisions with men who have been where you are, that is what Husband Help Group is for.