Be the Boundary

The next time you go to explain yourself - pause.

Author.

Verbal boundaries don’t work the way we think they do.

I know I am touching the female holy grail.

We are in the age of the boundary.

Attachment styles and communication scripts and the ten things to say when someone crosses a line. And I hope all of these labels add more than they take. I hope we are just in the messy middle of evolving into deeper connections, instead of just dissolving human relationships.

I wish people thought more about what worked in their own life, than what anyone online set up as a standard. I notice that is especially rare for women to do. It takes a very long time for a woman to mature to the point that disagreeing with a popular female stance doesn’t feel like betrayal.

But when something isn’t working - for you and the people you are connected to - it’s time to pause and reflect.

If you are working on getting better at explaining to someone that they need to and must respect you and be honest with you, something has already gone wrong.

Not because you’re wrong to want respect. But because real respect — the kind that is spontaneous — doesn’t get installed through direct instruction. It was either there or it wasn’t. And what the framework gave you, in its place, was compliance. Someone performing the behavior because you told them to.

And the moment you stop enforcing, they will stop trying to follow the rule.

I’ve done this. I’ve been in my own relationships running what amounts to a drill: You will finish this conversation with me. You will tell me all of the truth, this time. You will stop making everything about yourself. Will, will, will. Push, push, push. And underneath all of it, I thought I was advocating for myself. What I was actually doing was applying force. And force, in intimate connection, always closes something.

Plus, it sucks - because it’s exhausting. I have always regretted being in a relationship that pushed me into a corrector role.

My more successful relationships, in every area, have been formed through something that looks, from the outside, like passivity. I am quite frequently accused of being passive.

It isn’t.

It’s actually one of the more demanding practices I know: letting people be how they’re going to be, long enough to see who they actually are.

Watching how a man treats a woman who is a total stranger to him. Whether there is continuation — whether he comes back, unprompted, because he wants to. Whether, when he was last single, he was someone you’d want to know. Not interrogating those answers. Just noticing. Giving space for the evidence to accumulate without jumping in to correct the picture.

This takes an enormous amount of self soothing and patience.

And yes — sometimes letting something uncomfortable happen. Letting something land sideways. Sitting with it. Responding by moving your time and attention to how uncomfortable they are making you. Letting them notice, if they’re paying attention at all.

In the relationships I love most, it has always been enough to say: I really didn’t like that. Just that. And what comes back is not defense, not justification, but something like: Yeah. Me neither, actually. And we find a new way without anyone having been put on trial. The relationships that have been with me for long seasons of life can handle the natural storms of life because they include people who have compatible values with my own.

That’s not a skill you can install in someone through a framework. That’s character. And I’d rather know early whether someone has it. I’d rather be fully disrespected and completely let down in the first six months than in year three realize that being the mom of someone who can’t hold his emotional attention on one woman at a time isn’t a job I want anymore.

I’ve been told before that I’m teaching women to allow disrespect.

There’s some truth in that I want to honor.

There is discomfort in this approach. There is the risk of sitting with something that stings and not immediately routing it through a script. There is often the real possibility that what you discover, in the waiting, is that you are not being valued. And then comes the harder question: why?

Because sometimes the answer is the other person. They don’t value people the way you do and you found out organically. It isn’t your responsibility to reform someone’s character or improve their personality. It isn’t.

And sometimes the answer lives closer to home. Sometimes the thing you’re not receiving is the thing you haven’t yet learned to give yourself. And no number of stated boundaries will close that gap.

You can’t beg for self-respect from others. You can’t live in one way and force people to treat you in an opposite way.

I’ve had clients arrive at this threshold.

The discomfort of realizing they’ve been in rooms, for years, where they weren’t really seen. And instead of immediately figuring out who to blame, we get curious together. What are you making yourself available for? What have you not yet required of yourself that you keep requiring of others?

The most alive relationships in my life were not constructed through careful negotiation. I feel like every few years I have to torture myself a little in an exhausting connection to be reminded of this fact.

They were formed through long stretches of just being together — noticing, self-correcting, occasionally looking at each other and saying that didn’t land right, did it — and through enough trust in the other person’s essential goodness, honesty, commitment or work ethic that we didn’t need to run everything through formal court-like process.

Let the way you live be the limit.

Live in a way that it is quite obvious what you are and are not available for.

Let your warmth be real.

Let your discomfort be highly visible. Get annoyed. Pull back. React with your body.

Spend more time on learning how to stop fawning and being the parent than learning how to sound more professional when you make up rules for others.

Let people show you who they want to be in relationship with you.

Then believe what you see.

And if it has information for how you want to hold a higher standard for you own way of living? Self adjust.

Don’t make life harder than it is. Don’t find new ways to hide.

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I write primarily to support my small business, christinaelaine.com

I am a somatic coach, writer, and curriculum creator writing about the interior life of modern relating, weekly on Medium & Substack. I also host interviews on YouTube.