It can be difficult to set and keep boundaries in a relationship due to fear of rejection or a desire to avoid conflict. However, relationship boundaries are an essential skill to master for love to flourish.

The desire to emotionally merge with a partner is often romanticized in films, song lyrics, and poems. The misnomer that a partner completes you adds to the difficulty of individuating and setting healthy relationship boundaries. Ultimately, two people in love do not become one; they are two individuals coming together to share their lives.

Establishing and enforcing healthy relationship boundaries is critical for respectful love. Your ability or inability to set and maintain healthy boundaries profoundly affects your self-confidence and self-worth in relationship.

Relationship boundaries also help you set guidelines for acceptable behavior. When you have healthy boundaries in place, you can get your needs met without going into sacrifice.

By clearly defining what is and isn’t acceptable, boundaries help build trust and respect, ensuring that both partners feel seen and heard. This atmosphere of trust gives both of you the space to grow together rather than apart.

Without boundaries in a relationship, you can slip into a codependent dynamic. This means one partner sacrifices their needs in order to please their partner.

Healthy relationship boundaries ensure that neither party goes into sacrifice and creates healthy interdependence. Allowing both partners to thrive individually, as well as a couple.

9 Relationship Boundaries You Need To Master Before Your Next Relationship

1. The Boundary Of Respectful Love

There’s an old saying that familiarity breeds contempt. In an intimate relationship that can lead to harmful behaviors that wear away at the foundation of your connection. Love doesn’t mean that you can do or say anything to your partner. Relationship boundaries create respectful behavior and allow love to thrive.

Respectful love has boundaries built into it that leave space for your individuality and create an atmosphere of mutual respect. Boundaries help ensure that both partners are treated with kindness and consideration, preventing hurtful behaviors that come from taking each other for granted. Without relationship boundaries, familiarity can indeed breed contempt, leading to a breakdown in communication and respect.

When you have boundaries in a relationship you create an environment where love can flourish. Ultimately, boundaries create the structure to navigate your differences and find common ground.

2. Physical Relationship Boundaries

Love doesn’t give someone the right to your body, your personal space, or your time. Physical boundaries help keep you comfortable and safe and ensure your individuality within a relationship.

Physical boundaries create a respectful environment where both of you understand and honor the space you’re sharing. This creates individual autonomy, allowing you to decide what you wish to do with your own body, and your own resources.

In a long-term relationship, when you share the same space it’s important to have agreements about time together and time apart. It’s important to have your private space and your private thoughts.

You should be able to talk about anything but not have to talk about everything. Communicating about your physical and personal needs lays the groundwork for harmony in your home. Relationship boundaries cultivate a strong sense of trust and a feeling of safety.

3. Boundaries For Taking Responsibility

Have you ever taken responsibility for your partner’s mood or behavior? Or blame others when things don’t go your way? Get defensive when given feedback?

When you either take too much responsibility for others’ behavior or don’t take responsibility for your own, you have an issue keeping healthy relationship boundaries.

The responsibility equation provides a framework for knowing what is your responsibility, and what is not.

The Responsibility Equation: When someone has a problem with you, it’s their problem. When you have a problem with someone, it’s your problem.

To have healthy relationship boundaries, you must be aware of your triggers and wounds as well as your strategies for giving and receiving love. It isn’t your partner’s responsibility to avoiding triggering you. You’re responsible for your emotional life, reactions, as well as the actions you take when upset.

Your partner’s feelings and their behaviors aren’t your responsibility. They don’t belong to you. This doesn’t mean that you’re without compassion or empathy, rather it means you won’t take responsibility for their actions and emotions. It’s not your job to fix them.

When you live by the responsibility equation, you’ll always have healthy relationship boundaries, and you’ll avoid going into sacrifice.

4. Learn To Use Conflict To Create Deeper Connection

Instead of viewing conflict as a red flag, expect that you and your partner will sometimes have miscommunication, misunderstandings, and even argue sometimes. Sharing your life with another person is messy.

Avoiding conflict to keep the peace doesn’t create harmony in your home. Instead, it creates a cold war between you and leaves hidden landmines in your relationship which can explode at any time.

One sure way to grow apart is to avoid conflict, which can also build up resentment in you or your partner. Eventually, you won’t be able to hold it in and you’ll explode like a volcano. Holding your feelings in will eventually make it harder to have difficult conversations.

Learn to lean into your differences, speak your truth, and make your relationship a safe place to express emotions even when there’s a conflict. Disputes are a natural occurrence between two people who have different experiences and strategies for dealing with stress.

Embracing conflict as an opportunity, you can create a safe space to work through your differences and create a lasting connection.

5. Practice Non-Violent Communication

An important tool for working through your differences is to focus on “I” language instead of “You” language. When emotions are heated it’s easy to speak about all the things your partner is doing that are upsetting to you. “You did this, or you didn’t say that,” can feel like an attack.

Instead, focus your communication on your own emotional experience by saying, “I don’t feel heard.” Or, “I’m feeling sad right now.”

Non-violent communication fosters empathy and understanding instead of placing blame. It encourages you to express your own feelings and needs without judgment and allows you to listen to your partner’s feelings and needs with compassion.

The goal is to create a space where both of you feel heard and respected, which leads to a stronger connection between you and makes your relationship a space of respect and connection to promote healing.

Non-violent communication allows you to have respectful relationship boundaries even through misunderstandings and conflict.

6. Master The Walters’ Communication Template: The SHYFT

The most effective way to communicate your differences or to make requests in your relationship is to use the Speak How You Feel Template (SHYFT). The SHYFT gives you a framework for having uncomfortable conversations and leverages the opportunity to repair and reconnect.

There are three steps to the SHYFT:

• Identify and speak your emotions: “I feel ____________.”
• Put them into context: “When _____[context]_______.” (Avoid saying “You.”)
• Make a direct request or offer a joint solution: “Would you please ____________.” Or “Can we please ____________.”

This communication template allows you to express your feelings without blaming your partner and to make a request for a change if necessary. By putting your feelings into context you’re helping your partner see your point of view.

This same template can be used to make a request for something you would like your partner to do.
Example:

“I feel cherished when the person I’m dating opens the car door for me. Would you make an effort to open my car door when we go out?”

The SHYFT is the most effective tool for creating healthy relationship boundaries because it incorporates “I” language. It gives you the words to take responsibility for your feelings, and it gives you an opportunity to make a request.

There is no magical communication template to make someone behave the way you want them to. Utilizing the SHYFT allows you to evaluate the other person’s capacity and desire to meet your needs.

7. Earning The Benefit Of The Doubt

When you give a stranger the benefit of the doubt you open yourself up to being taken advantage of. Most people Date Backward: They give the benefit of the doubt to someone they barely know because it’s new and exciting. Sadly, after someone has earned the benefit of the doubt they tend to not get it from their long-standing partner.

Beware of instant intimacy! What you think is a deep connection with someone you just met could actually mean they resemble a familiar energy or experience. The brain science of attraction proves that you are attracted to the familiar.

If you haven’t had the happy, healthy relationship you’ve always dreamed of yet, it’s essential to embrace Slow Love so you can break your negative patterns in relationship. Having healthy boundaries in relationship is also imperative.

Don’t give someone you just started dating the benefit of the doubt until they’ve earned it. Once they’ve proven they’re in it to win it with you, and they’ve earned your trust, give them the benefit of the doubt.

8. Setting Healthy Relationship Boundaries

When you struggle with relationship boundaries, you can seesaw between having no boundaries and setting hard boundaries, like the Great Wall of China. Boundaries give you guidelines for respectful behavior, but they aren’t the solution to your habit of over-giving or going into sacrifice.

If you have a strategy of giving to get in your relationships, you’ll eventually feel angry and resentful when your partner doesn’t reciprocate your behavior. You don’t have to earn love or become a martyr. Healthy boundaries are flexible and allow space for the gray areas of life.

Your partner isn’t responsible for your strategy sacrificing your needs, you are. And you’re also responsible for ensuring your needs get met. Healthy relationship boundaries make sure both of you get what you need.

9. Co-dependence vs. Interdependence

There’s been so much emphasis on avoiding co-dependence in intimate relationships that many people have overcorrected and have created hard boundaries which cause you to feel lonely and alone. Humans are social creatures and need emotional connection.

A healthy relationship is an interdependent relationship, not one that emphasizes independence. Supporting each other emotionally fosters trust, love, and happiness. It’s vital to thriving in your life.

When you take your time getting to know someone, speak your feelings authentically, take responsibility for your needs getting met, and develop healthy relationship boundaries, you’re laying the groundwork for your relationship to thrive. Your self-confidence, self-esteem, happiness, and joy all depend on it.

If you’re struggling with relationship boundaries or need to develop more skills for lasting love, purchase our debut book: GETTING IT RIGHT THIS TIME: Break Free from Your Hidden Blocks to Lasting Love from Penguin Random House. This step-by-step guide will take you on a journey to identify your blocks to love, transform them to develop confidence, and manifest the long-lasting love relationship you desire and deserve.