Why Are Boundaries So Hard?

I was in my early 40s before I realized that I was allowed to have boundaries. Raised Catholic, I was taught by the church from a young age to believe that my worth and value as a person came from my self-sacrifice and service—in fact, due to the nature of “original sin,” I was born inherently full of sin (especially because I was assigned “female” at birth), and self-sacrifice and service were not only the determiners of my worth but also the only way to redeem myself. As a seasoned codependent, I believed that I was sacrificing my way to being the best person I could be. I did not realize for decades how much harm I was doing both to myself and to my relationships.

All of the strong, amazing women in my family mostly adhered to expected gender roles. Everyone sacrificed their own comfort and needs to ensure that their families were taken care of. I admired them tremendously—and still do—and stepped right into that same kind of role in my friendships and relationships. I was “the mom” of my friend group growing up, the amateur medical diagnostician, therapist, and problem-solver, and this continued well into my 30s and my first marriage. My first spouse struggled with a host of issues, not the least of which was addiction, and the focus for all of my energy became holding our marriage—and the appearance of normalcy—together.

After the loss of my spouse to suicide 15 years ago, I had to figure out how to move forward, and this was more complicated than grieving my marriage, my partner, the possibility of parenthood, and my imagined future life: I had to figure out who I was. I was so utterly without boundaries in my relationship that I had lost my identity. I was Wife, Caretaker, Holder-Together-of-Things. I had to remember that I was Melisa before I was any of those things, and reestablishing myself as an individual preceded boundaries. At that point, I still didn’t think that I’d done anything wrong or unhealthy—I had behaved how a wife was supposed to, and my needs were supposed to come second to the wellbeing of the collective.

It wasn’t until I began to process my loss (and the addiction that had ravaged both of our lives) that I learned something that would change my life: I don’t have to take on and attempt to solve other people’s problems. Their journeys are their journeys—crossing lines to help them and ignoring what I needed to be happy made their journeys about me. I had always felt that, if I could help, it was my responsibility to help, but I learned the crucial difference between lending a hand while someone navigates their own shit and taking the wheel to try to navigate it for them—that does not work. Taking responsibility for someone else’s journey not only enables them to not take responsibility for themselves and their own growth; it removes your focus from your own journey. This is recipe for misery.

I fumbled along initially, continuing to date people who had a host of issues that made them not the right partner for me—even those who told me flat out that they either didn’t want a relationship or were not “relationship material.” I saw each of these attempts to be transparent as challenges—I basically said, “We’ll see,” and kept pushing. I managed to get many of these people to slide into relationships despite their insistence that this was not what they wanted, and each one ended more miserably than the one before. I thought, because I was seeing the potential in these people, that I could provide all of the stable foundation they needed to settle down and blossom into partner-hood. Looking back, I see this as both really sad and really arrogant: who did I think I was?! Like, why did I think I deserved less than someone who at the very least wanted the same thing I did? And where did I get the audacity to think I could persuade someone to want something that they were clear that they did not want? I didn’t have my own boundaries, which made me not listen to or honor other people’s—I thought I knew what was best for everyone, which was a relationship with me.

This goes deeper than audacity to major self-esteem issues and a lack of real understanding about how healthy relationships work. It has taken me my entire life to even begin to learn how to be a truly good partner, but it all began when I realized that I needed to listen to what people were telling me about themselves. Once listened, I realized that other people were having boundaries all over the place, which I was ignoring because I thought they were wrong. A natural next mental step was realizing that I too could have boundaries, but, having never had them before, I had to figure out what it was that I wanted.

For me, discerning what I wanted started with what I didn’t want: I didn’t want to chase people around anymore who insisted that they didn’t want to commit to a monogamous, long-term relationship—which was the opposite of what I wanted. I realized that I had a lot to figure out, and I had to settle into the idea that I am worthy of boundaries—that I am a human being who, by nature of being alive, deserves to have agency. (It took years for me to be able to say aloud that I deserve anything—again, it’s been a journey.) I gave up my agency in every relationship I was in and didn’t even realize it. I thought I wanted to take care of someone else, but I realized that these codependent arrangements benefited me only in that, by making myself indispensable, I temporarily ensured that the other person would not leave me.

Having good boundaries is about learning to stand on your own two feet, mentally, emotionally, and logistically. It’s about knowing what you want your life to me—and what you don’t want it to be—and not letting the perception of the scarcity of time convince you that you deserve less than happiness and joy in your one wild and precious life. (Thank you, Mary Oliver.) It’s about agreeing to be yourself as an individual human and not defining yourself only by your relationships to others and your roles in their lives. This can be hard, though, because we are inherently social beings, and our relationships matter deeply to us. We feel good (and, thus, more valuable) when other people love us and find us important in their lives—it feels amazing to know that we make someone feel happiness or that we have helped someone. The problem arises when we prioritize all of these relationships over ourselves and our own health and wellbeing.

You are powerful, valuable, and worthy exactly as you are. Your inherent worth is every reason to figure out what your boundaries are and then to hold them, both with yourself and with others. You do not need to sacrifice yourself to make other people happy. You deserve happiness, and having clear boundaries that you honor and ask others to honor as well is a great place to start.

(Originally published April 7, 2022.)