Boundaries in Marriage

by Henry Cloud

As love grows, spouses become more free from the things that enslave: self-centeredness, sinful patterns, past hurts, and other self-imposed limitations. Then, they gain a greater and greater sense of self-control and responsibility. As they act more responsibly, they become more loving. And then the cycle begins all over again. As love grows, so does freedom, leading to more responsibility, and to more love.

Two extremes occur in marriage when the Law of Responsibility is not obeyed. On the one hand, a husband will neglect his responsibility to love his wife. He may become selfish, inconsiderate, or hurtful. He will not consider how his actions affect and influence his mate. He is not following Jesus’ law of how to treat one another: “So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you” (Matthew 7:12). This is being irresponsible to a spouse.

Finally, the Law of Responsibility also means that spouses refuse to rescue or enable the sinful or immature behavior of their partners. Couples have a duty to set limits on each spouse’s destructive acts or attitudes.

Loving your mate means desiring and protecting her freedom of choice. It means dying to your wish for her to see things your way and appreciating that she has her own mind, values, and feelings.

You may need to confront your spouse, give him a warning, or set a consequence. Do not neglect setting limits in your marriage because of a fear of causing pain. Pain can be the best friend your relationship has ever had.

You cannot make your spouse grow up—that is between him and God. But you can make it easier for him to experience the love and limits he needs. When he faces the consequences of his immaturity, he stands a better chance of changing than if he faces your nagging and hounding. Become truthful, not controlling.

Marriage cannot be successfully navigated without our giving more of ourselves than we are comfortable giving. Yet self-absorbed people often attempt to live as a single person within marriage, thinking they can get what is important to them and still pull off the relationship.

Grief helps us to accept the truth and to let go of things we can’t change or have.

Whenever we view others only in terms of how they affect us, we are in big trouble. This is self-centeredness. We reduce others to objects of our own needs, and we don’t see them as real people. And whenever we don’t see people for who they really are, love breaks down.

I’ll always take your experience as meaning something about me. Or I’ll react to your feelings by thinking of myself, not you.

Rebelling against control is the motivation behind many affairs and other problems. The spouse who feels controlled is not mature enough to stand up to control with responsible boundaries,

Stand against anything in yourself or your spouse that would destroy them.

When loving God is our orienting principle in life, we are always adjusting to what he requires from us. When things get tough in a marriage and when some change is required from us, we might not want to do it. We might feel that it is unfair that we have to change, or it might be too difficult or painful to change. At those moments, it is much easier to just please ourselves. But if we know that it’s God with whom we ultimately have to deal, we submit to this reality and his higher calling to us to grow. In the end, the relationship wins.

What does it mean to love someone “as yourself” in marriage? It means three things: you so deeply identify with your spouse that you feel the effects of your own behavior on your spouse, you think first of making your spouse’s life better, and you want the best for your spouse even when your spouse can’t see what that is.

First, you so deeply identify with your spouse that you feel the effects of your own behavior on your spouse. When people do things in marriage that hurt the relationship, selfishness—and a lack of thinking about how that selfishness will affect the other person—is usually at the root.

Deception damages a relationship. The act of lying is much more damaging than the things that are being lied about, because lying undermines the knowing of one another and the connection itself.

Deception is the one thing that cannot be worked through because it denies the problem. It is the one unforgivable sin of a relationship because it makes forgiveness unattainable.

All of these words hint at what faithfulness is. A faithful spouse is one who can be trusted, depended upon, and believed in, and one in whom you can rest. Our notion of faithfulness in marriage is too often shallow. We generally think of it only in the physical realm. Yet, in many marriages spouses are physically faithful but not emotionally faithful. They are faithful with their bodies but not with their hearts. The partners can’t depend on each other in the ways listed above. There is little trust, little certainty, little safety. Especially in

religious circles, people think that if they are not sleeping with someone other than their spouse, they are being faithful. But faithfulness means to be trusted in all areas, not just the sexual, trusted in matters of the heart as well as those of the body. Being faithful to your spouse means that you can be depended upon to do what you have promised, to follow through on what your spouse has entrusted to you. It means that your spouse can be certain that you will deliver on what you have promised.

An affair of the heart means taking aspects of yourself and intentionally keeping them away from the marriage.

“Objects” of unfaithfulness are numerous. Some are people, some are not. But the bottom line is that they come between you and your spouse.

The person you love the most and have committed your life to is an imperfect being. This person is guaranteed to hurt you and fail you in many ways, some serious and some not. You can expect the failures to come.

What do you do when your spouse fails you in some way or is less than you wish for him to be?

You can beat him up for his imperfections, or you can love him out of them.

The primary reason for growth must be that one is “hungering for righteousness”—not for someone else, but for oneself.

Marriage involves much more than two loving people keeping love alive. It means doing some hard work in forsaking, or leaving behind, other things. This is not easy. Many newlyweds are often disheartened to find that they are constantly having to say no to many things to maintain their marriage.

In any situation requiring change, two major issues appear right off the bat. The issue to be dealt with The ability of the person to deal with the issue If number two is good, then in most cases, number one will not be a problem.

The husband should always submit to his wife’s needs as Christ did for ours, even to death on a cross.

Use your freedom to give, sacrifice, and love your spouse, whether you are husband or wife. If you do that, with the result that most of your arguments are over who gets the chance to do the sacrificing, submission will never be an issue. You will be submitting to each other in Christian love.

If one of you discovers that you are being selfish and not serving the other, you can take ownership of that behavior and make a change.