Think about the boundaries you deal with in everyday life – traffic laws, sports rules, work regulations, medicine administration, tool and appliance operations, and toxicity warnings, to name a few. These boundaries help you to stay healthy and safe under various circumstances.
Personal boundaries concerning relationships are no different. They help you control what you will and will not tolerate. They assist you in protecting the integrity of your relationship and build strong trust.
How?
The simple answer is that solid boundaries build trust by helping partners feel loved, respected, and safe.
Building Trust with Solid Boundaries
For many people, it’s not easy to trust. They carry emotional baggage from past negative experiences like rejection, deception, and pain.
They’ve never encountered a partner with whom they could openly talk and who would listen to their feelings. A partner who would want to know their needs, wants, fears, and goals. One who they could be comfortable with, knowing that they wouldn’t have to be afraid of how they may respond.
It’s because they never had healthy, solid boundaries to establish the trust needed in a close relationship. Consider a few example how building trust with boundaries works in practice.
Commitment
Commitment is a reflection of respect for your partner and motivated by heartfelt love. If you made the choice to commit to your partner, you should accept full responsibility for that choice.
Would it be loving to your partner to consistently flirt with others or make suggestive comments about them? If your partner always has to wonder about your integrity and faithfulness, would they feel safe?
A feeling of safety is also of utmost important during physical intimacy. When you put your own preferences and needs ahead of your partner’s, does it show them respect? When you don’t listen or empathize with their feelings, are you being loving? Building trust through boundaries can truly enrich this most personal aspect.
Secrets
Keeping secrets – even small ones – builds walls instead of trust. It limits the closeness you can have with each other because there’s always something you can’t be open about.
If you’re secretive about your health issues, spending habits, friends, internet relations, or other activities, can you expect your partner to feel safe? Is it loving to be dishonest with the person you say you care about? Think about how you would feel in their place. Would you not prefer the respect and trust honesty fosters?
Conflict
Certainly, you would agree that having boundaries on physical expressions of frustration that could border on or are physically abusive obviously builds trust during times of disagreements. It contributes to your partner feeling safe in a physical sense.
But what about words? If you end up flying off the handle, lashing out, or getting in a verbal fight, do you think your partner feels safe? If you use harsh language, a nasty tone, or scream and shout at each other, does it show love or respect?
What about if instead of addressing the issue with your partner, you dish out your most sensitive problems to someone else? If you complain about your partner or make them look negative in front of others, do you show respect or love for them? Making your partner feel safe in an emotional sense also builds trust.
Clearly, it may not always be easy to put solid boundaries into practice. Hopefully, though, the examples above help you understand that trust is always built by your efforts to make your partner feel safe. You can extend building trust in this way to all aspects of your relationship, always asking yourself if your behavior makes your partner feel loved and respected.
