Communicating boundaries and sticking to them in new relationships


When you find that self in the miserable text message vortex where your man (or woman) has relegated communication mostly down to text message, it can be disheartening.  You wonder why you are here, why he (or she) can’t call you, and what you did to wind up in a power struggle where the other person really does not care that much about you to pick up the phone and call.  

How lousy does it feel that a man or woman is willing to get jiggy with you while simultaneously saying with their behavior that you aren’t even worth a phone call?  Your behavior will inevitably becomes acid-like over situations like this, and slowly it becomes your fault for blowing up his or her phone with angry acidic text messages that are a result of your growing resentment about how you are being treated.

Avoiding the text relationship pitfall by establishing strong relationship boundaries

Once you wind up in the text pit, so much damage has already happened in terms of respect in the relationship, that you will rarely emerge to anything even closely resembling normal.  How did you get here?  How did you allow yourself to get here?  You’re dealing with a person who is either cutting you down or won’t even text you back.  Here is how: you failed to communicate your boundaries from the beginning of the relationship. You then failed to stick to those boundaries.

Communicating your boundaries from the beginning, and sticking to them

The biggest key to establishing a healthy relationship is to communicate to the other person what your personal boundaries are and sticking to them no matter what so that the other person can learn to respect them completely.  It is obviously best to establish boundaries at the outset but there is no law against flipping a switch and setting strong boundaries anywhere along the relationship road.  It may surprise him or throw him for a loop but it is never, never, never too late to wake up and establish boundaries you vow to live by.

I will give you an example.  A guy you are dating tends to text you, and never really calls you.  He’s not being mean he’s just a guy who likes text message and that’s how he likes to communicate.  All your plans and communications happen by text and things are pretty flaky, spontaneous and last-minute with him.  You get fed up early on after a couple of text exchanges with him go awry and plans that you thought were firm never really happened.  So you tell him, why don’t you call me instead of text me.  But then you don’t stick by that boundary request and instead just continue to text communicate with him after he doesn’t bother to call like you asked.

You convince yourself he’s just a tad stubborn and instead of calling you, he did just texts you a bit more and he did clear up the communication albeit via text.  So you let it go, and give him the excuse of Oh well this guy just likes to text.  Trust me he can make a phone call too.  He has a mouth and he has a voice and he knows how to talk on the phone and he has your number.  So there you were trying to establish a boundary that he call you.  But, what you really did was let him get away without having to call you at all.  You still went out with him!  And now he has learned that he doesn’t have to respect your requests.

Why boundaries are essential for a relationship to grow

Boundaries are what you will and will not tolerate in a relationship.  It’s simple things like that he call you in addition to text you, or that he calls when he says he will.  What is critical is not only communicating these boundaries in a way that he can totally understand but demonstrating that you mean what you say.  The bottom line, no matter how gorgeous he is, how hot he is, how successful he is, how much of your ideal he is, how many women he has throwing themselves at his feet if you walk away, if he does not respect that boundary you will remove yourself out of the picture 100% no doubt about it. 

Setting a boundary is easy.  Keeping it, is harder.  Because it puts your self-importance above his existence and it means you risk being alone and ditched if he doesn’t accept your line drawn in the sand.  The more you like a man (or woman) and the more alpha his personality is the harder it is to enforce a personal boundary.  This is because you know deep down that he has other options and that you can be replaced.  If you have any insecurity whatsoever about losing him, you will find yourself inventing excuses for his misbehavior, and convincing even yourself that you should let boundaries go lax and hang on for dear life. 

For example, you might decide to convince yourself that you are being too rigid and try to delude yourself into believing that being unpredictable and free will create attraction.  You decide to pretend you’re cool and unruffled when he fizzles out on plans he made with you, or when he just ignores your texts.  I’m a cool chick you think, so I will just pretend I am easy-going and don’t care that I just sat home Friday and Saturday night hoping he would call like he said he would. 

Convincing yourself that you are a stick in the mud stickler for sticking to your boundaries and then letting your own boundaries you yourself set, fall lax is a mistake. Thinking that the devil-may-care attitude that devalues yourself will create attraction because you are “flexible” is a big mistake women make.  They give a guy a free pass to walk all over her because he’s all that and she fears she has to accommodate or another woman will promptly replace her.

The truth is, that communicating clear boundaries, sticking to them, and holding yourself to your own values without faltering, actually creates attraction.  Caving in, does not.  Having a man understand that when you let him know a bottom line you actually mean it, helps him to be attracted and actually grow a relationship with you.  And if he has zero interest in being accountable, it’s smart to weed him out early on while you can walk away unscathed and totally undamaged emotionally by him.

Living by your own boundaries and increasing your value on the singles market

Be semi-serious and not mean but let him know in no uncertain terms what is up.  Tell him, I give out my number to someone I think may care about me and if you don’t have your act together to call rather than text all the time you won’t have your act together enough for me to date you.  And then, stick to that.  If he can’t actually call you, just don’t go out with him. 

Sure you might sit home for a while, but you won’t be that doormat option for him and therefore you just preemptively stopped him from abusing you.  The message you sent him is: I won’t make time for men who won’t call.  He will try to flirt, text, tease, stonewall, ignore you, punish you by withdrawing affection, and try to break down that barrier any way he can.  But when he sees that actually IS A BOUNDARY with you, it will drive him crazy with more attraction.  He’ll see you as someone with feelings and not just as a physical entity.

If you want to develop any sort of lasting emotional connection with a man you have to establish boundaries and live by them no matter how much he tries to invade those boundaries, ignore those boundaries, bowl over those boundaries or break them down.  If he cuts you down for sticking to your boundaries, tries to demoralize you and tell you that nobody will want you because you are too controlling, or tells you that you aren’t good enough or worth it, you must stay unruffled.  Those are your boundaries and who is he to say your worth anyways. 

The more certain you are of where you draw the line, the more men will respect that line.  You may lose a few, or get insulted for being too controlling, but that is what it is.  You gain an enormous amount by having boundaries.  For one thing, you won’t be lost in a twilight zone of hookup relationships, bullshizle relationships, and people using each other relationships, that exist in text message non-relationships.  You avoid all that because somewhere along the line you’ll have realized he wasn’t investing in you properly and you will have opted out and extricated yourself. 

Trust me that if you have boundaries and simply extricate yourself from situations where you are being run roughshod, you won’t even find yourself in a situation of typing why won’t he call me or return my texts questions into Google.  You may miss out on some fun times by sticking to your boundaries, but your entire emotional well-being and core-self will be 100% better off.  This inner strength is exactly what is going to make you relationship material and not hookup material.

If you allow yourself to be taken advantage of, your self-esteem erodes, your value as a potential girlfriend goes down, and you don’t have the fundamental qualities that will make a unertain man become committed to investing in you.  It’s not easy to have strong boundaries, but it is definitely worth it.  Ask any dating expert or dating coach and they will all tell you that your value on the singles market will increase when you are able to really live by your own moral code.

Boundaries

           

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