Boundaries

    Hello everybody! I hope you had a great Halloween! Or if you don't celebrate Halloween, I hope you had a great week anyway. Today I am going to talk about a few different things but they are all going to be centered on one principle. Boundaries. Boundaries are vital to a successful marriage. They are also vital to raising children. I would like to talk about different kinds of boundaries and their benefits.

    The first one that I want to talk about is the boundaries you set in marriage. The goal in marriage is to have complete fidelity. You want to be as loyal as possible. The way you get there is through setting boundaries with your spouse. What kind of boundaries are we able to set? One effective boundary in helping to protect a marriage is to not spend time alone with the opposite gender. There are many marriages that struggle because people will spend time with friends or coworkers alone. This can be especially hard for newly married couples because they still want to hang out with some of the friends they had before they got married. This is very dangerous especially when we look at the R.A.M. (relationship attachment model)  that we looked at a couple weeks ago.

    Think about it. The more someone spends time with someone of the opposite gender (who isn't their spouse), the more they may increase the know and trust category on the graph for that person. While this is happening, they may rely more on that person and begin to trust/rely less on their spouse. This is a very common thing with marriages that end in infidelity. However, when you set the boundary to not have those interactions, you are much easier able trust and rely on your spouse, thus building up your marriage.

    Another great boundary to set is the kind of media we take in. Pornography comes in many forms. It's not always as obvious as you'd think. It can be very subtle. There was a study conducted to see the effects of the use of pornography and what it can to do a relationship. They took a bunch of butterflies (male and female) and put them in an enclosure. Butterflies are stimulated through visuals when looking for a mate. In this particular study, they made a fake butterfly that was very colorful and represented an exaggerated female. All of the male butterflies flocked over to this "perfect" butterfly. When taken away, the male butterflies had no desire to go to the normal female butterflies because they had an unrealistic expectation of how a female butterfly should be. The same thing can be compared with pornography and media in general. Both will try to put off a perfect image of how a male or female should be or act. Many people fall for it's trick and it's hard for them to have an intimate relationship with their spouse because of the unrealistic expectation that they've developed. It's easy for you to look at your spouse as inferior when they are compared to a superstimuli.

    The reason we set boundaries is so that we don't let one thing lead to another. At first, something may seem harmless, but over time, steps are taken a little too far and you start to slip. Someone once told me about how their experience while they were out fishing with their dad as a child. He told me about how he wanted to go down to the bank to look at some of the fish up close. His dad would always tell him not to. One day he decided that he was going to do it anyway. As he made it down the hill, he started to look at some of the fish when all of the sudden, he fell into the river. His dad had to come down and pull him out. He also mention how he had tried to do it another time, and this time, he had already lost his balance on the way down the hill and fell in again. This is why we set boundaries. You can't just tell someone not to cheat on you and call it good, you have to set healthy boundaries so that you can avoid those dangerous steps down the hill.

    It is very important to set boundaries with the children you are raising. As the world moves on, the more dangerous and manipulative it gets. The pornography industry's main target is children, because when they get them to develop unhealthy habits while they are young, it's much harder for them to get rid of the habit as they get older. It is a good idea for a parent to set boundaries concerning technology usage.

    Boundaries are like a picket fence around a marriage to protect the harm of the world. Couples can and should openly work together to set healthy boundaries in order to develop healthy habits. This is the way our Father in Heaven wants it to happen. He wants our relationships to be happy and healthy. He wants us to do everything in our power to protect them because they are sacred. Thanks for taking the time to read my blog. I hope you guys have a great week!