Tag Archives: Personal Boundaries

Navigating Relationships: Understanding Boundaries, Rules, and Agreements

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Learning to navigate personal, professional and community dynamics is a set of skills we must all acquire over time. Personal boundaries, rules, and agreements play distinct, yet interconnected roles in defining relationships, promoting autonomy, and fostering mutual respect. While all three establish guidelines for behavior, their purpose and application differ significantly.

Personal boundaries are internal, self-determined limits that individuals set to protect their emotional, physical, and mental well-being. These boundaries reflect personal values, needs, and comfort levels. For example, someone might set a boundary by choosing not to discuss certain personal topics at work. Boundaries are non-negotiable because they are intrinsic to the individual’s sense of self and are communicated to others as a means of self-respect and preservation.

Rules, on the other hand, are often imposed by one person or a governing entity and tend to define acceptable behavior in a specific context. Unlike boundaries, which are individual and internal, rules are external and often apply universally within a group or relationship. For example, a parent might establish a household rule requiring all family members to eat dinner together. Rules can sometimes feel restrictive, as they are not always collaboratively created.

Agreements are mutual understandings or decisions made between individuals, often through negotiation and consent. They rely on open communication and shared values to foster cooperation and harmony. For example, in a relationship, partners might agree to prioritize quality time together every weekend. Unlike rules, agreements are flexible and evolve based on the needs of all parties involved.

In essence, boundaries define the self, rules impose structure, and agreements promote collaboration. Recognizing these differences allows individuals to navigate relationships more effectively, and respectfully. This is a very old post for me, and one I have used for many years, when dating and partnership conversations turn to honest, open, clear and direct communication.  

Honesty vs Transparency

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In my world, there is a strong push towards total interpersonal transparency these days. It’s a hard marketing sell by the “authentic living” leadership and coaching community – “Tell it all, be proactive, share everything, spare no detail, be vulnerable”.  As you can imagine, this doesn’t sit well with me, and while I am all for honest, open, clear and direct communication, I am also for keeping parts of my life private, and the lives of my close intimate friends and partners too. 

As I evolve and mature, it’s becoming easier to maintain my personal boundaries, although they are often seen by the uninitiated as rules, and please remember this is my social circle, not necessarily my close or particular friends, and yes, there is a difference. Before moving on to exploring the difference between honesty and transparency, let’s do a quick side bar, and clear up personal boundaries vs rules. 

My Personal Boundaries are empowering and enforceable because they are all about my actions, my choices, and there are consequences for others; whereas Rules are disempowering and often unenforceable, because they are about you and therefore out of my control. Perhaps I need to write a dedicated post of this subject. I will think more!  

As I have said, my privacy is very important to me, as is the privacy of my partners and particular friends, so for me the difference between honesty and transparency is that honesty is what I share with people as my perceived truth, whereas transparency is what others feel they need to know about me.  A good example of this would be how we share our tombstone data.  I like to share the minimum possible such a name, address, email and perhaps phone number (this is honesty), whereas many social media apps want all of the above plus DoB, hair colour, gender and inside leg measurement (for sake of transparency).  For me, the issue is that, if you’re transparent, you may not succeed in educating people as to what they really need to learn about you, whereas my truth is my truth and it informs people about my reality. When I am accused of being secretive, I am often simply exercising my right to privacy. People frequently dress up their invasive demands for information about my life as a need for “full transparency and disclosure”.  

This happened this week, when someone asked me why I wasn’t willing to attend a social event? I had already answered that I wasn’t available, and yet they pushed for full transparency demanding more disclosure, including what exactly I was doing with my time and with whom? My honesty was that I wasn’t available, and that’s a hard “No”, which is all they really needed to understand to access my truth; whereas if I had fully disclosed how I was engaged during that time, this information would have opened up a conversation about social and friendship priorities, which I wasn’t prepared to explore. My choices are my choices!    

There is a concept called a Disclosure Agreement that can be made with partners and particular friends about what we will and will not disclose about our relationships with other people. Perhaps it’s time for this concept to become a more common practice, especially in the days of megacorporation-controlled social media where anything and everything can be disclosed and shared on the InterWeb in an instant?