Tim Arrigo and George argue that boundaries in marriage reflect respect, and violating them signals disrespect. Boundaries come from a man's core values, not his partner's agreement. Ignoring them breeds emasculation and enables unhealthy patterns that honest conversations can break.
What boundaries do you need to set, and what happens if they're broken? Because you know what a boundary proves? Whether or not you respect me. If I set a boundary with my wife and she violates the boundary, it proves that there's no respect. And a marriage without respect is automatically dysfunctional and unhealthy.
I know if I say the boundary, I want— I don't want to go out with those people anymore because I don't feel comfortable with it, that's not going to be something that she's going to agree to.
But it doesn't matter that she agrees or not. That's not the point. My boundaries are not dependent on other people's behavior. My boundaries are dependent upon my values, my core values, my morals, my ethics as a man, the standards that I have in my life. My boundaries are based on those things. It's a code that is instilled inside my life. If she doesn't align with the boundaries that I set, it— you're revealing to me how you really feel about me and our marriage. And then the real question is, then what are we doing here?
Otherwise, we're not— we're not getting anywhere. We're just keeping— we're going through the same motions. Yeah.
And I would say this, I would say when you allow that to happen, you automatically get emasculated. Like, you have to stand up for yourself inside this marriage, just like your wife should be standing up for herself inside this marriage. It's like, you guys have to stop sweeping everything under the rug all the time and not having the difficult conversations and living in denial. And, and just— it's easier for us to not talk about it because it's going to be a conflict and an argument. It's like, when are we going to actually get honest about what are we doing here? What's going on with our marriage? What are we doing? You don't want to work on it? I don't want you to be having an emotional connection with another gentleman whose wife has already determined it's unhealthy too. She's uncomfortable with it. I'm not the only one, which proves that my level of being irrational or insecure about this is, is far less than it would be had I was just saying, hey, I don't want you to talk to that guy because I'm uncomfortable. This isn't about your past. It's not about a prior engagement when you were younger. It has nothing to do with that. Yeah, it has everything to do with boundaries that you're not setting in your marriage, and you're just getting walked over and You're enabling patterns in your marriage that are unhealthy and you're not doing anything about it. So stop being an enabler.
Yeah. The problem is that this— I enabled this for the last 10 years.
Yeah. Relationship. That's— you gotta stop though. Just cuz you did it for the last 10 years, George, doesn't mean that you need to beat yourself up for that and live in the shame and guilt and then lay down kind of like the learned helplessness.
