Maintaining Emotional Safety, Without Putting up Walls

Whether you've been attracting partners with all the wrong motives, you're coming out of a long-term commitment like marriage, or you you've heard dating horror stories, it's common to want to make sure that you keep your heart protected.

When we need to create boundaries, we often build walls instead. Emotional walls are designed to keep people out and protect us from becoming vulnerable with others. Boundaries provide a controlled pathway to intimacy and vulnerability. Where walls keep everyone out, boundaries serve as a filter for insincere and hurtful individuals.

The only way to truly, 100%, keep yourself from ever being hurt is to put up walls. Unfortunately, it also leads to a life without true love and intimacy. Part of finding and creating love is opening your heart, handing it to another person, and trusting them to keep it safe. There is nothing scarier. But there is also nothing as powerful as someone seeing every deep dark corner of you, and still choosing to love you.

Boundaries help us to keep our heart from being needlessly broken. Below are a couple of quick hacks for setting relationship boundaries.

The Relationship Attachment Model

Dr. John Van Epp's Relationship Attachment Model (RAM) gives a rough outline for daters to set boundaries in relationships. It consists of five different domains - Know, Trust, Rely, Commit, Touch - which all take place during relationship formation. The rules are quite simple: introduce the domains in order, and never allow a later domain to be "higher" than an earlier domain. For example, never trust a person more than you know them, never rely on a person more than you trust them, etc.

Following this process provides built in boundaries. You never rely on someone to help you with tough things, until they have proven they can be trusted with it, which keeps your feels safe. If things don't work out, you may be bummed, but not necessarily as shattered as if you had shared your deepest vulnerabilities before you knew that they would actually prefer dating that other person they went out with last week.

Date Problem-Solvers

Problem solvers are people who look for solutions when things get difficult. Since relationships experience difficulties and problems that need solving frequently, this is a really valuable skill.

You can identify these individuals by looking for three basic behaviors: empathy, personal-responsibility, and self-control. We all miss the mark sometimes, so if your partner isn't 100%, it's certainly not a red flag. If they are exhibiting these behaviors 80% of the time, you've got a problem-solver.

Empathy, is obviously the ability to put yourself in someone else's shoes, personal responsibility is the ability to see how your actions contribute to a situation, and self-control is the ability to control emotions, desires and behaviors, especially under stress. 

Keep Your Options Open

Dating several people at once and waiting for at least 6 weeks before you become exclusive serve as hacks for keeping you from moving too fast with one person. This does come with a few tips though:

• Make sure those you're dating know that you are also dating other people

• Set personal rules for physical touch, and make sure that those you're advancing with in physical touch are aware of those rules (e.g., "Just so you know, even though I'm dating other people, I have a firm rule that I'm only kissing one person.")

Dating can often feel out of our control, but by implementing a few simple practices, we can create boundaries to help us maintain control, while also moving toward intimacy.