When a Partner Doesn’t Take Your Boundaries Seriously

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Wrecking ball

At a national peer education conference, I served as a panelist for a session called “Ask the Sexperts,” where students could anonymously submit any and all questions about sex-related topics. Since I do these kinds of workshops on college campuses fairly frequently, it’s interesting to note trends in the types of questions received. This time, as usual, the largest number of questions on any single topic concerned orgasm, especially from women who hadn’t experienced one yet. Think of the anxiety that could be relieved if we taught about the clitoris and basic human sexual response cycle in every high school health class! We also received the typical smattering of inquiries about the G-spot, HPV, herpes and HIV, subjects about which our knowledge is continually evolving and about which there exists a lot of misinformation. I was surprised at the lack of questions about anal sex, which is usually a pretty hot topic.

I was most struck, however, by questions about sexual communication. We are still doing a poor job of getting people to talk openly about sex and not make assumptions about other people based on their identity or past behavior. The hardest questions to answer are the ones about relationships and negotiating sexual boundaries, because there are no quick-and-easy solutions that apply universally. Several students chose to follow up with me after the Q&A was over to clarify their questions or get more specific information, because it’s almost impossible to confine a sexual communication question to the simple 3-by-5 index cards that we used to collect them.

One student I talked to had followed all the “rules” that are typically suggested about clearly defining her own sexual values and boundaries before getting into a relationship and then communicating those boundaries to a potential partner before getting involved in a relationship. Love it! Her partner appeared to understand those boundaries and they had a mutual agreement about what they would and wouldn’t do sexually.

However, over time, some “boundary creep” appeared. I’ve heard about this from other people as well. Either your partner assumed that you would change your mind about a particular type of sex (“Oh, wait—you meant ‘never’ when you said ‘never’?”) or, in the flush of a new relationship, underestimated the importance of a particular type of sex to them. Perspectives can change when a person hasn’t had a kind of sex they like in a year or more. And then subtle, passive-aggressive pressure can appear, perhaps in the form of offhand comments or questions or even through trying to take things in a new direction during sex without discussing it first.

This can be frustrating to both partners, especially the one who thought that she or he had been upfront and clear about boundaries at the beginning. To me, this emphasizes the fact that sexual negotiation is an ongoing dialogue, not a one-time conversation. People change and relationships are all about knowing when to compromise so that both people’s needs are reasonably taken care of, and knowing when a compromise would require you to abandon too much of yourself.

I suggested to this student that she bring up the passive-aggressive behavior she was seeing in a direct but non-confrontational way, simply stating what she was witnessing and asking her partner what was going on. It seemed time to reopen the discussion, acknowledge that relationships can be difficult, and see how both people felt about the original agreement. Perhaps talking alone can resolve the feelings of frustration, perhaps a new compromise agreement can be reached, or perhaps the two will realize that their values are not compatible and move on. I would consider any of these outcomes a success as long as both people feel that they have maintained their integrity as sexual beings.