We have in our earlier series looked at what it means to have boundaries in your premarital relationships. Thereafter, we looked at one type of such boundaries – Sexual and emotional boundaries. In this series, we shall be looking at three other forms or types of boundaries that we need to build in our premarital relationships.
Spiritual Boundaries
A spiritual boundary occurs when you retain space for yourself spiritually. That is, your relationship with God and the church should not necessarily depend on your premarital partner. You must put in mechanisms to protect your relationship with God at a very personal level and not seek to now depend on the other to grow. More specifically, this is not the time to always pray together or study the bible together. You must learn to be responsible at this stage for your spiritual growth and not necessarily depend on the other. Remember, you are each your person walking with God and neighbour. Again, you must be worried when people at church begin to give you names denoting some kind of married couple when you know you are not married yet. Names such as “love birds”, “Mr and Mrs”, “best couple in town” etc. do not glorify God.
Boundaries around talking about your futures together
Planning for the future together in your premarital relationship experience should move along with increased levels of commitment. The more commitment the two of you make with time, the more it makes sense to talk about the future. There is no need to talk about the number of kids, your kids’ names, and what job they will be doing when you are just in the early months of your relationship. All you are going to do is increase your emotional intimacy, which will influence your sexual desires.
This is not to say, do not talk about kids at all. No, not at all. However, statements such as, “I can see you being the mother of my children.” “I can’t wait to see how beautiful our kids will be, considering how beautiful you are” and so forth can be avoided.
Conversations about emotional future-centred topics need to happen once the relationship starts getting “medium” to “very” on “the serious scale”. However, if you are in the “not that serious” zone and you are talking about the two or three years ahead to get married, you are just playing fire. If you want to keep your emotions and heart healthy during the premarital relationship, make sure you have healthy boundaries around conversations regarding the future.
Boundaries for your words and promises
This is strongly connected to the previous set of boundaries. When Christians abstain from sexual sin, the desire to connect through words is likely to be even more intense. But just like the others, you must balance your commitment levels with the levels you are connecting at. Guard what you say if you want to guard your heart. As earlier noted, do not be exchanging avoidable pleasantries that stimulate unnecessary sexual desires. You should know yourself and your emotional capacity to use certain words in your conversation. We should not make things difficult for ourselves because of what we say or the promises we make.
