Good Fences Make Good Neighbors

I let my neighbor know beyond the hill,
and on a day we meet to walk the line
and set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
- Robert Frost, “Mending Wall”

So we talked the other day about surviving criticism from our loved ones. Certainly there’s plenty flying around at this moment - the generational differences in how we’re all coping with our evolving fascist hellscape alone are inspiring a lot of… unsolicited input, let’s say. Every generation has some notes for its forebears on how things ought to have been done, and the unfortunate thing about that is, we’re growing as a species, learning more and more every day, whether scientifically, societally, emotionally, or metaphysically. The great frustration of being a parent will always be that your children will end up knowing better than you do, of necessity, because they will have access to information you didn’t, and will be more involved with the world as it changes from the world you knew. And perhaps the hardest job of a parent is to allow that to happen, to not make your own limitations the limits of your child’s world.

When our children become adults, we have to perform a mental flip that many parents are utterly incapable of pulling off. Many parents spend their lives treating their children as fundamentally the same larvae they diapered. In a way, the parent is somewhat denigrating their own capabilities this way - if you genuinely believe that your child can’t manage on their own and still requires parenting, has not become a full and functional adult with equal potential for decision-making and problem-solving, doesn’t that mean you were an atrocious parent? Wasn’t that your whole job?

It’s too easy to fall into a defensive position when we’re criticized - as soon as even one word suggests we might be the target of this conversation, we shut out all else, begin assembling our weaponry to repel the assault. We have stopped listening, stopped giving any kind of a shit what’s being said. We see ourselves as the victim of an attack, and our loved one as the enemy assailant.

But what if we took a moment, like we talked about the other day, and breathed through that awful moment that feels like a physical threat? What if we acted, rather than reacted? What if, instead of hearing criticism and thinking, “This person is telling me the reasons I am bad and will no longer be loved,” we framed it as, “This person cares about our relationship and wants it to be better so that we DON’T have to stop loving each other. This person thinks I am a good person who wants to treat them well, and they are trying to give me ways to do that.”

Boundaries are an investment in the relationship

The snippet above is from Robert Frost. I loved his poetry as a kid for the sense of quiet it seemed to impart, as if his poetry brought the sound-swallowing snow into my bedroom, drowned everything with the listening stillness of the forest. I didn’t understand his poem “Mending Wall” when I was younger, or rather, I understood only the surface narrative: the owner of an orchard rebuilding the stone wall between his property and his neighbor’s. He points out that the wall isn’t necessary - his trees will never escape and try to eat the cones under his neighbor’s pines. His neighbor says only, “Good fences make good neighbors.”

But why? “Isn’t it only where there are cows?” he asks.

I don’t know, you tell me. Are boundaries only useful where there are boundary-pushing individuals? Do walls exist exclusively to keep people out? Or do we also use them to define spaces, to assert our independence, to allow people to move closer while still retaining a modicum of distance?

Think of it this way - say you’re a picky eater, you’d like your mashed potatoes not to touch your ketchup and your bread on your plate. If you just have a flat plate, you gotta create big gaps between those things, so that they don’t mix. BIG gaps you can constantly maintain with your spoon, and the food’s all pushed to the sides to create space. You have to keep pushing things apart, because there’s no firm boundary. But what if you had one of those divided plates that keeps each food in its own space? You’d actually be using MORE of your plate, and the food wouldn’t need to be so widely separated, because the boundary exists - there’s no necessity to overcorrect to make sure the distance is maintained.

Boundaries allow us to be closer to one another while still feeling safe. There’s cultural pressure in our society to believe that boundaries are bad, man, that if you truly loved someone, you would want to fully immerse yourself in them in every way, spend no moment apart, share every thought and feeling. There’s pressure on parents to feel this way about their children, to know literally everything about them, to control all possible outcomes.

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, that wants it down

Remember that there’s a capitalist element to this. Boundaries aren’t things you can sell, you see. Boundaries are generally associated with self-control and restraint, things capitalism would prefer you discard in favor of ravenous, insecure consumption. The pressure from pop culture to psychologically merge with your friends and loved ones is part of the attempt to place your source of self-worth outside you, so that they can say, “Hey, you know your worth comes from everything except who you are, right? Well it turns out it comes specifically from how many of our products you have, so you’d better get on buying more, hadn’t you?”

When we surrender to this pressure, what happens? Our relationships become painful, diminishing, strangling. We become unable to advocate for ourselves, express our needs, ask for help. We sink into toxic shame. None of this is fun, or pleasant, or truly makes us feel loved - it makes us feel needed, but that’s not the same thing - so inevitably we pull away from that relationship, try to reestablish boundaries, and if that doesn’t work, try to separate ourselves. The more people try to control us and colonize us, the less safe and comfortable we feel around them.

So when we choose to set boundaries, to tell our loved ones that the way they’re treating us isn’t okay… we are investing in our relationship. We are saying, “Listen, I don’t want to HAVE to run away from you, but you are making me feel like I need to. Can you give me a little bit of space, so that we can continue to be friends? Because I would hate to lose my friend, but I would also hate to lose myself.”

You see, the other option is nothing. The other option is, you have no relationship with this person anymore. At best, they broke it off and got the hell away from you. At worst, they stay in that relationship, but they sublimate themselves in you, they surrender everything they are to being what you want them to be. Is that the kind of relationship you wanted? Is that what you were hoping for when you met this person, this amazing person that you love - were you hoping to obliterate everything you loved and replace it with yourself?

I don’t think so. And the reason I don’t think so is that this pattern, this codependence, this lack of boundaries tends to come from very, very insecure people who have no self-worth of their own. They source their own self-worth outside themselves, and they need others to obey and reflect in order to feel loved. Frankly, I think anyone who acts like this hates themselves so much that when they do finally make their loved ones into a perfect mirror… they no longer care. They move on to dominating someone else. We are only interesting to narcissists when we provide an emotional charge, a sense of centrality in someone else’s life. When we surrender at last, we become boring, just another ugly part of the self the narcissist cannot bear to face.

Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
what I was walling in or walling out
and to whom I was like to give offense.

No, Robert. Our boundaries are not an offense against others. To say, “This is mine” is offensive only to those who believe everything should be theirs. We do not wall in or wall out - we build the wall together, to stand for our mutual commitment to our relationship, our mutual commitment to being good neighbors. Frost rebuilds the wall because his neighbor wants it to be there, not because he cares about it. He’s willing to do something meaningless to him because the neighbor believes it matters. That’s his contribution to that relationship, his demonstration that his neighbor’s boundary is important even if it isn’t important to him. That’s what the boundary is for - to give us an opportunity to show our love for one another, to respect one another in little ways every day by preserving the space our loved ones need to grow. We don’t spend our days eyeing the boundary, thinking of ways to destroy it. We maintain it tenderly, both of us on our own side, because good fences make good neighbors.