Thanks for plowing through my long post, heather. Sometime, you might want to check out the boundary links that cobra so nicely posted (thanks, c!).
Here is indeed where the rubber meets the road: two people who live together should (there's the s-word!) treat each other with civility, caring, and kindness EVEN IF NO ONE MAKES THEM DO IT!
So when you stop trying to make your partner be a certain way and they continue to treat you like sh!t, and when you continually make simple requests of them ("Honey, could you take the kids tomorrow morning-- I just need 30 more minutes of sleep), and they ridicule you, turn you down rudely, ignore you-- well then you need to decide if you want to go on living with a person like that.
We can't spend every waking minute of our day trying to get our partner to notice us and treat us with kindness and courtesy. We shouldn't need to. Kindness, courtesy, and making each other's life easier, say, 91.4% of the time SHOULD be a given.
But if a person treats you like crap a lot of the time, and the only way you can get them to be civil is to threaten bodily harm or the withdrawal of something they want-- no one should have to live that way.
What the boundary setting thing does is clear out the dust, smoke, flying debris so you can see where the commotion is truly coming from.
With two grown-up people who love each other and are capable of being civil, the boundaries should be lightly drawn chalk lines on the ground, not coils of razor wire. If they NEED to be the latter, something's wrong with the Big Picture.
