Subtle reasoning, Mojo, and I agree with it. The stating of a boundary or a condition is something that you say to yourself. Period.
After that, you may or may not choose to relay it to your partner. If you do relay it to your partner, it must not be done in the spirit of "I'm doing THIS to get you to do/not do THAT." It must just be a reporting of "this is the way things are."
This is really good, and it may be the missing link in all of our boundary discussions.
When I said to my BF, "I will not be under the same roof with you and alcohol ever again," I was truly at the end of my rope and wasn't testing him or even trying to get him to stop drinking. I was reporting a conclusion that *I* had already reached through an internal process. AND if he had stopped drinking on his own, I might not have ever made that statement to him. But after he got home from the heart surgery, he bought a bottle of wine, and that's when I told him the conclusion I had already reached.
[Amusing (or not) aside: We were talking about this over the weekend, and he does not remember my making that statement or expressing that boundary. The way he remembers it is that he decided in the hospital that he would stop drinking then and there. What really happened is that we had an ugly scene in his hospital room involving the nurse who was giving him discharge instructions and I was ranting about his drinking and about how I could not get the cardiologist to make any statement to BF one way or the other about the damaging effects of drinking a 12-pack of beer every g-dd-mn night! I remember crying and screaming a bit. He remembers none of this... only that he was the man o' steel who left the hospital vowing to remain dry. ]
Anyway, Mojo, this business of firming up one's own position on these issues and committing to that position before or even instead of ever telling your partner about them is very important.
