Relationship Builder: Walls Don't Work by Ron Carpenter

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I hear so much talk in relationship counseling circles about how people put up walls in relationships. I’ve even heard some people teach the importance of putting up walls in relationships. I certainly believe it’s important to have boundaries in your life, but when it comes to marriage, I firmly believe walls don’t work.

Building walls is nothing more than a defense mechanism where a violation has occurred.

The irony about walls is that they are put up to protect you, to keep an enemy out, but they keep you locked into your pain.

While you put up a defense to keep somebody else from hurting you the way you have been hurt in the past, you simultaneously wall off your life and restrict yourself from experiencing the life that God wants you to participate in.

Not allowing your partner to see they hurt you doesn’t stop them from hurting you. I can tell you nothing hurts me, I can say I don’t care, and I can tell you that it doesn’t bother me, but it doesn’t stop it from hurting, it doesn’t stop me from caring, and it doesn’t stop it from bothering me.

That wall is something that I present to you to try and convince myself that you can’t perpetrate that area anymore. I believe that marriages need to communicate truth. It’s the truth that sets you free, not walls—walls keep you from the truth, and you’ll never truly experience an intimate relationship if you refuse to be vulnerable.

Intimacy, by its very design, means that you are vulnerable. That’s why divorce hurts so much, because you get so much inside information concerning each other in a marriage, and everything you used to guard about each other is now being exposed for the sake of winning the kids, the house, the car, and the stuff.

Being vulnerable means sharing fears, fantasies, dreams, experiences, the good and the bad. That’s what creates intimacy in a marriage, the fact that I have knowledge that no one else possesses and the responsibility to protect that knowledge. I can trust you with this information, because I know you won’t use it against me; you can tell me you were abused or molested, you can tell me about the terrible treatment of your past relationships, and I will cover you where you’ve been hurt. Never publicly poke fun about something your partner revealed to you privately, because they’ll never tell you another thing.
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