Setting boundaries can be healthy. But have we become too quick to decide that difficult relationships are relationships we no longer need?
By Geralynn Madonna
We hear a great deal these days about protecting our peace.
Set boundaries. Stop explaining yourself. Distance yourself from people who drain your energy. Surround yourself with those who support the person you are becoming.
There is value in much of this advice. We should be able to protect ourselves from relationships that are harmful, exhausting, or consistently disrespectful.
But the growing conversation around family estrangement raises some important questions. Cornell sociologist Karl Pillemer's research has found that more than one in four American adults report being estranged from at least one family member. Psychologists, including Joshua Coleman, have also examined how changing expectations about personal happiness, emotional well-being, and family obligations are reshaping our relationships.
These are complicated issues, and there are certainly circumstances in which ending contact is necessary. But I wonder whether, in our efforts to protect ourselves, we've begun to overlook something important.
Relationships have never been easy. People disappoint us. They misunderstand us. They remember things differently. They sometimes say the wrong thing, fail to recognize what matters to us, or expect us to behave in ways we have long since outgrown.
Are these always reasons to leave?
Or have we become so focused on protecting our individual well-being that we sometimes forget relationships require us to make room for another person's experience, even when it differs from our own?
I don't think this is simply a question of boundaries. It is a question of how we understand one another, how those understandings change, and what happens when they no longer agree.
The person we know may not be the person standing in front of us
Think about someone you have known for twenty or thirty years.
You probably have a fairly settled understanding of who that person is. You know their personality, their habits, what they are likely to say, and how they usually respond. You may even anticipate their reactions before they have a chance to express them.
That familiarity can be comforting. It gives relationships continuity.
But it can also become limiting.
Imagine a family gathered for a holiday dinner.
An adult daughter is talking about a major financial decision she has made. She has built a successful career, managed her finances responsibly for years, and is perfectly capable of making her own choices.
Her father interrupts.
"Are you sure you know what you're doing? You've never been very good with money."
The comment may seem insignificant to everyone else at the table. It may even be offered with genuine concern.
But to the daughter, it represents something much larger.
She is no longer the young woman who struggled to manage her first paycheck. She has spent years developing skills, making decisions, and establishing her independence.
Yet in that moment, she is once again being treated as the person she was twenty years earlier.
She may respond sharply. Her father may become defensive. Other family members may wonder why such a small comment caused an argument.
But the disagreement isn't really about money.
It is about the frustration of not being recognized for who she has become.
We rarely stop to consider how much of what we believe about another person comes from who they were rather than who they are today.
A parent may continue treating an adult child as someone who needs direction. A sibling may still be seen as irresponsible, even after decades of responsible decisions. A longtime friend may be uncomfortable when someone who once agreed with everything begins expressing different opinions.
The person may have changed considerably, but the relationship continues operating from an earlier understanding.
One person believes they are relating to someone they know well. The other feels increasingly misunderstood.
And because both are responding from different understandings of the same relationship, even an ordinary conversation can become a source of tension.
The disagreement may appear to be about something relatively minor. Underneath it is a much larger question:
Why can't you see who I am now?
When being misunderstood becomes exhausting
There is a difference between someone disagreeing with us and someone continually relating to a version of us we no longer recognize.
Disagreement can be uncomfortable, but it does not necessarily threaten our sense of self. We can hold different opinions and still feel respected.
Being repeatedly misunderstood in a relationship is different.
We may begin to feel that our choices require constant explanation. We find ourselves defending decisions we have already made, correcting assumptions that no longer apply, or responding to expectations we thought we had left behind.
Eventually, the effort of maintaining the relationship can become greater than the pleasure we receive from it.
And sometimes we begin behaving differently around that person.
We become quieter. We avoid certain subjects. We agree when we would rather disagree. We slip into familiar patterns simply because challenging them seems too exhausting.
It is possible to feel like an earlier version of ourselves in the presence of someone who continues to see us that way.
I call one aspect of this experience Recognition Lag: the delay between change and its recognition. It happens inside us, but it can also happen between us.
Recognition Lag is one of the concepts within Recognition Theory, which I developed to explore how change becomes part of our sense of identity.
We may have moved forward in important ways while the people around us continue responding to an earlier version of who we were.
The result can be a relationship in which both people believe they know the other, yet neither feels fully understood.
But what if we are also holding on to an earlier version of them?
This is where the conversation becomes more complicated.
Think again about the daughter at that holiday dinner.
She hears her father's comment as another example of how critical he has always been. But has she considered that he may have changed, too? Perhaps he has become more patient in other ways, or his concern about money comes from experiences she has never fully understood.
None of that makes his comment less frustrating. But it raises another question: Is she seeing the father sitting across from her today, or the father she remembers?
It is easy to recognize when someone else has failed to understand how we have changed.
It is much harder to consider whether we are doing the same thing to them.
We may want others to recognize our growth while continuing to judge them by something they did years ago.
We may expect them to understand our new priorities while assuming their motivations have remained exactly the same.
We may even become so certain of who someone is that we stop allowing new information to change our opinion.
And here is the contradiction.
We want the freedom to become different people, but we don't always extend that freedom to those around us.
That is one reason longstanding relationships can become particularly difficult. They contain years of shared experiences, but also years of assumptions that may never have been reconsidered.
And those assumptions can become remarkably resistant to change.
When we say someone has always been selfish, controlling, difficult, or emotionally unavailable, are we describing who they are today? Or are we relying on an understanding formed at another time?
Sometimes the description remains accurate. People do repeat harmful patterns, and we should not ignore evidence simply because we hope someone has changed.
But sometimes we stop looking.
And once we stop looking, it becomes difficult for either person to be recognized differently.
Why walking away can feel easier than reconsidering what we know
There is something reassuring about certainty.
When we decide that someone is toxic, selfish, or incapable of understanding us, we have an explanation for why the relationship is difficult.
We know where we stand. We know what to do.
The uncertainty disappears.
But relationships are rarely as simple as the labels we give them.
Someone may be inconsiderate in one situation and generous in another. A parent may genuinely love an adult child while struggling to respect their independence. A friend may be supportive in a crisis but uncomfortable when the relationship begins to change.
These contradictions don't necessarily make the relationship healthy. They do, however, make it more complicated than a single description can capture.
Understanding that complexity requires effort.
It may mean reconsidering our own interpretation of an event. It may mean acknowledging that another person experienced the same conversation differently. It may also mean recognizing that our expectations of the relationship have changed without our ever explaining those changes.
And sometimes it means accepting that neither person is entirely wrong.
Walking away can offer immediate relief from that uncertainty. We no longer have to negotiate the relationship or question whether things might be different.
Of course, there are circumstances in which ending contact is necessary. Abuse, intimidation, repeated manipulation, and persistent disregard for boundaries are not misunderstandings that someone should be expected to tolerate.
But in relationships that are difficult rather than dangerous, certainty can sometimes arrive before understanding.
We decide what the relationship means before we have fully examined what happened within it.
The difference between leaving a relationship and resolving its meaning
One of the things I've come to believe is that an external change does not automatically produce an internal resolution.
We can leave a job and continue thinking of ourselves through the role we once held. We can move to a new place and remain attached to the life we left behind. We can experience a major transition without immediately understanding what it means for who we are.
Relationships can work in much the same way.
We may stop speaking to someone, but the relationship doesn't necessarily disappear from our internal lives.
We continue remembering conversations. We reconsider decisions. We imagine what we might have said differently. We sometimes feel relief, but also sadness, guilt, anger, or disappointment.
These feelings can exist together.
Ending contact may have been the right decision, yet we may still struggle to understand what the relationship meant to us and why it became impossible to maintain.
This is another place where Recognition Theory offers a useful perspective.
A change becomes part of our identity not simply because it has occurred, but through the process of recognizing and integrating its meaning.
When a relationship ends, the external circumstances may change immediately. Our understanding of ourselves in relation to that person may take much longer.
We may no longer be someone's partner, friend, or confidant, yet those relationships remain part of the history through which we understand ourselves.
Distance changes our circumstances. It does not necessarily change the meaning we carry.
And that may be why some relationships continue to affect us long after we have decided they are over.
Have we begun to expect relationships to confirm rather than challenge us?
We often describe healthy relationships as those in which we feel supported, understood, and accepted.
Certainly, those qualities matter.
But does feeling supported mean that someone must always agree with us? Does being understood mean that our interpretation of every situation must be accepted? And does protecting our peace mean avoiding people who challenge the way we see ourselves?
I don't think so.
Some of the most meaningful relationships in our lives are with people who know us well enough to question us.
They may recognize patterns we have overlooked. They may remember strengths we have forgotten. They may challenge decisions that seem inconsistent with what we say matters to us.
That doesn't mean their judgment is always correct.
But there is a difference between someone attempting to control who we are and someone asking us to consider something we may not want to see.
If we begin treating every challenge as a threat to our well-being, we risk losing something valuable.
We lose the opportunity to understand ourselves through perspectives other than our own.
Recognition is not the same as agreement.
Someone can recognize who we are without endorsing every decision we make. And we can recognize another person's experience without accepting behavior that causes us harm.
That distinction deserves more attention in our conversations about boundaries.
What if the relationship needs to change rather than end?
Not every relationship can be repaired. Not every person is willing to listen, reconsider, or change.
And sometimes the healthiest decision is to accept that reality.
But how many relationships might become more manageable if we stopped assuming they had to continue in exactly the form they once took?
A friendship may no longer support the same level of closeness. A family relationship may require firmer limits. Two people may need to acknowledge that their expectations of one another are no longer realistic.
The relationship may still have value, even if it cannot remain what it was.
We often think of relationships as either successful or failed, close or distant, maintained or ended.
But some relationships need to be redefined rather than abandoned.
That possibility requires both people to recognize that something has changed.
It also requires a willingness to let go of the roles, assumptions, and expectations that once defined the connection.
And that may be more difficult than simply walking away.
Perhaps protecting our peace requires a different kind of understanding
I don't believe we should remain in relationships that repeatedly diminish us simply because they have a long history.
Nor do I believe that every disagreement deserves endless discussion.
There are times when leaving is necessary, and recognizing that can be an important part of personal growth.
But I also think we should be cautious about adopting a view of relationships in which discomfort itself becomes evidence that something is wrong.
People change. Their priorities shift. Their understanding of themselves develops. And the people who have known them longest may be the slowest to recognize those changes.
Sometimes we are the person who has changed.
Sometimes we are the person who has failed to notice.
And sometimes both are true.
Perhaps the question we should ask before deciding that someone no longer belongs in our life is not simply whether the relationship brings us peace.
Perhaps we should also ask whether we are responding to the person who is actually in front of us, or to the person we have come to believe they are.
Because there is something worth considering in all of this:
We cannot expect others to recognize who we have become if we are unwilling to reconsider who they may have become, too.