We tend to treat boundaries like walls. Something cold. Something we put up against the people we love when we’ve run out of patience. I’ve come to believe the opposite is true: a boundary, set well, might be one of the warmest things you can offer someone.

Here’s what I mean. True love shows up when you care about someone enough, and you’re confident enough in your relationship with them, that you refuse to participate in the things that are hurting them — or hurting you, or hurting the people around you both. That refusal isn’t rejection. It’s the furthest thing from it.

Out here in Iowa, every farm has fences. Nobody drives past a fence line and thinks, “That farmer must hate his neighbor.” The fence isn’t anger. The fence is clarity. It says: this is where my field ends and yours begins, and because we both know that, we can wave at each other from the road for the next forty years. The relationships that go sour are almost never the ones with clear fence lines. They’re the ones where nobody ever said where anything ended or began.

Music taught me the same thing from another direction. A rest in a piece of music is not a failure of the melody. It’s part of the melody. The silence is written into the score on purpose, and a musician who refuses to honor the rests doesn’t give you more music — he gives you noise. Some of the most loving sentences I’ve ever learned to say are rests: “I would love to talk about this, but what we’re doing right now isn’t healthy. I’m going to step away, and we can come back to it when things are calm.”

That sentence used to feel like giving up to me. It isn’t. Walking away from an unhealthy moment is not walking away from a person.

And here’s a harder truth I’ve had to sit with. When we say the same thing to someone over and over — the same criticism, the same reminder of the same failure — at some point we have to admit we’re no longer saying it for them. We’re saying it for us. If my true focus were on helping someone change, I’d say it once, clearly, in a way they could actually hear and process. Repetition past that point stops being encouragement and starts being a hammer. I know, because I’ve held the hammer. Most of us have.

So what does a boundary actually do, if it’s done in love? Two things, I think. It hands the other person back the responsibility for their own life — the independence God created them to live in — instead of letting me carry it for them, badly, while resenting the weight. And it protects something in me worth protecting, because loving my neighbor as myself assumes there’s a self left to love from.

But none of this works if I skip the first step, which is the quiet one nobody sees: knowing my own boundaries before I try to hold them. Who am I? What was I made for? What can I actually carry, and what have I been carrying out of guilt or habit? When I begin to understand where my own edges are — my abilities, my motivations, the shape of the field I’ve actually been given — only then can I see clearly where my boundaries end and someone else’s begin. Most boundary problems, I suspect, are really self-knowledge problems wearing a disguise.

In my work I sit with people in their homes, in the middle of their real lives, and I can tell you the ones who seem most at peace are rarely the ones who said yes to everything. They’re the ones who figured out what was theirs to hold and held it well, and let the rest belong to the people it belonged to.

So here’s what I’d ask you to sit with this week. Is there a place in your life where you’ve been calling something love that’s really just an absence of fences? Is there a sentence you’ve said so many times it stopped being for the other person? And do you know where your own field ends?

Don’t take my word for any of this. Walk your own fence line and see.

— Reggie