I’ve been thinking a lot about boundaries lately (see last week’s blog post.) While driving the other day, I started thinking about the movie, Moonstruck (stay with me!)

If you haven’t seen the movie, put it on your list; it’s a good one. I’m not going to spoil it by telling you all the details but I will mention one subplot.

The main character’s mother, Mrs. Rose Castorini (played by Olympia Dukakis—Brilliant!) is an older Italian housewife. She knows her husband of many years is having an affair and she starts asking the other men in her life why they think men cheat.

Toward the end of the movie, the whole family is seated around the breakfast table.

Rose looks down the table and says to her husband, “I want you to stop seeing her.”

He starts to get upset and then thumps the table with both hands and says, “It’s finished.”

Then he says he loves her and she says it back (or maybe it’s the other way around, it’s been a while since I’ve seen the movie.)

While she doesn’t actually come out and say what she’ll do if he doesn’t stop seeing the woman, it’s implied: She will not continue to live with someone who is cheating on her.

I think this is a good example of a boundary. While Rose Castorini does spend some time trying to figure why her husband is cheating on her, in the end she asks for what she wants. She doesn’t say “Why would you..? or “How could you..?” She doesn’t ask him to love her more, she doesn’t tell him why he shouldn’t have cheated. She says, in effect, “I see what you’re doing and I want it to stop.”

Now, this is the movies, so it’s all very cut and dried. Not all of us would figure out what we want to do with our cheating spouse in the course of one evening, but the lesson here is that, from Rose Castorini’s perspective, she didn’t waste her energy trying to figure out how to change her husband—or herself—to try to control the situation. She took the situation as it was and asked for the change she wanted. In this instance, her husband complied with her wishes.

If he didn’t, that would be a whole ‘nother movie. But let’s pretend, for a few seconds here, that Mr. Castorini, didn’t tell his wife he would stop seeing his other woman.

Then, the ball is back in Mrs. Castorini’s court. She can’t control her husband’s behavior, but she can decide what she will live with and what she won’t.

We all decide what we will live with and what we won’t. Sometimes we decide consciously, and many times we decide by unconsciously “going along” with whatever is happening around us. We fail to set boundaries with the people and end up feeling violated.

What do you live with? Have you decided to live with it, or have you avoided setting a boundary?