Healthy Relationships: Real or Fake?
Do you know the characteristics of healthy relationships? Do you want to know whether a healthy relationship can even be achieved? In this article, you'll find out all about what makes a relationship be genuinely healthy. Click to read more!
Description
Have you ever looked at a couple, real or fictional, and thought their relationship was simply too perfect in comparison to anything you ever had?
If so, you are not alone; as we go from one heartbreak to the next, it's not hard to feel like hyper-functional couples are the stuff of fairy tales.
Which brings us to the question: What does a healthy relationship look like - if it exists at all?
This is what we are going to try to answer in this article by listing what the core principles of a healthy relationship are.
Communication
The very first thing most healthy relationships have is a common understanding, which can only be achieved if both parts can speak their mind without fear.
As you can imagine, that means that, while all relationships have fights, one of the healthy relationship characteristics is that conflicts occur within the boundaries of respect.
When and if a couple achieves this state, misunderstandings and trivial fights become rarer, facilitating both parties to consider the other.
Communication is so important that the best dating sites out there have it as their single and most important focus.
Trust
To say “every relationship is built on trust” has become so commonplace that the phrase itself has become a cliché. Yet, like many of its kind, this one, in particular, bears truth.
Without trust, you can never be sure that your partner means what they say, a void that can easily be replaced by our imagination, which is often worse than reality. This is where the healthy relationship vs toxic relationship debate comes in, and where you should start asking yourself whether what you are experiencing is normal.
Affection
If proper and honest communication is important, affection is absolutely essential, as while the first is achieved through words, the latter backs it with action.
After all, you can say “I love you” a thousand times, but it will mean very little if you never demonstrate it in a visible way.
These can be simple things like leaving little notes, or texting them along the day, breakfast in bed is also a classical way to tell that special someone what they mean to you. This is how healthy relationships look like: both partners truly care for each other, in ways big and small.
Reciprocity
Communicating your love through words and actions is wonderful, but not so much when you are the only one doing it.
People tend to mistake the give and take nature of reciprocity as a “he did x for me, so I should do y for him as well”, which is a mistake.
Reciprocity is less about exchanging favors and more about a state of things where you know you can count on each other on whatever needs to be done.
Conclusion
A healthy relationship is different from a perfect one, the main difference being that the former is perfectly achievable if both sides compromise to make it so.
Healthy relationships are not built on the absence of problems, but rather on your ability to work as a team to remedy them in the best possible way.
This can only be achieved through the principles above, which, even if not encompassing there is to a happy relationship, give you the sturdy foundation to start building one.
It also all starts with knowing what healthy relationship expectations are, and we believe we have managed to give you an idea through this article.
Do you have any healthy relationship advice you’d like to share? Let’s hear it in the comments!
Guest Author’s Bio
Miranda Davis is a freelance writer in the relation and psychology area. Miranda is interested in such topics as building healthy relationships between people, love/sex compatibility, and how to find the right balance in life in general. She is currently doing specific research on the topic. Miranda loves cooking and long-distance walking.