My secrets for maintaining a healthy relationship
Today I decided to talk about good relationships, which can make a relationship successful or not. Some of the points that I will talk about can be applied to love relationships, friendship, work, etc.
Obviously, I don’t have Holy Grail for relationships, but I went to research some famous techniques used and talk about what I think it had, and it still has the biggest positive impact on my relationship.
Before talking about what may or may not be helping to preserve a relationship with others, we must foster a good relationship with ourselves, you can read a publication I made on the topic of self-love.
The reason why we should maintain good relationships goes far beyond the momentary pleasures of laughing when we are with friends or having sex with our partner. In this post, in the section “Why we should nurture our personal relationships” I talk about the topic.
But what is a quality relationship? What factors can characterize a healthy relationship?
What does not mean a quality relationship:
- Don’t argue → you have to learn to argue, arguing doesn’t mean you have to yell at each other and see how you can reach the highest decibels. Arguing for things that happen at the moment, not arguing for things that happened last year
- That you need to guess exactly what the other is thinking.
- You need to agree on everything → you can respectfully disagree.
- Everything must revolve around the other person → you can and must maintain relationships of friendships and family. A person will not be able to give you everything you need (obviously here I am talking about friendships and love relationships and not 2 love relationships).
- Your partner is a boxing bag → venting and unloading on your partner are entirely different concepts
- That relations have only binary states, either it’s great, or it sucks
- Your partner doesn’t have to be perfect → because nobody is, here the way is to learn to grow together.
What I’m doing in my relationship
1. “We were made for each other, I can even read your thoughts” does not exist
I started dating relatively young, I was 17 years old which makes the insecurities of adolescence still present. I know that many times I missed opportunities to do something I wanted because I didn’t express it. By not saying that we like something or not, we miss an opportunity to improve next time.
2. “He / she has to like you anyway” does not mean neglect in the relationship
If when you start dating, or even before you start dating, you prepare surprises for each other, or have dinner only for two, or wear a different outfit, why shouldn’t you do it afterwards?
Not neglecting does not mean that you have to prepare as if you were going to a wedding, but rather schedule a day to have dinner together or prepare a dinner with his / her favourite food, wear a different outfit than usual, organize a walk in nature, etc. Basically preparing something, not just on Valentine’s Day, something that says you remembered the other person.
In practice …
In the quarantine my boyfriend and I started to spend more time together, and my routine was to wake up wearing a tracksuit and go to the computer to work. We were spending more time together, but the time we talked did not increase. We decided that we had to change something to start dedicating time effectively to ourselves. The way we found a way to fix this was every Friday afternoon / night we had a date, we would go out to dinner (when the restaurants opened) or prepare dinner or go for a walk. One week I chose what we did and the next week my boyfriend chose. The only rule for these meetings was not to be able to move the cell phone all the time.
3: “Do not do to others what you would not like to be done to you”
I think this is one of my main mottos in life, it seems simple, doesn’t it?
The Gottman approach developed by Dr. John Gottman and Dr. Julie Schwartz was carried out by observing thousands of couples.
They concluded that healthy relationships have on average 5 times more good times than bad ones (with unstable relationships having on average the same number of good and bad times).
With these studies Dr. Gottman theorizes that there are 4 factors that can lead to the breakdown of relationships:
- Criticism (destructive criticism)
- Contempt
- Defensiveness (for not defending ourselves, we blame the other or make ourselves a victim)
- Stonewalling
In this video show a summary of the 4 points is made and which may be the antidote for each one.
If we would not like them to despise us or support us when we need it most, why would we do it to the person we are supposed to like?
In practice …
The points where I know I need to improve the most is defensiveness and stonewalling, I think my biggest problem is that I am afraid of failing I feel that on the one hand I have to defend myself and on the other I cannot “give my arm to cheer” even though I think that have no reason to assume this as failures.
The way I have been working on this point is improving my self-love so that I can say “You’re right” and “I’m sorry” when I need.
4: Use intelligently “Do to others what you would like to be done to you”
In theory, doing to others what they would like to be done to you seems like a positive thing, but this presupposes that we are all the same and that we all want the same, which is not the case. So, we must adapt this phrase to “Do to others what they would like you to do to them”. As time goes on in a relationship you will realize what your partner likes and dislikes that you do (that’s why tip # 1 is so important, so you don’t need to get to what the other person likes by trial and error).
The book “The 5 Languages of Love” by Dr. Gary Chapman (pastor and marriage counsellor) is partly related to this point. This indicates that we all express and receive love in different ways and that the success of a relationship can be improved by realizing how our partner fits into these 5 languages. The 5 languages are:
- Affirming words (words that are encouraging and caring)
- Service actions (tasks that are not done out of obligation)
- Gifts
- Quality time (quantity of time is different from quality time)
- Physical touch
The intention of the book is to help people discover what their language is and what the language of the partner is and invest more in the language of the partner when we want to show our love.
In practice …
Over the years of dating I realized that my partner devalues gifts and service actions (like I cook him for example) because they are things that he easily gets someone else to do. While quality time and physical touch is already something that values much more. This, I was discovering either by his reactions when everything happened or simply when he says, “I prefer X to Y”, which makes the process much faster.
As I said before when the quarantine started, my boyfriend and I decided that we were going to have a sort of meeting on Fridays. In the week that I was the one to choose, knowing what he liked best, I chose to go get food and choose a film to see us because it was the type and things he liked. On the contrary, one of the times he chose we ordered him to come, but we went to eat in a park in the sun (something I like best).
5: Don’t change for love, change for yourself
Changing for love will, sooner or later, create resentment if you don’t agree with that change.
In practice …
What I do in situations of disagreement with my boyfriend is to assess whether what I would have to do to change would cost me or not, that is, whether the gain I brought to my partner would be better than the loss it would be for me. Being something that even if I didn’t agree, if I were indifferent to the level of taste and work, it would be worth changing. A personal example, I would say to my boyfriend “Don’t you want to get me a coffee?”. For me, this was the same as saying “You can get me a coffee” but, for him, no. He said it didn’t make sense because he assumed that he wanted to get me a coffee, it didn’t cost him to take it, but it’s not like he was anxious waiting for me to place the order. For me, the effort to ask in one way or another was identical and, although I did not fully agree, I started to choose the question “Can you …”.
6: Don’t say “I told you so”
I think that a lot of us suffer from this disease. I, although I believe that I have already improved a lot on this point, I still say more times than I would like. Let’s be practical, when we say something is for some purpose, thinking about the possible in this situation:
Scenario 1: your partner already feels bad that something didn’t go as he wanted, and he starts to feel worse when he hears this phrase because he felt he shouldn’t even have tried → your partner will stop saying or do certain things fearing being judged. Your partner -1 and you 0.
Scenario 2: your partner already feels bad that something didn’t go as he wanted and without the patience to hear “I told you so” reacts badly and the two begin to argue. Your partner -1 and you -1.
Scenario 3: your partner already feels bad that something didn’t go as he wanted, and you say “Don’t worry about it now, let’s see what went wrong, and we will find a solution together so that the next one runs your partner +1 and you +1.
It is easy to see that the only one that brings a Win-win situation is the 3rd scenario.
Final thoughts
→ Everything you read is based on research and experience in a relationship that I have had for 13 years (I am 28 years old, so I consider it to be a long relationship for my age). The points spoken are supposed to make you think what could or could not be applied to you, it should not be seen as a checklist because, each relationship has its peculiarities.
→ Despite talking about these 6 tips that can help your relationship, it doesn’t mean that mine is perfect because none is. However, I consider that as we both recognize this, that we accept that we have to work on it so that it can grow, and we can both grow with it.
→ It is very difficult for me to choose the most important tip because it depends a lot on the state of the current relationship and what is the most fragile area of the relationship. This most critical point can depend on what you and your partner expected from a relationship and can also change over time.
→ It is also important to understand the difference between falling in love and staying in love. This requires a different level of work and dedication. A relationship is not an acquired good. In any business if we do not nurture relationships with our customers, however good the product is, we run the risk of losing the customer if we do not dedicate ourselves to the customer service part.
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