5 Hallmarks Of An Extremely Healthy Relationship
There are some hallmarks of healthy relationships that don’t exist in toxic relationships.
John Schnobrich | Canva When you're in a relationship, it can be challenging to see how healthy or sickly it is. You're too close. There are too many emotions involved. Your friends and family all have different opinions. Recognizing whether or not your relationship is toxic is the best tool to use when considering if your relationship has a future.
Here are 5 hallmarks of an extremely healthy relationship:
1. You have no fear of your partner.
A healthy relationship has no fear. Neither partner lives life being scared of physical or emotional pain. Disagreements exist, but they don’t lead to outbursts of emotion. Do you fear asking your partner if you can go out with your friends because if you do, your partner will become furious? This includes yelling at you, knocking things off tables, and punching walls because they think you're fooling around and your friends hate them.
Do you live in fear if you don’t do your chores on time, your partner will verbally berate you and make you feel incompetent? There are two people in every relationship, and problems arise between them. It’s how relationships work. Each partner has wants and needs they should be able to address without living in fear.
If your partner doesn’t like you going out but is willing to discuss this with you instead of freaking out, then you are in a healthy relationship. If you don't do your chores on time and it leads to discussing how things can be different next time, you are in a healthy relationship. If you don’t do the things you want to do or can’t make mistakes without fear of being attacked, then your relationship is toxic. And it’s time to take a good, hard look at what is next for you.
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2. There's a healthy level of give and take.
Another indicator of a healthy relationship is equitable give and take. This is when each partner has their wants and needs met equally, often as a direct result of conversation. Perhaps you both have different sleep habits — you like to stay up late, and he likes to go to bed early. For people in a toxic relationship, this could be an issue. One person, or both, might insist they go to bed at the same time. They don’t discuss it and believe this will be the case. So, when it isn’t, it becomes a real issue.
A couple in a healthy relationship will recognize each other’s individual needs and work together to meet those needs. For the couple who go to bed at different times, they discussed what would work for them. They agreed they would keep their bedtimes during the week but sleep together at a time halfway between their desired bedtimes on weekends.
By making this decision together, they staved off resentment at the different bedtimes, agreed on a solution, and moved on.
3. There's equality.
An essential part of a healthy relationship is equality, where both partners have an equal say in short-term and big-picture decisions. I have a friend who has six children. When she and her husband looked at houses, he liked one with a long flight of stairs leading from where the car was parked to the front door. She didn’t want the stairs. She could picture lugging groceries and children up those stairs from here to eternity, and the prospect didn’t thrill her. When she voiced her opinion to her husband, he brushed them off and made an offer on the house.
This is an excellent example of how a healthy relationship differs from a toxic one. In a healthy relationship, the husband would have been receptive to at least listening to his wife’s concerns. He would have been open to working through how to manage them together. The wife’s concerns should have taken equal weight to her husband’s, and they could have figured out a compromise. If one person is making all the decisions in your relationship without considering the other person's needs, your relationship may very well be toxic.
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4. There's mutual respect.
No relationship can be deemed healthy if there is no mutual respect. If couples can’t look at each other as equals and know they are good people whose perspectives are vital and deserve to be treated well, then they are in a toxic relationship.
Let's say you have a challenging time letting your partner make decisions around day-to-day workings. You feel like they don’t have the consistency and determination to make decisions and follow through with them. As a result, because the workings of your family are so essential to your life, believing they can't handle this will cause you to lose respect for them. Because they feel like you're treating them as a child and disregarding their input, they will grow increasingly resentful and lose respect for you. This relationship is a toxic one and will end in divorce.
If you don’t respect your partner as you did when you were first together, your relationship is not healthy. You must consider working to fix it or move on.
5. You feel good about yourself.
Many people in toxic relationships don’t feel good about themselves. Years of being ignored and mistreated lead them to doubt their self-worth and not believe they have anything to offer the world. The hallmark of a healthy relationship is feeling good about yourself and believing you can take on the world and succeed. Has your relationship made you feel less than? Has it driven you away from friends and family? Has your career suffered because you don’t believe you can do your job effectively? Do you believe you aren’t worthy of love and don’t deserve the life that you want?
If you don’t feel good about yourself or your place in the world, then you are most likely in a toxic relationship, one you want to get out of before you lose all sense of yourself. Knowing how healthy relationships are different from toxic ones is very important when deciding how to move forward. The goal is to have no fear in your relationship. Healthy relationships are about kindness, consideration, and mutual respect. Be with someone who makes you feel like you can take on the world, someone who makes you happy — at least most of the time. That is a healthy relationship. And that is the goal.
So, take a good look at your relationship. If one or more of the above things aren’t a part of it, your relationship might be toxic, and you must consider moving on!
Mitzi Bockmann is an NYC-based Certified Life Coach and mental health advocate who works exclusively with women to help them be all they want to be. Mitzi's bylines have appeared in The Good Men Project, MSN, PopSugar, Prevention, Huffington Post, and Psych Central, among many others.