Relationships Advice: How to Know if Your Relationship Is Healthy? Good to Know!

How do you know if you have a healthy relationship? Good to know! Relationships are an important part of a healthy life. Research consistently shows that social connections are critical to both mental and physical health. People in healthy relationships have better health outcomes, are more likely to engage in healthy behaviors, and have a lower risk of mortality. How do you know if you have a healthy relationship? For example, research has shown that people in secure romantic relationships have a lower risk of cardiovascular disease. 

People often spend a lot of time talking about how to identify a bad relationship, but there is much less discussion about what exactly constitutes a healthy relationship. How do you know if your relationship is healthy, and what can you do to make a good relationship even better? How to tell if you are in a healthy relationship:

Questions to ask yourself

How to Know if You’re in a Healthy Relationship: Characteristics of a Healthy Relationship

While every relationship is different, some key characteristics help differentiate a healthy interpersonal connection from an unhealthy one. 

Trust

Trusting your partner is a key component of any healthy relationship. Research shows that your ability to trust others is influenced by your overall attachment style. Early relationships help set expectations for future relationships. If your past relationships were secure, stable, and trusting, you’re more likely to trust future partners. However, if your past relationships were unstable and unreliable, you may have some trust issues to overcome in the future.

Building trust requires mutual self-disclosure and sharing about yourself. Over time, opportunities arise to test and evaluate this trust. As trust grows, the relationship becomes a great source of comfort and security. If you feel like you have to hide something from your partner, it may be because you lack this necessary trust.

Openness and honesty

You should feel like you can be yourself in a healthy relationship. While all couples have different levels of openness and self-disclosure, you should never feel like you have to hide aspects of yourself or change who you are. Being open and honest with each other not only helps you feel more connected as a couple but also helps build trust.

Self-disclosure refers to what you are willing to share about yourself with another person. At the beginning of a relationship, you may be reserved and very cautious about what you are willing to reveal. Over time, as the intimacy of the relationship increases, partners begin to reveal more of their thoughts, opinions, beliefs, interests, and memories to each other.

This doesn’t mean you have to share everything with your partner. Each person needs their privacy and space. The most important thing is whether each partner feels comfortable sharing their hopes, fears, and feelings if they choose to. Healthy couples don’t have to be together all the time or share everything.

However, differences in opinion about how honest a relationship should be can sometimes cause problems. Fortunately, one study found that when people are unhappy with their partner’s level of openness, they tend to discuss the issue with their partner. This is a good example of how addressing a problem openly can help strengthen a relationship.

While your partner may have different needs than you, it’s important to find ways to compromise while still maintaining your boundaries. Boundaries aren’t about secrecy; they’re about establishing that each person has their own needs and expectations. Healthy relationship boundaries allow you to still do things that are important to you, like hanging out with friends and maintaining privacy, while still sharing important things with your partner. A partner who has unhealthy expectations of openness and honesty may expect to know every detail about where you are and what you’re doing, limit who you can spend time with, or demand access to their personal social media accounts.

How to Know if You Have a Healthy Relationship: Mutual Respect

In close, healthy relationships, people share respect for each other. They do not put each other down and they offer support and security. There are several different ways that couples can show respect for each other. These include:

• Hear each other
• Don’t procrastinate when your partner asks you to do something
• Understanding and forgiving when one person makes a mistake
• Build each other up; don’t tear each other down
• Make room in your life for your partner
• Interest in things your partner enjoys
• Allow your partner to have their individuality
• Support and encourage your partner’s aspirations and hobbies
• Show appreciation and gratitude for each other
• Have empathy for each other

Attachment

Healthy relationships are characterized by tenderness and affection. Research has shown that the initial passion that marks the beginning of a new relationship tends to diminish over time, but this does not mean that the need for affection, comfort, and tenderness diminishes.

Passionate love usually occurs at the beginning of a relationship and is characterized by intense longing, strong emotions, and a need to maintain physical intimacy. This passionate love eventually evolves into compassionate love, which is marked by feelings of affection, trust, intimacy, and commitment.

However, it is important to remember that physical needs are different for each person. There is no “right” amount of affection or closeness. The key to a healthy relationship is that both partners are satisfied with the level of affection they share with their partner. A caring partnership is characterized by genuine love and affection for each other, which is expressed in a variety of ways.

Good connection

Healthy, long-lasting relationships, whether friendships or romantic relationships require the ability to communicate well. While it may seem like the best relationships are ones that are free of conflict, knowing how to argue effectively and resolve disagreements is more important than simply avoiding arguments to keep the peace.

Sometimes conflict can be an opportunity to strengthen the bond with your partner. Research has shown that conflict can be beneficial in intimate relationships when serious issues need to be addressed, allowing partners to make changes that benefit the future of the relationship. When conflicts arise, those in healthy relationships can avoid personal attacks. Instead, they maintain respect and empathy for their partner by discussing their thoughts and feelings and working to resolve the issue.

Give and take

Strong relationships are marked by natural reciprocity. It’s not about keeping score or feeling like you owe the other person. You do things for each other because you genuinely want to. This doesn’t mean that give and take in a relationship is always 100% equal. Sometimes one partner may need more help and support. Other times, one partner may simply prefer to take on more of a caregiver role. These imbalances are fine as long as both partners get the support they need.

Signs of trouble

Relationships can change over time, and not all relationships are 100% healthy all the time. Times of stress, in particular, can lead to unhealthy behaviors and coping mechanisms that can create problems. Relationships are unhealthy when the bad outweighs the good, or when certain behaviors are harmful to one or both.

• Feeling pressured to change who you are
• Putting your partner first by neglecting your own needs
• Being forced to give up something you enjoy
• No privacy or pressure to share every detail of your life with your partner
• Unequal control over common resources, including money and transportation
• Trying to control your behavior 
• Criticism of what you do, who you spend time with, how you dress, etc.
• Afraid to share your opinions or thoughts
• Poor communication
• Lack of fairness in conflict resolution
• Feeling like spending time together is a commitment
• Avoid each other
• Scream
• Physical violence

Some problems may be temporary and something you can work through together, either through self-help techniques or with the help of a mental health professional. When it comes to more serious issues, such as abusive behavior, your primary concern should be maintaining your safety.

How to build healthy relationships

Toxic behavior is often a sign that an unhealthy relationship needs to end. For some problems, there are many ways to fix the weaknesses and build a healthier relationship. Some steps you can take to strengthen your relationship include:

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Couples who feel grateful for each other feel closer to each other and tend to be more satisfied in their relationships. One study published in the journal Personal Relationships found that showing gratitude to your partner can be an important way to increase satisfaction in a romantic relationship. Another study found that feeling grateful for your romantic partner was a predictor of relationship longevity. 

Managing daily work and raising children can sometimes cause couples to fall into the same old routine. Boredom can lead to even more relationship dissatisfaction. For example, researchers found that couples who reported being bored in the seventh year of their relationship were more likely to experience marital dissatisfaction nine years later.

So what can you do to keep the romance alive in the long run?

Every relationship will have its bumps and turns. Conflicts over finances, parenting issues, and other differences can cause ups and downs in a long-term relationship. Even if you and your partner have a healthy relationship most of the time, there may be times when problems arise that could benefit from professional help.

If you feel like your relationship could benefit from outside help, consider talking to a counselor or therapist. A mental health professional with skills in interpersonal and relationship issues can help you learn to communicate, listen, and work through some of the issues that may be interfering with your relationship.

Now you know how to tell if your relationship is healthy. Work on building your social support system outside of the relationship and consider leaving the relationship if it ends up being unhealthy.