Building and Maintaining Healthy Relationships

Healthy relationships are good for you. Supportive and loving relationships are more likely to make you feel happy and satisfied. A healthy relationship with your partner and family members can improve your life, wellbeing and make everyone feel good about themselves.

Healthy relationships don't happen on their own. They take time to build and need work to keep them healthy. The more positive effort you put into a relationship, the healthier it should be.

People who have healthy relationships are more likely to feel happy and satisfied with their lives. They are less likely to have physical and mental health problems.

Healthy relationships can:

• increase your sense of worth, belonging and help you feel less alone
• give you confidence
• help you overcome difficult times in your life

Be clear about what you want. It helps you make your point clearly and honestly while respecting the other person's point of view. Try using 'I' statements instead of critical 'you' statements. For example, say 'I really hate it when you don't clean up the dishes” rather than 'You never help me in the kitchen”.

Say sorry when you're wrong. This is really important, as it helps heal relationships and make them stronger.

Be affectionate and show appreciation. Relationships can become routine after a while. Make special time together and continue to show your affection. Even just snuggling on the couch after work helps show intimacy.

Find shared interests. Finding hobbies you both enjoy allows you to spend time together. This could be as simple as doing a night class together or taking up a new sport.

Find solutions that work for both of you. Conflict occasionally occurs in any relationship. It is essential that you both respect and accept your differences and similarities. Finding solutions that work for both of you will probably require compromise at different times.

Make time for family time. Finding time together as a family can be difficult. However, even one family meal a week gives everyone a chance to catch up, connect and communicate with each other.

You each make the other feel loved and emotionally fulfilled. There’s a difference between being loved and feeling loved. When you feel loved, it makes you feel accepted and valued by your partner, like someone truly gets you. Some relationships get stuck in peaceful coexistence, but without the partners truly relating to each other emotionally. While the union may seem stable on the surface, a lack of ongoing involvement and emotional connection serves only to add distance between two people.

Despite the claims of romantic fiction or movies, no one person can meet all of your needs. In fact, expecting too much from your partner can put unhealthy pressure on a relationship. To stimulate and enrich your romantic relationship, it’s important to sustain your own identity outside of the relationship, preserve connections with family and friends, and maintain your hobbies and interests.

Relationships with our family, friends, intimate partners, community members and colleagues, form an important part of our lives, affecting our sense of self, satisfaction levels, physical and mental health and overall wellbeing. While relationships can be one of the most rewarding parts of our lives, building healthy relationships with others requires hard work and ongoing effort.