Posts Tagged ‘quality of healthy relationships’
7 Qualities of a Healthy Relationship
Relationships can be the source of the greatest joy and the most intense suffering in life. While there is no prescription for success, there are some qualities that need to be present in a relationship to make it work.
1. Sincerity
Sincerity is honesty about yourself and your motivations. Words and deeds must be congruent with your inmost sentiments. Your words must be supported by your actions.
Approach the other with openness to the spontaneity of each moment. Allow yourself to be guided by the reality of shared experiences. Do not get attached to a preconceived outcome. Healthy relationships are co-created by both individuals.
2. Commitment
Commitment provides the “container” within which a relationship can flourish. Containment in a relationship offers the safety necessary for intimacy. Two people in a committed relationship must hold together with “sublimity, constancy and perseverance.” *
3. Cherishing The Other
“Cherishing the self is the cause of all suffering. Cherishing the other is the source of all happiness.” **
Like all dichotomies, this statement is a partial truth. Positive self regard is a prerequisite for a healthy relationship with others. However, being “full of oneself” precludes any genuine experience of relatedness. Love is contingent on the capacity to derive the greatest happiness from the happiness of the other. “Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage.” ***
4. Mutual Respect
Physical attraction, liking and loving will wax and wane in all relationships. Mutual respect is a bedrock that will sustain your relationship through thick and thin. I recently had the pleasure of witnessing my niece’s wedding. Both she and her fiancé vowed to support the other’s expression of their respective values. The couple’s respect for one another was palpable and deeply moving.
5. Balance Between Autonomy and Mutuality
This balance is a dance between preserving your identity as an individual and accommodating your mate as a full partner. An excessive devotion to “self actualization” at all cost will kill a relationship. On the other extreme, giving oneself over to an intense longing for “merger” with the other will either drive your partner away, or if the longing is reciprocal, will create an unhealthy codependency.
Ayya Khema is a German Jew who became a Buddhist nun. She has written a beautiful autobiography called “I Give You My Life.” In a talk, she identified the “near enemy” and the “far enemy” of love. The far enemy of love is hatred. The near enemy of love is attachment. Needy clinging precludes any possibility for mature love.
6. Good Communication
Good communication is the key to success in any relationship. One must be open to speaking and hearing the truth, to and from the other. Safety is a prerequisite for good communication. Both partners must be able to listen without defensiveness and to speak without hostility. Genuinely listen. Don’t plan what to say next while you are trying to listen. Listen with your ears and with your heart. “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye” **** (and inaudible to the ear).
7. Space
“A good marriage is that in which each appoints the other guardian of his solitude …
“Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue to exist, a wonderful living side by side can grow up, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole and against a wide sky!” *****
Notes:
*The I Ching, Hexagram 8, Holding Together
Wilhelm/Baynes Edition, Princeton University Press, 1967
**Santideva
8th Century Indian Buddhist Scholar.
***Lao Tse
****Antoine de Saint-Exupery, The Little Prince
Harcourt, 1943
*****Rainer Maria Rilke
Rilke On Love and other Difficulties
John Mood, Editor. Norton, 1975, p. 28
