Signs of a Healthy Relationship

The Internet is awash with checklists showing when you’re in an abusive or otherwise unhealthy relationship. I contributed one myself. But I soon realized how little they help people stuck in bad relationships and how much they risk of making things worse.

Checklists of unhealthy or abusive relationships risk making things worse by violating a neurological principle: Mental focus amplifies and magnifies.

What we focus on becomes more important than what we don’t focus on, so checklists of unhealthy or abusive relationships risk making things worse by violating a social psychology principle, namely that whatever we focus on, we’re likely to get more of.

They risk making things worse by violating the cognitive psychology principle of confirmation bias. Once the human brain begins looking for something – in this case, evidence of an unhealthy or abusive relationship – it is certain to find more and more of it, while denying or minimizing contradictory evidence.

Checklists of unhealthy or abusive relationships risk making things worse by developing victim-identity, which will undermine all present and future relationships and most likely impair performance at work.

They foment fruitless arguments between partners about the validity of negative labels, such as abusive, unhealthy, narcissistic, or borderline. The use of such labels makes both partners feel abused.

Problematic checklists offer no way to improve dysfunction or any inkling of what a healthy relationship looks like. Worse, they make many people feel too bad about themselves to get out of bad relationships. Those who do so are often mired in contempt, if not bitterness, which alienates them from their true nature and prolongs their misery.

Checklists of unhealthy relationships suffer from the great affliction of the 21st Century: We focus on what we're against more than what we’re for. We’re more certain of what we don’t want than what we do want.

What we need, instead, are checklists of healthy relationships, which provide goals for partners to work toward and increase a sense of empowerment to make healthy choices should improvement remain elusive.

The Healthy Relationship Checklist

Partners in healthy relationships display:

• Respect.
• Kindness.
• Affection.
• Interest in each other’s well-being.
• Compassion in times of distress, hardship, pain.

Partners in healthy relationships encourage:

• Individual growth (intellectual, spiritual. aesthetic, communal).
• Alliances with family and friends.

Partners in healthy relationships share:

• Positive experiences and hardships.
• Support.
• Burdens.
• Resources.
• Responsibilities.

Partners in healthy relationships solve relationship issues and problems of living:

• By focusing on improvement rather than blame.
• As partners on the same side, rather than opponents.

Partners in healthy relationships argue:

• To learn, rather than to win.
• Without devaluing or undermining each other.

Partners in healthy relationships regard each other as:

• Valuable (important, worthy of appreciation, time, energy, sacrifice).
• Equals.
• Free to be themselves.
• Able to negotiate safely about specific behavior requests.