A thread about healthy relationships?

[BlingLoving]

Obviously, most of the time, people posting about their relationship are doing so because they're in crisis. And so the relationship board is skewed towards that. Sometimes, on those threads, people in healthy relationships come along and explain how they do things. And I'm sure that's helpful at times but maybe the OP just wants to focus on her own problem.

So I thought I'd create a thread where we can comment on why we think our relationships are healthy (I assume, based on my own experience, that doesn't necessarily mean perfect! ) and what we think makes them healthy. Perhaps people who are struggling might take a look at their leisure and consider if any of the points resonate or apply to their relationships?

In my case, I think the key points are that DH and I love each other. And what that means is that we want to help and support each other. Which informs much of our individual and family decision making. If he wants to do something I'm not wild about, I consider whether it's good for him/our family/our mental health. When DH is doing laundry or tidying up he's doing it partly because he loves me and wants me to have a nice home and he doesn't want me to have to work any harder than he does.

Also, we don't get it right all the time, not least because things change (eg jobs/finances/kids at different stages). But when one of us starts to feel it's not working, there's a discussion or raging argument that ultimately leads to us addressing it and shifts in how things happen. Eg at start of lockdown, DH wasn't working so was taking on 100% of kids. But... it became clear within a week that somehow, I was WFH and doing everything else. Meals, planning, thinking, laundry etc. We'd just slipped into it. Now, 6 weeks in, that's just not the case anymore. DH has stepped up on the home stuff. I have more actively encouraged him to do workouts etc, and am happy to ensure I stop working to do childcare during those times etc, which are hugely important and which he was feeling he couldn't do so was affecting everything else. I feel like we navigated this quite well and I'm very grateful that we're able to have these conversations arguments.

Often on this board I see families where this basic consideration and care doesn't exist and it makes no sense. Why would a man marry a woman if he doesn't want her to be happy and loved?

I really don't want this to sound smug. It's more that I used to think DH and I had a volatile relationship because we DO argue. But then I realised that the arguments lead to change and improvements in how we operate. I also realised that not everyone experiences this. I've had a number of people comment that they can't argue with their DH, for example, because it ends in sulking/days of PA behaviour/ hurtful comments etc. One friend was completely gobsmacked that Dh and I were able to discuss and come to compromises.

I think the key points are that DH and I love each other.
Have you read the threads in which people write how their partners treat them like shit and the only reason they don't call the police/leave them/tell them to piss off is because they love them?

Or the threads in which people say "Until last month, I thought we loved each other, but now his/her behaviour has changed totally overnight, might s/he be having an affair?"

Have you read the threads in which people write how their partners treat them like shit and the only reason they don't call the police/leave them/tell them to piss off is because they love them?

Really good point and I always want to scream, "but he clearly doesn't love you as otherwise you wouldn't be the only one trying here." I wish more people could see that.

I don't think that you've explained what the secret ingredient is that makes your relationship healthy. How did you get hold of this good DH who steps up when required? How did you tell him apart from the others who just claim to be like that in theory, but then don't do it in practice? How did you identify him as a good parent before he was a parent? How was it not just luck?

Perhaps people who are struggling might take a look at their leisure and consider if any of the points resonate or apply to their relationships?

Oh nooooo OP, I get this is done with good intentions but sounds a little “smug married”, and lots of people in bad relationships don’t really realise they are

You know what, you're all right. It does sound smug and I didn't mean it to be. And Raven is right - I know why my relationship is healthy but I don't actually know how I was lucky enough to get to this point. I didn't marry a dick but most women don't purposefully marry twats. Obviously. I mean, I KNOW I'm lucky and I recognise my relationship is healthy and I lots of people don't know how to recognise that, but that doesn't really help anyone else does it?

Right, I'm going to ask MN to delete because my intentions were good but I am not being helpful.

Well, I hope it stays healthy Bling :) but yes, I think the "list of red flag" type threads are more practical, maybe? Even though, as you say, the trouble is that the red flags are not necessarily there at the start.

My relationship is quite new - we met at the end of October, and have spent two months of that time separated by lockdown - but I am often struck how different, and how much healthier, it is than with my ex. The thing which is so much better is communication. We are well matched in terms of our emotional openness and willingness to engage with intensity and difficult topics. We've been very open with each other from the start, and i never feel like i have to hold back or second guess how he feels.

He is also very good at making me feel good about myself. I have a lot of insecurities and hang-ups from a decade with a man who was not good at communicating his affection, but was extremely able to point out criticism. My new partner does not think i'm perfect - who is? - but is very good at reinforcing my good qualities and making me feel more confident to embrace who I am, rather than constantly feeling not-good-enough.

But, and I think this is important OP - while I knew there were lots of things in my old relationship which were bad, i found it easy to blame myself for them. And I also felt that I should 'work on it', and constantly made compromises and tried to make it work. Until suddenly, i just couldn't do it anymore. It took a long time for me to admit it was over, but once I realised that the patterns of unhealthiness were there (we really did just bring out the worst in each other in so many ways, especially towards the end) I was done. But it took me so long to see that. Even though i knew there were unhealthy things, there were good things too - it's very rare, i think, that relationships are just 100% shit. Even physically abusive ones; that's how the abuser keeps you there, in part (not that my ex was abusive).

I think having an emotionally intelligent partner makes things so much easier.

Plus someone with a decent moral compass and empathy means they are capable of seeing things from every perspective and has a decent sense of fairness

Well, I hope it stays healthy Bling smile but yes, I think the "list of red flag" type threads are more practical, maybe? Even though, as you say, the trouble is that the red flags are not necessarily there at the start.

This is often true. But it's also true that it's not always the case. I'm always interested in some posts on these boards from early in the relationship and the person is querying something and it's obvious that other posters see it as a red flag but others don't. I think a lot of people miss red flags because they don't get taught about healthy relationships. Eg, DH and I saw red flags with SIL when she first met her now DH. But everyone else thought it was all super and dandy and that even though he wasn't perfect it was time for her to "settle down."

10 years later... well. It's sad.

I'm having this post deleted as I think it's hard to do it in a way that doesn't seem smug/unhelpful and that wasn't my intent. Thanks everyone.

I think this thread is very useful...I have actually asked the question on here before..what does a healthy relationship look like? I tried to split with my husband and he is now promising me the world, asking what I want...but after years in an unhealthy relationship...I am struggling to work out what I want/need.. what that healthy relationship would look like.

I don't think the problem is luck. I think that lots of people come from homes where good relationships weren't modelled so they often copy their parents. Even if they do everything they can to avoid it, they end up with it anyway.

They may also have been brought up with bad boundaries, their 'shark cage' wasn't developed through neglect or bad parenting, so they are vulnerable to predators.

Other reasons are the fact that women are pressured into keeping relationships going which are unhealthy. They are fed messages about trying hard to make it work and compromises. Single women are frowned upon and seen as failures. Often women want to have children and settle. The red flags may be there but they thought marriage and children would stop him from drinking or sleeping around.

Relationships may not start out as unhealthy but develop like that over time. Problems often kick in after the first child when they are expected to look after the home, their partner and their child with little input or help. Their partner feels entitled to continue their single life and resentment builds.

I am a bit baffled by this. I am one of those women who had ended up in a totally dysfunction relationship. Now here is my perspective. I am 30. I have been with this man for 13 years, meaning yes, I was very young when we got together. We have been married for 4. Has my relationship always been dysfunctional .... maybe and I just haven't seen. But when I married this man and decided to have children with him, I believed it was the right thing to do. Hindsight is a splendid thing.

People change. Parenthood has changed us in ways we could never ave imagined. Perhaps I have become stronger and less willing to be a push over since becoming a mum. Whatever has happened, things have changed for the worse, and three years later i know i cannot live like this any more. I feel like i have grown up, and he hasn't. He has unspoken resentment toward me that makes him angry and cruel. He has hurt me and disappointed me in ways that have destroyed my trust.Did I know any of that at 17, or 20, or 23 of 27? No.

I did not rush things with this man. I was young when we got together, but we didnt rush into things. My parents had an alcohol fuelled relationship which was angry, sometimes violent, often painful. I can see that has shaped my idea of normal, but that is from this perspective.

My advice to my daughter before settling down would be take it steady, don't rush, sample the goods. But then young people rarely think their parents know best, I know I didn't.

Please don’t delete the thread OP. As a PP said, for people who didn’t get to see what a healthy functional relationship looked like in childhood, it’s very helpful to learn about this. My DF was abusive and my shark cage didn’t develop properly so I’ve accepted partners behaving horribly to me because it’s what I’m used to. Tell me more about what a good relationship can be like...

I think my girlfriend and I have a healthy relationship, but if someone asked what the secret to the success was, it would simply be that we were both in our mid 30s and had had enough experience to know what we wanted and what we definitely didn't want. We told each other extensively about our previous relationships, the good and the bad, and because she had kids so we couldn't rush things anyway we had plenty of time to digest all this information.

It's great, but "get a couple of failed relationships under your belt and hope you strike gold in your mid thirties" isn't exactly helpful advice.

I was so pleased that I'd found an easy-going man who seemed to be much more sensible, responsible and confident than me. He claimed to believe in women's equality, being an active dad, etc. Basically as soon as the kids arrived and things got serious (me wanting to go back to work and needing him to do stuff too), I felt like I could have filed a complaint for false advertising: he morphed into 1950s Man. Even his non-argumentative nature turned into an inability to discuss problems.

I don't think it's always a question of not seeing clear signs. Sometimes the signs are not clear at all.

I don’t find these posts unhelpful, if they are more of a wider discussion rather than people just listing all the reasons their OH is amazing and ‘just hang in there, other good men are out there’ - yes, they are, but the older you get those ones stay married a lot longer... good people in healthy relationships don’t tend to get divorced as often.

So people who are ‘starting again’ (and again and again in my case) in later life are really faced with the fact that everyone else’s relationships also failed. And people either don’t really know why, they were abused or the one that behaved badly. Yes some people in perfectly healthy relationships fall out of love, but that still results in heartbreak and usually insecurity and sadly often some cheating even if it’s emotional and not physical

If you came from a healthy home where good relationships are modelled, married in your 20’s and are still together 20 years later it’s not compatible to people who have got divorced with 2 kids starting to date all the other divorced people. Of course your RS will be healthier if you are a team raising your family together with no exes and child support issues. It’s hard to raise someone else’s, blend families etc

I am not saying this bitterly - I am out there dating men that someone else didn’t want as a husband anymore, or husbands who were not very good at being husbands. I am also working on my boundaries as a person as I did not have a good childhood and struggle to know what a good RS looks like. But I don’t believe it’s entirely my choosing process that is to blame all the time

*not comparable

Hi all. Okay, I won't delete it. Thanks for understanding I was trying to be helpful not judgemental.

I don't really know how to create a healthy relationship. I do know it wasn't always easy. Both DH and I can be quite black and white and think our way/belief etc is completely right. What I do know is that over the years, our desire to stay together forced us both to change so that we could accommodate the other one.

Actually, that is one commonality I've discussed with friends before. Most of the people I know in what seem to be healthy, happy relationships have had to accept that it changes other things, particularly extended family dynamics. So things that were entirely normal growing up aren't considered normal by your DP. And that if you choose to accept that your DP is right, that means a shift elsewhere down the line. And maybe to a PP point: that if you haven't had this kind of thing modelled in your family growing up, that becomes impossible. I know there are things about the way DH and I do things that my family think are weird. But I also know that (mostly) my family accept that these things work for us and accommodate accordingly. And ditto for DH's family. So perhaps it's more complicated because how often on here are issues directly as a result of extended family but even when the the couple are the same page, the extended family make it so hard?

Actually, thinking about it more, I think it comes down to both DH and I putting the other one first. As a woman, I've socialised this idea that I have to prioritise family and what they need blah blah. But DH knows I'm an introvert and I need more space so he sometimes insists I take it. Even in lockdown, he'll insist I go out without the kids and dogs and just get that walk in even though the kids are begging to come with me and it means he'll have to walk the dog later. Ditto, I'd rather not do a hard stop in terms of work at exactly 5:30 but I do because he's found an online class he really enjoys that starts at 6:00 and if I come downstairs at 5:30 or so he gets a few minutes to get himself prepared, set up, move the DC from focusing on him to me etc.

Until we had children, we never needed to really go out of our way for one another. It was only after the children were there that exh started to act like he was the important earner, seeing it as natural that I wasn't working as much rather than it being because I couldn't work any more without his cooperation. I was making his life easier, he wasn't doing the same for me. I was surprised and confused to find myself in that situation, and never found any way of changing it.

In my current relationship, it is nice when I see my bf going out of his way for me. I notice it especially after being with my exh. But it seems like the luck of the draw that I have happened across someone who does that. And he's no more perfect than my ex. None of us are an amazing catch, probably!

Like a PP I think I learned from having some bad relationships in my late teens/ early twenties. So then I was determined not to repeat those mistakes with the person I married. Also I am lucky in that I am a high earner so I could afford to wait for the right man to come along and buy my own flat etc without a partner. I have one friend who has always earned very little and she is married to a horrible man with a decent amount of money - I think she decided to settle for the lifestyle as she couldn’t see herself ever affording a flat/holidays etc on her own.

For me, it was about ditching guys as soon as the red flags appear. This is painful as they nearly always appear during the lovey-dovey early stage when you’re really excited about the relationship and really hopeful for the future. You try to talk yourself round thinking “he probably didn’t mean it like that” or “it’s something we can work on together” or “maybe he’ll change” etc. But the fact is he is showing you who he is and your actions will either show him that you will put up with this crap or that you won’t. If you keep him at this point, you become really invested in the relationship and then it’s SO much harder to ditch later on, meaning you waste more time with them and not finding a good’un.

And sorry yes in terms of what I think works in my marriage, I would say that we are always kind, even when we are arguing. Neither one of us would ever say anything cruel or designed to really hurt the other person.

We also often remind ourselves that we’re a team so when we’re arguing it shouldn’t be one of us against the other but the two of us together against the problem. We both genuinely want to find a resolution that works for both of us rather than either one of us “winning”.

Also we are each other’s cheerleader - so we celebrate each other’s achievements and encourage one another if we’re feeling nervous or worried about something.

Never used one before, but

For me, it was about ditching guys as soon as the red flags appear. This is painful as they nearly always appear during the lovey-dovey early stage when you’re really excited about the relationship and really hopeful for the future. You try to talk yourself round thinking “he probably didn’t mean it like that” or “it’s something we can work on together” or “maybe he’ll change” etc. But the fact is he is showing you who he is and your actions will either show him that you will put up with this crap or that you won’t. If you keep him at this point, you become really invested in the relationship and then it’s SO much harder to ditch later on, meaning you waste more time with them and not finding a good’un.

This is so important. The problem is, for a lot of people, they don't know what to look for. It's really only with experience or, a good solid self esteem and boundaries, that they can see them. That's the problem and it becomes a vicious cycle because once you've been with an abuser, your self esteem is so low that it's really easy to choose another one, and on it goes.