1 Respect:
To have a healthy relationship, refrain from screaming, yelling, name calling, ordering your partner around, belittling, criticizing, blaming and fault finding. These types of behaviors hurt and demean your partner wich doesn’t feel supportive or loving to them at all; eventually creating indifference, emotional distance and isolation from each other.
To have a loving relationship, if you feel yourself getting about to resort to such tactics of disrespect, stop yourself and decide to take a time out away from your partner. Take some time to calm down and think of a better way to communicate your needs to your partner while respecting your partners’ feelings, boundaries, goals, etc.
Honesty:
In order to have a healthy marriage / healthy relationship, you must be honest about how you feel. Some people may fear being honest with their partners because they are afraid of how they may respond in return. However, if you do not express your thoughts, feelings and needs in an honest and effective manner with them, then you are still being dishonest. Not only is this a form of dishonesty towards your partner, but also with yourself. This also results in a form of disrespect towards both of you. How can your partner respect your feelings, if they don’t know what you want or need?
Acceptance / Unconditional love:
Don’t place conditions on your partner that you expect to have filled before providing your acceptance or love to them. In a happy marriage / happy relationships, love shouldn’t come and go on conditions; the love you have for a person should always be there and you should always be willing to provide it to them without requiring conditions from them before hand. Knowing that you are giving and receiving love with no strings attached will keep you happy with each other. When you withhold love from your partner, you also withhold yourself from receiving love in return.
Learning from each other and evolving together:
Realize that you can learn from each others differences in opinions and ways to do things. When we learn new things, we grow and develop. When both partners are willing to learn something from each others differences rather than submit to having power struggles over them, you evolve as individuals and create a path for a more loving relationship.
Share in each others individuality and joys:
It is important that even while working to achieve things in your life together, that you also each have the freedom to achieve your individual interests and goals in life. Partners in a healthy relationship support each other with their individual life goals and share in the joy their partner gains from achieving such goals.
Many people realize the importance of this for themselves, but may not realize the importance of it for their partners, or sometimes the case may be reversed, where one person may hold themselves back while allowing their partner to achieve their interests and goals.
When one partner is held back from their individual interests and goals, either directly or indirectly, this will serve to create many problems for the partners and for the relationship; such as indifference, resentment, and emotional distance. The key here is to balance your individual goals along with the relationship/ family goals in order to maintain a happy marriage.
