Healthy Relationships

Many people have attempted to define what constitutes a healthy relationship. These definitions come from those of us currently in relationships. We look at ourselves and think we can use our relationship as the standard for healthy relationships. If we analyzed our romance from an outsider’s perspective, our opinion would change overnight.

We should never judge the relationships of two people we have never met. Each relationship has a different dynamic and comes with its own unique set of challenges. We should wait to meet both sides of a relationship and observe their dynamic before we decide to form an opinion. You will have a hard time finding something more annoying than arrogant couples looking down their noses at other couples.

A healthy relationship should act as an island that keeps any unnecessary influences at sea. Relationships between major celebrities end because the couple thinks they deserve to put their two cents in. The only successful Hollywood marriages come when the man and woman practically exclude themselves from constructive society.

Everyone looks at celebrities with a critical eye because they have more money and opportunities than “regular people.” While they might have a somewhat easier life, they still have to deal with many of the complications we all experience in relationships. You might not have the paparazzi sitting outside your house right now or the news media talking about you every hour of the day, but you likely have people in your life that do nothing but try to find weaknesses in your relationship.

If you want you have a healthy relationship, you need to block out everyone who wants your relationship to fail. You cannot rule out rejecting anyone in your life. Some couples try too hard to impress an old friend or family member, risking the success of their relationship on the opinion of someone else. In the case of family members, you only have to worry about impressing their immediate family (mother, father, sisters, brothers). Nobody else matters.

You have to find a way to maintain quality friendships within your relationship though. You will have your best friendships with people who have your best interests in mind. Someone who wants your relationship to fail is the furthest thing from a good friend. You might have a hard time letting them go, but if they could potentially ruin a lifelong love, you will not miss them in the long run.

It’s hard to keep a relationship going when it’s just you and your significant other, let alone a bunch of other people trying to insert themselves. When your relationships starts running purely on the opinions of others, it’s not your relationship anymore. You have to maintain a certain level autonomy from everyone else in your life.

You should do everything in your power to keep a good relationship going. You should spend every waking minute thinking what you can do to make the other person happy. The best relationships take time to grow and require work every step of the way.

Young Love

What age should you start pursuing love and all it has to offer? People debate this idea based on nothing more than the idea that those who have not put in as many years on this planet as them. They say young people haven’t learned anything about life because they have experience very little of it. While you could apply this argument to some situations, it doesn’t apply to every young person out there. A person’s ability to succeed in the romantic world at a young age depends on their level of maturity. Far too many people think young and immature have the same meaning.

Some young people are as mature as adults twice their age and some adults are as immature as someone half their age. We should never use age as a measurement of someone’s maturity. Each young person can handle a different assortment of life experiences. Parents should only intervene when their child’s romantic ambitions hinder their academic studies. Romance should blend in to the overall tapestry of our lives, not serve as the main component. A child’s education should always remain as top priority. They should eliminate anything that jeopardizes their chances of getting a quality education.

If a child can maintain their grades while having a romantic relationship, a parent should keep their hands off the situation. A parent should also stop a young romance when it verges on a sexual relationship. Parents should use their common sense when evaluating if their child’s romance has become sexual or not. In most cases, a young romance never approaches this risky territory. It’s understandable for parents to want to protect their children from everything evil in the world; however, an overprotective atmosphere could have its share of consequences. You should never condemn someone’s parenting style though because each parent does the best they can.

Love knows no age, gender, race or nationality. We all have the capacity to love at every stage of our life. Society dictates what form this love takes every step of the way. When we attempt to venture outside of what society accepts, society tosses us into the darkness. Society wants our children to start dating at a certain age across the board. Applying age requirement works for some children who can’t handle a romantic relationships or venture into unsafe territory when they’re part of one. There’s no way to apply one rule to the overall population and have it remain valid though.

We must keep an eye on our children, but we can’t dictate the flow of their life every step of the way. If we want our children to succeed, we should try to make them self-sufficient. Parents need to keep themselves in their children’s lives without becoming too overbearing. A well-regulated child will know what to do in the romantic world if a parent teaches them what to do within it, not if they keep them away from it altogether. A parent should encourage a child to venture into the social world while advising them when the child comes to them for advice.

Online Relationships

The internet has become an inseparable part of our lives, whether we like it or not. It provides us with a convenient way to look up information about anything we want. It also gives us an escape from having to deal with face-to-face interactions with other human beings. There is nothing wrong with talking to people you have already met that live in other states. You have met them before and you two share some sort of bond. When you meet a stranger online, you venture into completely different territory. You should keep your online interaction to a minimum and schedule a time to meet in person. You should not seek any sort of relationship with someone that lives in another state.

An alarming number of people choose to establish and maintain relationships with others strictly within an online world. We forget the importance of interacting with someone in person has for a new relationship. You cannot get the same benefits from an online relationship that you would from a real-life romance. You might try to rationalize the situation and put your relationship in the same terms as those you see in your day-to-day, but the differences between the two relationships are like night and day.

The internet has become the most efficient means for making a connection with other people you would otherwise pass over. You should take advantage of every networking you have on the internet, but any bond you forge in that space should carry over into the new world. You will not have a healthy existence unless you make face-to-face interaction a big part of your life. You might think talking to someone every day online or exchanging messages from time to time fills this void, but you will end up feeling unfulfilled in the end.

We all want to love someone and have someone love us. We would go the ends of the earth to find someone with whom we can spend the rest of our lives. We must first realize that the person we want could live around the corner or just a couple miles away. While a relationship with someone who lives in another country or state might seem appealing, you will lose the battle trying to maintain it. Some relationships that start online end up lasting forever, but that only happens when the couple decides to meet in person rather than carry on their romance online.

When you focus your romantic efforts online, you will miss out on what’s right in front of you. Someone you have known for years could have romantic feelings for you and you wouldn’t know it because you spend all your time pursuing another person that lives hundreds of miles away. We all must open our eyes to the world that’s outside our front door. Online relationships shouldn’t occupy more time than it takes to send a single email. There’s so much more in life to do and experience. You might sacrifice love when you sign off, but you will get so much back in return.

Trust

You can earn and lose trust, but you can never regain trust. Earning a person’s trust signals the start of a relationship while losing their trust often means the beginning of the end. You might think something leads to the breakdown of trust; however, one part of a relationship can often squander the other person’s trust based on suspicion alone. If you cheat on your significant other and do not tell them for several months, that is a legitimate breakdown in trust. If your significant other claims that you have cheated and you cannot convince them otherwise, you can blame their jealousy on your relationship’s downfall more than anything else can.

Many people try desperately to regain other people’s trust once it has vanished. Unfortunately, in most relationships, this pursuit will get you nowhere. The most stable, successful relationships might have some luck in re-establishing trust, depending on the circumstances. In the end, the same rule will always apply. You can never regain trust once it is lost, unless minor events lead to the breakdown in trust. The severity of these events depends entirely on your unique relationship. One relationship’s catastrophic event could serve as nothing more than a blip on the radar in another relationship.

A person’s capacity to forgive could always change the outcome and make the rule of trust obsolete. When we love someone, we have a tremendous capacity to forgive them, no matter what they might have done. To an outsider, this forgiveness might seem irrational or foolish because they do not understand the bond you share. You might even think it is foolish, but you go ahead with it anyway because love has a way of overpowering any negative thought we might have in this situation. This explains why husbands and wives return to situations we see as nightmares.

A person who is innocent of a crime should never have to own up to a crime they did not commit. The same goes for relationships. We often find ourselves in relationships with someone who has a tendency to become jealous. This jealousy convinces them you have done something wrong, even if you spend every waking moment with them and tell them everything. In this battle, you cannot win because your significant other has lost touch with what is really going on. If they sat back and analyzed your relationship honestly, they would realize you deserve more than suspicious and fabricated accusations.

When you find yourself in a relationship with a jealous individual, you need to address your concerns about how their feeling directly. You have to tell them you do not like how they accuse you of doing something wrong. You cannot bend to their will and shut yourself out from your friends and family because it makes them feel better. If they refuse to change, you should leave because you could spend your time better elsewhere. You and the person you are with might not like it, but you have to do what makes you happy when the person you are with stops making you happy.

Laughing at Unfunny Jokes

You might have heard that laughing at every joke your date tells will somehow endear them to you. While busting into laughter at everything they say might produce good results in the short term, you will not like the long-term implications. If they tell bad jokes, you should react with nothing more than a blank stare. Anything else will make them think they should keep telling jokes. They will keep trying to tell jokes, thinking they can do no wrong because you laugh every time. One blank stare will end the bad joke telling forever. Your date will either stop trying to tell jokes or make an effort to improve their lackluster humor.

However, if they tell a good joke, you should give them credit for it. A funny person will feed off your positive reinforcement and keep you rolling in the aisles for as long as you know them. Funny people have a way of wanting all the attention for themselves though. Evaluate every humorous person individually and separate the selfless ones from those that have oversized ego. A relationship will not work if one or more of its sides have a large ego. Egotistical individuals often put their needs over yours and those of the relationship.

In the dating world, you do not want to earn any points with dishonesty. Laughing when you should give them a blank stare isn’t much different than lying to them about other matters. Dishonesty should not rear its ugly head at any point in a relationship. You might try to come up with some justification for why you decided to lie to your date, but you have no real reason to do it. Once dishonesty makes its way into a relationship, it never leaves. It festers and becomes something much worse down the line. Any problem you leave unattended will later explode into a full-blown catastrophe.

Never attach any rules to how you react to members of the opposite sex. If you follow a certain set of rules, your interactions will become stilted and awkward. You need to loosen up. You might think it makes sense to read about how to communicate with certain people. In the end, you have to figure out how to talk with people based on who they are, not on what a rule that says you should laugh at anything that resembles a joke says. You will have a lot more fun if you react the only way that feels right.

Laughter has a way of bringing people together. You remember the people with whom you have shared a genuine laugh. The people you tried to impress with fake laughter fade into the endless abyss of memory. If you want to build long lasting relationships, you should do it with genuine interaction alone. Nothing else will produce the result you desire and the relationships started with artificial will vanish faster than they started. The dating world would improve considerable if we all learned to show our true colors from the beginning.