How do you maintain a healthy relationship with your partner?
When we first fall in love, we go through a “honeymoon phase” where everything seems perfect. But once that magical phase is over, issues seem pop up everywhere, and it can be challenging to keep the relationship healthy. It takes real commitment to keep the love strong as a married couple or if you have been dating partners for a long time.
Yet, a healthy romantic relationship can be well worth it. It can improve your emotional and mental health, making you feel loved and supported.
So in this article, we’ll cover:
- The 5 top qualities present in healthy relationships
- Warning signs of an unhealthy relationship (according to Dr. John Gottman), and
- Practical tips and habits to build a good relationship with your partner
We’ve included visual guides from various book summaries in our library, along with a video created by our ReadinGraphics founder with practical tips and real-life examples.
Ready to build a long-lasting and successful relationship? Let’s get into it!
Qualities of a Healthy Relationship
You may find a long list of great relationship characteristics online. But we’ve found that these 5 are essential for thriving and healthy couples.
Quality #1: Curiosity
Have you noticed how your partner has changed over the years? Sometimes, you might feel, “I don’t know my partner anymore.”
In long-term relationships, couples go through many life-changing phases. These might include career changes, having children, and personal losses.
“If you don’t really know someone, how can you truly love them?”
The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work by Dr. John Gottman
It’s essential to stay curious about each other’s personal growth and changes. This curiosity helps partners find new things to love and support each other over time.
Quality #2: Emotional Support
Emotional support becomes very important as time goes on for a relationship.
Over time, couples end up forgetting to strengthen their emotional connection to each other. They end up filling their days with small arguments and contempt. This combination leads to some emotional distance that leaves you feeling like you’ve fallen “out of love”.
People in healthy relationships invest time in emotional intimacy with their partners. And this doesn’t just mean one-time grand gestures or expensive dates. The real key to staying connected with your partner is the small, daily acts of love and admiration.
In 5 Love Languages, Gary Chapman highlights the importance of understanding your partner’s love language to show your emotional support in not just big, but also small ways..
Quality #3: Open Communication
In a research study by Dr. Edward Tronick, they experimented on the bond between infants and their mothers. The mothers and infants played together, but after a while the mothers were instructed to not respond to their infants at all: including gestures and facial expressions.
This resulted in considerable emotional distress for the infants. To this day, this “still-face experiment” demonstrates our fundamental need for human connection. This need persists even as we grow into mature adults, and it becomes a key component for building a good relationship with your partner.
When your partner responds to you with empathy, whether through verbal or physical gestures, you feel connected with them even more. In turn, that leads to openness, honesty, and good communication.
“Connectedness is necessarily a two-way street, each partner in the conversation listening and latching on to what the other said.”
You’re Not Listening: What You’re Missing and Why It Matters by Kate Murphy
In another article, we discuss the value of good communication in romantic relationships, which you can check out here.
Quality # 4: Teamwork
Overcoming problems with your partner will always be part of the relationship. So, teamwork is an essential part of a healthy relationship day to day.
Whether faced with external problems or dealing with relationship woes, great couples solve problems together in a healthy way. They focus on teamwork, get emotions out of the way, and address the problem with mutual respect and trust.
Quality #5: Shared Purpose and Meaning
This characteristic isn’t often thought about but is very essential for long-term relationships. Couples have a deeper connection when they have a shared common purpose or meaning.
A strong relationship could be built around shared interests, such as related hobbies or careers. Shared goals like going on dream vacations, or buying a house, can also build a great bond.
Signs of an Unhealthy Relationship
The 4 Horsemen by John Gottman
The 5 qualities we discussed above may be harder to attain if these signs are present in your relationship.
A relationship’s “honeymoon” phase often only lasts up to 2 years. After this period, our differences start to surface, and cracks begin to appear in the relationship. Unfortunately for married couples, the majority of divorces occur within the first 7 years.
But you don’t need to wait 2 years to find out if your marriage or long-term relationship will last. Dr. John Gottman, a famous psychologist and relationship expert, observed many couples in his “Love Lab”. As time went on, he was able to determine with 95% accuracy whether they would still be married 15 years later.
During the study, he identified 4 signs that impact your relationship’s future: criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling. We go through this in more detail in the video below.
He calls these the “Four Horsemen” where when each one arrives, the more difficult the relationship becomes. And when all four are present, they can lead to unhealthy behavior that brings about a relationship’s downfall.
You can find out more about these horsemen in our book summary for The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work.
Building a healthy relationship takes effort. According to Gottman, the core of a happy marriage is a strong friendship built on positivity, respect, and confidence in each other. This can take your relationship beyond the initial “in-love” phase to a lasting, genuine love.
Habits of a Healthy Relationship
Now that we know what to build, and what to avoid, here are 5 habits you can start with to maintain and strengthen your loving relationship.
Our ReadinGraphics founder, Angela, talks about these in this 12-minute video on her personal channel GrowthGarden, where she explains the 4 horsemen with more examples and detail, and highlights 5 key habits with practical steps on how to avoid them.
You can read the highlights of these tips below, along with key book inspirations from our library.
Habit #1: Practice Curiosity
Get into the habit of staying curious with your partner. Practicing curiosity will help you avoid feeling like a stranger to each other over time.
To do this, we can take inspiration from Gottman’s “love maps,” which are mental maps where you store details about your partner. The goal is to keep this love map up-to-date with your partner’s feelings, thoughts, and ideals.
“The more you know and understand about each other, the easier it is to keep connected as life swirls around you.”
Dr. John Gottman, The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work
Set a regular date when you can interview your partner like a journalist or have fun quizzing each other about key details of each other’s life.
You can find out more about Gottman’s Love maps from our free book summary, and through great resources about it from the Gottman Institute.
Habit #2: Fill Your Emotional Love Tanks
You and your partner will feel more emotionally supported when you start thinking of it like a bank account or a tank.
This “love tank” gets depleted when you “withdraw” emotional support, like when you cancel a date last minute or have an intense argument.
“When your spouse’s emotional love tank is full and he feels secure in your love, the whole world looks bright and your spouse will move out to reach his highest potential in life.”
Gary Chapman, 5 Love Languages
But, you deposit into it when you remember good times together, appreciate each other’s qualities, or make loving gestures.
To maintain a positive and healthy relationship, be consistent in making generous “deposits” and minimal “withdrawals” in each other’s love tanks.
Identifying and using your partner’s love language can also help with this immensely. For example, if their language is physical intimacy, making physical gestures makes it easier to recharge your tank. But withholding physical touch will deplete it faster than anything else.
Habit #3: Connect and Communicate Openly
In the effort to connect with others, we initiate conversation, make eye contact, and may even extend a hand to touch our partner’s. When these “bids for connection,” such as asking for bonding time or seeking comfort after a bad day, gets ignored or brushed away, it can make us feel sad and neglected.
You’ll receive these communication cues from time to time. So practice healthy communication skills such as listening well, and responding with empathy. You can learn more about this in our article on communication tips.
You’ll also find great tips to overcome communication barriers with your partner in You’re Not Listening: What You’re Missing and Why It Matters.
Habit #4: Create a Healthy Mutual Space When Problem-Solving
“Our purpose is not to solve the conflict…(it) is to ‘declaw’ the issue, to try to remove the hurt so the problem stops being a source of great pain.”
Dr. John Gottman, The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work
When faced with a problem, give your partnership the openness and support it deserves.
According to Dr. Gottman, there are two types of problems that couples encounter: situational and perpetual.
When met with a situational problem, soften your tone and soothe each other. With this more calm environment, focus on finding common ground or reaching a compromise.
If there are issues that come up over and over again, it may be a perpetual problem. 69% of marital conflicts are from perpetual problems that can’t be truly resolved.
When they do arise, make sure to give the time and attention to talk it over with your partner. Offer support and share their dream, but if you can’t find yourself doing so, at the very least you can honor their point of view.
Habit #5: Build On Your Relationship “Culture”
Create your own “insider” culture that only you and your partner can share.
Rituals such as regular date nights, morning coffee, or long weekend walks are great parts of a relationship culture. You and your partner can also discuss your shared goals and dreams for the future, like moving to a neighborhood you both love.
You’ll find more specific examples and details by watching the full video above and exploring more relationship tips in GrowthGarden’s healthy relationship playlist on Youtube.
Summary and Other Recommendations
A happy relationship doesn’t just happen. Each interaction—whether positive or negative—adds up. By cultivating the 5 qualities above and avoiding the Four Horsemen, you can tip the scales toward a more positive and fulfilling relationship. If your relationship is however in a very difficult situation, it’s important to consult with a professional (such as couple’s therapy) for a more tailored approach.
Aside from the books we’ve already mentioned, we also have other books that bring a new perspective to personal relationships and communication.
- Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life by Marshall B. Rosenberg
- Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most by Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton and Sheila Heen
- The Anatomy Of Peace: Resolving The Heart Of Conflict by The Arbinger Institute
- Just Listen: Discover the Secret to Getting Through to Absolutely Anyone by Mark Goulston
- Fierce Conversations: Achieving Success at Work and in Life One Conversation at a Time by Susan Scott
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