Love has been the nucleus and heart of human experience throughout the history of mankind. Wars and battles have unraveled under its spell!
Love has touched the souls of many artists, poets, and geniuses, as well as all of us mere folk, who today have established that having a “healthy love relationship” is the number one goal of existence, beyond financial and professional success!
In fact, George Vaillant, the director of the longest longitudinal study of human development, which was designed to uncover the parameters that allow people to live happy and healthy lives, summarized the conclusion of the seventy-five year study with three simple words: “Happiness is love.” (Vaillant, George E. Triumphs of Experience: The Men of the Harvard Grant Study. Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012.)
Love appears to be so important, yet only a small percentage of us have succeeded in cultivating long-lasting, healthy relationships.
Why are we having such a hard time arriving at successful outcomes in love relationships? What are the real obstacles in the way of grasping the powerful force of healthy relationships? What does a healthy relationship look like?
Here is what I learned from reviewing the most substantiated, evidence-based research and from my own humble experience when it comes to what healthy love is all about.
- A healthy relationship involves seeing things for what they really are.
We seem to have this conditioned notion that someday someone will come along that will be our perfect “match.” This person will know just what to say and how to say it with the magical ability to speak our “love language.” This someone will never disappoint us or let us down. This unreasonable expectation can be a real culprit to a healthy relationship, because when we meet really wonderful people that have a lot to offer, they cannot possibly fulfill this unrealistic standard. Then we tend to blame them for our needs not being met.
The end result is rupture of the relationship and an endless search for the phantom “perfect one.” If we look at the definition of the word relate in the dictionary, we will find that “to relate” actually means “to make a connection between two different things.” A healthy relationship involves committing to the practice of becoming better and better at making a connection between our differences with another. If we want a healthy relationship, it’s time we let go of the search for the phantom “perfect one” and turn toward the real people who are here and now willing to hold our hand through the everyday challenges of life.
- A healthy relationship requires honoring and embracing how powerful a love connection truly is.
In the aftermath of every failed relationship, we have the tendency to blame love (along with the actual failed relationship or the person) and minimize the importance of love in our life, coming to the conclusion that we are better off without it!
The latest findings in biology and neuroscience clearly confirm that we are hard- wired for connection and that our interactions with loved ones act as regulators in the brain priming our emotions. The more strongly connected we are with someone, the stronger the mutual force. Healthy, positive relationships seem to have a tremendous impact on our nervous system. They contribute to a well- documented diminished-threat-related activation in our brain in the face of a situation that is perceived as stressful, which is linked to powerful benefits in cardiovascular and overall health. In order to be able to cultivate a healthy relationship, we must embrace the power of a secure attachment, recognizing it as the primary drive it truly is and the role it plays in our happiness and health.
- A healthy relationship is willingness and commitment to growth. There is no better mirror to our beauty and our unresolved baggage than a love relationship. It is easy to go through life alone, maintaining the facade we have built of who we want the world to think we are. When we choose to be seen for who we really are it can be unnerving and scary.
The opportunity for growth can be found in truly understanding that we are reflexive beings driven by memory. This means that anytime a life situation that is perceived through our five senses awakens negative memories from the past and triggers the emotion of fear, events will start happening without our permission in such a way that we ourselves sabotage a positive outcome of the situation.
A love relationship where the stakes are so high is a potent trigger to past experiences that did not turn out well and resulted in pain. When parts of unresolved trauma are activated, what’s called implicit memory generates negative emotions. Because emotions are so powerfully contagious, if someone talks to you in the way that a parent used to talk to you, it can trigger a reaction in you as though what happened back then is actually happening now.
An example can be shared using capable, intelligent, educated adults that were victims of abuse in childhood. It is well-documented in literature that adult victims of childhood abuse that have not made a coherent story of what happened to them, when depending on another, will have a difficult time regulating their negative emotions and without much cognitive awareness will employ deactivating strategies to take away the felt internal turmoil. That means that even if we are lucky enough to meet a person who has proven their loyalty to us and has done enough to earn our trust, debilitating fears from the past can drive our behavior in the present, in order to sabotage our relationship with them. If we want a healthy relationship, we must be ready to face and understand how our past still keeps us hostage and acts as an insidious culprit to our ability to relate to another in a healthy way.
- If we want to have a healthy relationship with another, we must first choose to have a healthy relationship with ourselves.
We all want to profess how healthy we are, and we have a hard time recognizing any parts of us that are actually unhealthy. We want to avoid feeling pain, and it is understandable that we have developed certain patterns of behavior to maintain a sense of internal safety, including being in denial about the things we do that are unhealthy.
But when we are finally motivated to make positive change based on the unhappy results we are getting from our current behavior, we can clearly see what it is that we do that is a true obstacle to all we ever want in life and love.
One great area of fertile ground is our own incongruences—when our words and behavior conflict. This can show up in subtle ways, like when we declare one person is the most important one in our microcosm and then we choose to not connect with them when the opportunity shows up. But it can also show up in more direct ways, for example, in the form of actual, conflicting messages we give to the people we love and who love us, like telling them how important the relationship is to us and that they are our ideal partner, but when they are willing to commit to us, we bolt!
Our own contradictions that stand out like bad weeds cause a lot of unnecessary suffering for us and the few people that truly love us. FMRI scans of people that are promised something sweet and instead get something sour reflect a tremendous energy drain in the person’s brain who is burdened with having to close the gap of the palpable contradictions presented to them. Not to mention that these contradictions are an incredible obstacle to what it is that we truly want.
A healthy relationship is not something that happens organically to a select, lucky few. It is a principled way of being that we agree to cultivate with another that is based on goodwill, sensitivity, and trust, as the ultimate way to reinforce our sense of safety and weather the ups and downs of life. It is a commitment we make that provides a safety net that keeps our nervous system calm and gives us access to the executive functioning part of our brain, allowing us to focus on both our everyday and our higher purpose in life.
There are well-substantiated, evidenced-based methods to realizing the noble and powerful universal goal of healthy love, which is hardwired into our DNA. I have two that are my personal favorites.
- The Gottman Institute’s simple seven step formula on how to make relationships work is backed up with three decades of research and can predict divorce with over 90% accuracy. The art and science of love workshops the Gottman institute offers, is a powerful weekend workshop to practice the seven steps in real life.
- Sue Johnson’s model of emotionally-focused therapy (EFT), which defines a secure attachment as simply when each partner is accessible, responsive, and
emotionally attentive, is also backed up with substantial research. Completing the seven steps of EFT (with a certified EFT clinician), has been proven to yield a staggering 75% positive result in overcoming past injuries in relationships and 95% improvement rates.
So, yes, we can take practical approaches to fill the emotional bank of the person we love by turning toward them with acts of caring and goodwill in every opportunity we have, or we can even commit and complete powerful, Emotionally-Focused Therapy couples sessions to repair past indiscretions in our current relationship.
But in all fairness, nothing will ever truly reverse the trajectory of our relational health until we win the battle with the most inconspicuous culprit of all—ourselves.
We are all capable of mastery in every area of our lives, including love relationships. The most significant decision we will ever make in our lives is to choose to invest in work on ourselves that allows our own mastery and our best self to resurface.
At that point, and only at that point, will we be able to truly understand how to support a healthy relationship and how we can accomplish the noble outcome of a healthy love relationship which is within our control.