Healthy Relationships

How many people have been caught in the mindset that relationships have to happen fast? Maybe we get caught in the idea that if we don’t grab ‘em quick then we will lose them. Our patience may also be part of the issue. We want so badly to be cared for by a special someone and we want it now, we don’t want to wait and torture ourselves through the long process. I will admit that I have been caught in this mindset. I want things to happen NOW and Quick. It turns out that these fast moving relationships aren’t very healthy and there is a big potential to have more relationship problems in the future. We can relate a relationship to a growing child. A child in order to grow up healthy and strong needs nourishment and love. A child cannot go from being one years old to being a five year old. If this happened we would miss the joy of seeing them learn and grow. So they grow one day at a time. We learn from them and they learn from us. The same thing goes with a relationship. If we try to go to fast in a relationship we miss out on the healthy growth that takes place one day at a time.

Dr. Michael Williams says that it takes a least 3 months before we even START getting to know someone. So if we follow what is taught in the Relationship Attachment Model (RAM), then we will build our relationships in the healthiest of ways. The RAM is as follows. 

It simply means that anything to the right should not be higher than what is to its left. So we should not trust someone more than we know them. We shouldn’t rely on someone more than we trust them, and we shouldn’t commit to someone if we don’t rely on them very much. Touch is the last one, it should be the last thing that we show in a relationship. So if we don’t know someone very well and we don’t trust them then our touch should be way down. The problem in relationships now days is that it is usually the opposite. Touch is usually the highest one up. This is like trying to stand a pyramid up on its top. The foundation is very week and the relationship is likely to crumble if your foundation is built on physical touch

The best way that we can get to know some is through the 3 T's

  Talk (Mutual Self Disclosure)

  Togetherness (involved in a WIDE RANGE of activities)

+Time   (It takes 3 months to START getting to know someone)          

= Knowledge

So take your time. Enjoy getting to know your significant other in a healthy way. This will make your relationship so much more rewarding!

Have you ever thought about how we become the people that we are today? I do a lot, and something that I have realized is a big portion of the people that we comes from the family that we grew up in. We gain a lot of personality traits from our families. We gain a lot of memories from them, bad or good. Things that we were taught as a kid will probably stick with us for a long time. So if we have bad experiences in our family, it can have harmful or negative effects on who we may become or vice versa. If we have good experiences, those experiences will also help us to become good people.

Do you see why family is so important? Do you see why it’s so important to be informed on how to be a good spouse, or to be good parents? When you have problems, it’s not just affecting you, but it affects the whole family. Kids observe so much more than we realize, and they are learning from our examples. Let’s make sure that the examples we are setting are good ones!