How Can You Tell the Difference Between a Healthy and Unhealthy Relationship?

Every relationship is different. Often a grey area can develop for what is healthy in a relationship and what is not. Close family members or friends may try to give you warning signs that they read in a magazine or online, but often it is not the act that is unhealthy, but the reason behind it. This article helps you determine a healthy response that can service growth in a relationship and reasons unhealthy for the development of the relationship.

Is Fighting Part of a Healthy Relationship?

Let's start with the biggest misconception of a healthy and unhealthy relationship. Fighting! Every couple does it. However, not all couples admit that they do. Some fight more than others. They say opposites attract, but that can be the very reason for more clashing than other relationships. Depending on your personality, the more distinct you are from each other can cause more quarreling between you two. Fighting is not a bad thing in a relationship, and it is perfectly normal to have disagreements every once in a while. A healthy fight can be used to grow and to understand your partner better. Just like in heightened moments of sadness or happiness, you see a vulnerable side to your significant other. The same can be seen in anger or frustration, passion evolves, and a rawness appears. This emotional display can be intimate for couples to get to know more about one another. You can learn their triggers, how they handle emotions, or how they handle frustrations. But most importantly, you learn how to comfort and soothe one another to a mutual solution.

A harmful fight usually stems from a place of revenge or resentment. These fights use guilt to belittle their partner's opinion and worth. These arguments can ramp up quickly with considerable aggression used to turn the opponent into a submissive state of mind. If these fights occur, they will continue and could happen more frequently as your partner's triggers become more easily engaged by simple actions. These types of arguments are often met with an extraordinary apology on one end more so than the other. Abuse can stem from this type of behavior.

Growth Period of a Relationship

Fighting can happen early on in a relationship. While arguments can always arise between couples, conflict is the first experience a team has in their relationship's growth phase. While fighting is used to get to know each other, growth appears once you have decided to continue to invest time and effort into one another. There are several identifiers of a healthy versus an unhealthy relationship. Have you accepted your partner as they are, or do you want to change them? No one wants to be considered a project. A project is something that needs to be changed, fixed, or improved. How can mutual love, respect, and trust stem from being thought of as needing to change or be different? In many unhealthy relationships, people sacrifice confidence, and self-esteem for themselves, to be who their partner wants them to be. This is unhealthy!

People and couples do change over time, but you should not do it out of guilt or embarrassment of one another. The change should be by empowerment and support. This can mean the difference between "Don't you think you should lay off the cupcakes" and "You are doing great avoiding excess sugar. You seem a lot more energetic." Change for yourself is your choice and should be met with compassion and support. The change should not be from guilt by someone else.

What the Future Holds

As couples continue to grow and change together, they start looking and talking about the future. This is another identifier of the difference between a healthy and unhealthy relationship. In a healthy relationship, you begin to share each other's dreams, and you want their dreams to come true as much as your own. In an unhealthy partnership, you remain solely focused on your goals and your success as an individual. It would be best if you were viewing your relationship as a team. You do not have to see eye to eye on everything, but you should share a common goal to conquer life together. You should have someone to lean on in times of struggle and someone to celebrate with for your life's accomplishments.

This relationship period is often where you evaluate your timeline of life and see how they match up. Is your significant other ready for marriage, kids, pets, or a house as much as you? This could also be when a person can start to guilt their significant other for not meeting their expectations in an unhealthy relationship. Talk about your dreams and aspirations with your significant other. This could open up some doors and help you to view where your relationship is going.

You can quickly overthink life and relationships! You begin overanalyzing each other's actions, which leads you to stop acting like yourself. This can dissolve a relationship quicker than anything else. Communication is an essential thing in a partnership. As long as you are communicating, you can continue to grow and evaluate your feelings for one another. Relationships take continual effort, and the effort needs to be shared on both sides. But remember, you as a couple are not alone; you can ask for help at any stage in your partnership if you are willing to communicate it.