Maintaining Healthy Relationships

 Maintaining healthy relationships is one of the major life skills that everyone must master in order to build long-term happiness. The first step to maintaining healthy relationships is to understand why healthy relationships work. Generally, they work because of three factors: trust, communication and equitable give and take. If both partners can trust each other, there is open communication, and both contribute equally to the relationship, the relationship has every chance of staying strong and healthy.

1. To foster trust, never keep important information from your partner. If it's something you would want to know as a partner, it's something your partner should know. Once trust is lost, it never really comes back, so don't squander that trust. It's rarely worth it to shatter the trust between two people who rely on each other.
2. Communication is often considered the most important aspect of maintaining healthy relationships. When communication is closed, issues tend to build up over time, resulting in explosions of emotion that can destroy a relationship. Keeping communication open means that issues never get past the initial misunderstanding phases and never blow up to relationship-ending proportions.
   
3. Having an equal "give and take" attitude in the relationship is often the most difficult part of maintaining healthy relationships. This part of a relationship is never really completed. It's an area that both partners need to be mindful of indefinitely. If one partner is contributing much more than the other, it builds resentment over time. This leads to a lack of respect and a desire to get out of the relationship. Maintaining healthy relationships requires both partners to make sure that there is no resentment over either partner's efforts and that both feel the relationship is equitable.