Healthy Relationships
What is a healthy relationship?
Are you sure that you and your significant other are getting the best out of your relationship? Not sure? If that’s the case, take a few steps back and consider whether your relationship has these qualities:
- Respect: Have respect for one another and yourself. Does your partner respect your beliefs, your boundaries (sexual / personal), values who you are as a person? Does he/she seek to understand who you are inside and out? Do they listen when you say you’re not comfortable doing something and back off right away? Or do they keep pressuring you until you say yes? Respect in a relationship means that each person values who the other is, seeks to understand and know them, and would never challenge the other person’s boundaries.
- Trust: Let’s say you’re talking with a guy/girl from gym class and your boyfriend/girlfriend walks by. Do they completely loose their cool or keep walking because they know you would never cheat on them? It’s completely ok to feel a little jealous sometimes – jealousy is a natural emotion. How a person reacts when feeling jealous is what matters the most. There’s no way you can have a healthy relationship if you don’t trust each other.
Honesty: Keep it real with your partner as well as with yourself. This quality goes hand-in-hand with trust because you can’t have one without another. Has there ever been a point in your relationship where you’ve caught your boyfriend/girlfriend in a major lie? Let’s say he or she told you that they had to work on a Friday night, but you find out that he/she was out with some friends instead. If that’s the case, TALK to your partner. If you feel there’s something that needs to be talked about, bring it up the next time you have a chance. Honesty is a very important quality in a healthy relationship.
- Support: Support your partner through good times and bad. Everyone needs support through good times, sad times, happy times, frustrating moments, etc. Even if you don’t understand the situation that your significant other is in, listen. Avoid put downs, that’s the last thing that they want to hear in a healthy relationship. Your partner should be your shoulder to lean on when you lose a close game, the one to celebrate with, and the person who has your best interest at heart.
Seek Consent
Seeking consent means “getting permission” for kissing, touching, or other sexual contact. Giving consent is always a choice.
- Respect Yourself.
- Respect Your Partner.
- Ask Before You Act.
- Respect the Answer.
- Going along with something because of wanting to fit in with the group, being deceived, feeling threatened, forced, or pressured is NOT consent! If you can’t say ‘no’ comfortably, then ‘yes’ has no meaning.
- Always ask first.
Don’t just assume the other person is consenting by their actions or body language alone. Silence does not equal consent. - Don’t assume that if the other person has consented before, that they will consent the next time. It is a choice every time and at every level of intimacy.
- Resepct your partner’s wishes about waiting to kiss or have sex.
Myspace
Facebook