So what is the mythical healthy relationship?

In My Humble Opinion
1

If you pop into dating and relationship threads you see that apparently some people have very low thresholds for declaring a relationship sick or unhealthy, or throwing around words like co-dependency and stalking, or going get out now whether someone says they and their long term partner had a verbal argument or one attempted to murder the other. I remember a time on another board where someone said the first time their lover raises their voice at them its over :smiley: Or they take metaphorical language literally, “I don’t want to live without you” is not in fact usually a morbid threat of suicide.

I imagine this is one of those areas in life with unclear boundaries, one person’s stalker is anothers thoughtful romantic. And apparently some people are very sensitive and really would find it creepy for a long term partner to come to their job to take them to lunch or whatever, but they tend to think everyone should.

Maybe I just don’t see the point of watering terms down to the point they are meaningless.

2

There’s healthy relationships with their hundreds of minor problems, then there’s “doper advice relationships”, which presumably only last a day or so because the protagonists “Run. Run away now. Fast” and DTMFA at the slightest sign of imperfection.

People in the latter kind presumably live happily in splendid isolation, taking comfort in human interaction when their mom bangs on the floor to get them to turn the porn down a bit.

I’m glad I’m in the fucked-up imperfect kind.

3

Ayup.

4

Not my mom, she likes the porn loud. :wink:

Seriously though, I could write a completely one-sided post about my husband that didn’t include any of his good qualities and only included the problem areas that made him sound like a complete dick and people would be advising me to leave. But no one can ever know the whole back story and all of the nuances of a relationship from a post on a message board.

The mythical healthy relationship (for me) is one in which both parties are mostly content and continuing to evolve as human beings and partners.

5

Pretty much any advice you’ll get on the Internet for even the slightest problem in a romantic relationship is “run run! leave now!!” If everyone took the advice they receive online, and everyone solicited advice online of this sort, no one would ever be in a lasting relationship.

6

Moved MPSIMS --> IMHO.

7

I haven’t noticed much of the behavior mentioned in the OP, links please?
Taking someone out to lunch once is a lot different from showing up every day, wanted or not.

And in general, a healthy relationship does not mean a perfect one - I doubt those exist.

8

A healthy relationship is one where the two people trust each other and keep lines of communication open. Both partners are happy with the relationship and greatly value the other person’s happiness. Almost every time I’ve read a thread here talking about people’s relationship problems, and thought they should end it, it is due to a lack of one of these two things.

9

I do think a lot of people have gotten used to pretty rough relationships, and do not realize how supportive and satisfying a relationship really can be: I’ve known several people in my life who had gotten to the point where always, or almost always, being at odds with their partner was just normal.

If I may make an analogy: it was one of the hottest, most dry summers on record here. By the end of it, I could scarcely believe that water used to fall from the sky for hours at a time. I had to go around and ask people if that was a real memory, it seemed so surreal to think of. I think many people are in relationships like that: their normal is awful, but when someone outside points that out, they disbelieve.

10

Not every relationship is an unhealthy one (obviously) but generally you don’t go on message boards and post “I’m in a great relationship. It’s fulfilling and fun and supportive- should I break up with him?”

People post on message boards when they are seeing red flags and want some outside confirmation for what they already know is true. And self-fulfilling prophesy or not, once you start seeing those red flags, the relationship is in trouble. It’s like cheating- once you suspect your partner is cheating, something is seriously wrong, cheating or not.

I’ve been in healthy and unhealthy relationships, and the difference is night and day. Healthy relationships are not perfect, and still take a lot of work. But healthy relationships don’t have the drama, the games, and the insecurity.

11
  1. This is pure selection bias. You don’t see people posting for advice about their awesome relationships because they don’t need it.
  2. Different people have different dealbreakers. I might advise a young guy to sever, even if he just says he’s a bit unhappy with the frequency of his sex life. This is because I know that sex generally gets less frequent the longer a relationship goes on. And having been in many more adult relationships than him, I have the experience to know that he and the girl will probably end up hating each other in the end, and then they’ll break up anyway. Even if he isn’t unhappy enough *yet *to sever, he will be eventually (and both people end up hurting more in the end). Getting into a new relationship isn’t easy, but it isn’t impossible. He’d be a lot happier spending this time of his life with someone whose drive lines up with his. So, even though he doesn’t view this as a dealbreaker now, he really should sever ASAP because you should never expect someone to change for you.
  3. A lot of people who post for relationship advice have no concept of severing. They’ve never done it before and can’t imagine the concept. They’re still friends/booty calls with all of their exes, and don’t realize the attendant drama is having a negative effect on them. They don’t think that cutting someone off is a good idea, no matter how shittily they’re being treated. So bringing up the concept plants a seed in their mind that hmm, maybe severing wouldn’t make me a totally horrible person.

There really are a fantastically enormous number of people who are content with shitty abusive partners, because they don’t know any better (or have become convinced they don’t deserve any better). If I see someone like that posting, I’m going to tell them to sever because it’s in their best interests, whether they like that advice or are capable of taking it. Because that’s what they SHOULD do.

I agree, though, that a lot of personal projection comes into play in relationship advice threads. There’s an implied disclaimer on message boards that the advice is unprofessional, and worth what the asker is paying for it.

12

A healthy relationship is one in which a given partner

• Is with you because you’re fun and you’re hot, and makes you feel like you’re fun & you’re hot
• Enjoys the good aspects of being with you
• Seeks the things you fall short on with someone else instead of trying to change you or harangue you about it
• Shares the things the two of you discover you share well, including angst and pain and worry as well as joys and futureplans and how yummy the sex feels
• Is a best friend and makes you not alone in the world, and appreciates the same from you
• Is a grownup and treats you as one, too; for all the sharing and mutual support, you take responsibilitiy for yourselves individually
• Commits to never hurting you on purpose, ever. And vice versa.

13

There’s also a point to be made that people who have to ask for validation on the internet are at least a little co-dependent. And often, a co-dependent will put up with so much shit, for so long, that is so far beyond the bounds of normal, that their *only *solution is severing (or staying unhappily coupled forever). That could explain why you see it so much.

It isn’t just the SDMB where you see this advice being dispensed disproportionately. SomethingAwful does it all the time. But the advice generally appears to be sound, as in: the more details someone posts, the worse and unhealthier the relationship sounds. So an initial advisement to sever often becomes a hallelujah chorus shouting SEVER! from the metaphorical rooftops.

14

Relationships are very much like so many other aspects of life and health. It’s possible to have a solid healthy relationship going through some rough spots or to have an unhealthy one that doesn’t show any outside signs of the real problems. I think a good analogy is comparing it to a body part. You can injure yourself, and it will be painful, but if you’re generally healthy and you take appropriate steps to help it heal, it’ll be fine. OTOH, you can have a pesky joint that you don’t take care of, often take medication to keep healthy and just sort of live with because you more or less forget what it should feel like, and it prevents you from going out and doing the activities you really want to do. At times, the former will seem worse than the latter, but it’s not really so true.

And as for internet advice, well, it’s always important to remember that whoever is telling the story, despite their best efforts, can only tell the story from their perspective. If they don’t see the other person’s motivations and thoughts behind their actions, it likely won’t come through when they tell the story, and it makes the other person look worse. And, of course, anyone responding to it will have their own spin based upon whatever baggage they have in their own lives, perhaps filling in a gap with how someone in their life who behaved the same way did, or whatever. It all needs to be put in perspective and taken with a grain of salt.

I do think internet advice is useful though, largely because it gives one perspective on their own perspective. That is, if one is thinking that maybe his spouse is cheating, well, it’ll be obvious that that’s what he really thinks is going on when people respond with “OMG GTFO!” That is, it’s more like that old flip a coin trick when one isn’t sure what decision to make, to flip a coin and whatever side they hope it lands on is what they want. Here, it tells him what he’s really thinking or perceiving, it may or may not be true, but it gives him an angle to approach the problem. So, in such a situation, he shouldn’t immediately assume that she’s cheating, but it is a sign that there’s a problem with perspective and trust, and he needs to look at that.

So, yeah, it can be helpful, but it’s far from a direct end-all-be-all sort of advice.

15

When people hear stories, we assign characters archetypes. There’s the Evil One, the Hero, the Elder, etc. And when we hear relationship problems online, we don’t think of the partner as a dynamic, changeable person with thoughts and emotions and perspectives of their own. We think of them as having the attributes of the archetype they’ve been assigned. They’re not people; they’re characters.

This is why there is so much break-up advice. The partner isn’t a person that’s done a bad thing, they’re just a bad person altogether. And we advise people to get away from bad people.

If people would give 10-page essays of their partner and their relationship, this wouldn’t happen. But they don’t, so it does.

You keep using that word like it’s a term of art.

16

I currently have a very healthy relationship. We seem to fit perfectly. However, I understand that we have only been together a little more than a year and we don’t live together yet. A very healthy relationship can go bad over time.

17

The point could indeed be made, but it would be a shit point.

18

At the risk of being accused of projecting, this is where I was in my (unhealthy) marriage. I had no idea that it was so toxic, because I’d gone numb years ago. Partly because of stuff like this:

(not picking on you, dear, it’s said by a lot of people without qualifiers)

I heard that and thought that the “work” of my marriage was just how relationships are. I guess I’d never had a “healthy” relationship to compare it to. Turns out that the “work” of a healthy relationship isn’t the same as, nor nearly as consuming as, the “work” of an unhealthy relationship.

Now, I do “work” on my relationship like realizing that I forgot to mention to my SO that I have plans this weekend and that was stupid, but when I tell him, he says, “Oh. So I’ll take the kids fishing and you’ll join us when you’re done.”

Then, I did “work” on the relationship like realizing that I forgot to mention to my ex that I have plans this weekend and bracing myself for the storm, sending my son to sleep over at a friend’s house so he’d be “out of the way” and creating cover stories and pretending I’d gotten a last minute job and calling up thirteen babysitters on last minute notice 'cause Og forbid he spend unplanned time with his own child.

But until you have a healthy relationship, you don’t realize that all that stuff is ridiculous and NOT what healthy people mean when they say a relationship takes “work”.

Word. (Again, at least, yes, for me.) Many people spend a lot of time in relationships carefully NOT seeing the red flags. By the time they can no longer ignore/rationalize/deny the red flags, there’s probably so much more fuckedupedness in the relationship that they AREN’T posting, it’s probably not worth maintaining.

19

Not really. People who are confident in their own actions and opinions don’t need to ask for the input of unqualified strangers. People who are co-dependent and indecisive do.

I’m not trying to be a jerk and say those are terrible qualities. I have a history of co-dependence myself.

20

Co-dependent doesn’t mean asking for validation from others. Co-dependent means being excessively nurturing and/or passive towards other adults who don’t require it, to an extent that it adversely affects one’s own quality of life. People can be confident in themselves and their decisions and be co-dependent.

You can be co-dependent AND seek the input of unqualified people, but the one is not a sign of the other.