A crucial component of individual mental health and societal health is relationship health. What do our relationships with others look like? And how fulfilled are we in these different relationships?
Each relationship may have different rules, traditions, needs and offers. It can be helpful to evaluate the needs that are met by each relationship, and what we offer in each relationship. Are they in balance across the board, even if not each individual relationship is in perfect balance? (This is often a myth that needs to be dispelled, or looked at closely if it’s something that’s blocking us).
Family relationships
Friendships
Romantic relationships
Community relationships (neighbors, acquaintances)
Work relationships
Community relationships
A sense of disconnection can be alleviated when we say hello to our mail carrier. These kinds of minute interactions can affect our mood and energy throughout the day. If we get in the habit of seeking out and noticing opportunities for these daily uplifts, over time they can have far-reaching effects. Not only for us, but for our social networks as a whole; repeated casual contact has been shown to foster the formation of closer friendships. And sometimes even the most casual contact can open us up to whole new realms of experience.1
Friendships
eating together
Every human being needs to eat. As often as we can, we should do it together.1
🔗 Footnotes
Waldinger, Robert J. and Marc S. Schulz. The Good Life: Lessons From the World’s Longest Study of Happiness, 2023. ↩
Romantic Relationship Health
CNN: You talk a lot about “emergent love.” Can you explain more about that concept?
Nasserzadeh: What I’m offering is a new model, based on more than 10 years of research, which requires certain ingredients for love to emerge. If you think about emergent love as a log and a spark, when these two come together, we have a beautiful fire. As long as we have all the elements available, the fire will burn beautifully and give us the warmth we want. But if you take one of the elements, or ingredients, away, the fire will die.
CNN: What are those ingredients?
Nasserzadeh: There are six ingredients: mutual attraction, trust, respect, compassion, shared vision and loving behavior. With attraction, think about the attributes you like about yourself and the ones you want to be around. Attraction could be social, physical, financial — you name it. It is constructed for you and only for you.2
CNN: What does the ideal configuration — the emergent couple — look like?
Nasserzadeh: In this type of couple, the partners are independent entities in an interdependent partnership with healthy and clear boundaries. They’re connected, but they also view their relationship as a distinct entity in which each partner participates. The relationship is based on equity: They give to the relationship and receive from it, too. The six ingredients of emergent love are present, and love emerges as the result.2
The essence of love is annoyance?
In my opinion, we are not sufficiently prepared for it. We are given aphorisms like “No one is perfect” and “relationships are hard.” We are given diagnoses like codependent and avoidantly attached and “the day-to-day entanglement of marriage is fundamentally opposed to the mystery that sustains sexual attraction.” Well, in trying to come up with my own theory of love, I’d like to submit: closeness is fundamentally annoying. I believe this is what Heather Havrilesky’s wonderful memoir of marriage, Foreverland, is about: the unavoidable friction of making it work with another person.
Closeness is annoying because it’s about the surrender of control. You’re trying to fall asleep, and beside you your partner is snoring. You lightly push their jaw to the side so it’ll stop. Two minutes later, the snoring commences again. You lay there in the dark wondering how you got here. Oh, right: three years ago at a party you saw someone and thought they were very beautiful.3
Footnotes
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Waldinger, Robert J. and Marc S. Schulz. The Good Life: Lessons From the World’s Longest Study of Happiness, 2023. ↩
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https://edition.cnn.com/2024/10/01/health/relationships-success-ingredients-wellness/index.html ↩ ↩2