Give your relationship a love MOT

This Valentines Day mental health expert Noel McDermott offers his expert tips for maintaining a healthy relationship. In addition to the traditional romantic meal and floral bouquet, he stresses we should make time to understand what makes a relationship roadworthy and how to better deal with life’s challenges together.

How to make a relationship roadworthy

Create emotional tone – this is a key contributor for relationships lasting the distance. Conflict is a part of life but in our love relations we want the emotional background noise to be about kindness and love. Oxytocin is a hormone we produce when we feel safe in our relationship to another; it produces a sense of wellbeing, a feeling of being bonded and contributes to our overall health. How do we do this? Simple! Take the time to look into your partner’s eyes, make moments for skin to skin contact in a non-sexual way, hold hands, cuddle lots! These simple activities create oxytocin and promote bonding adding a loving tone to our relationship. Dropping the tone of our voices also produces wellbeing and affection. Think of how you talk to a child to soothe them, it works on us adults as well.
Create flexible role boundaries – this allows us to be more authentic and open. We all have different roles in life and in our love relationships it’s important that the roles we take on feel authentic and allow us freedom to express ourselves. It’s okay that one of you is better at the finances than another for example. It’s okay to divide labour in that way, but it’s not okay to force one person to take it on because it’s a societal norm for example. Find out what works for your relationship and discuss together what you want in all aspects of the relationship.
Learn conflict skills – developing good conflict resolution skills keeps our relationships on track, this can be from learning to let things go, to getting it all out in the open. Being able to verbalise feeling angry rather than being angry in an aggressive manner for example is so much healthier for us. Owning our part in a problem. Creating emotional distance from conflict issues to problem solves helps. Learning that stress from life impacts us but doesn’t indicate our relationship is poor is good also. Learning assertive communication skills will improve conflict management.

These three areas are well researched to contribute to making a relationship roadworthy and are all things that can be worked on to function better.

What is ‘Healthy Love’?

The keys to a healthy and successful relationship are well known and they fall into three areas of functioning:

Problem solving: not just dealing with conflict when it arises but also how effective one is at letting go of conflict that is not helpful.
Ask yourselves – Is the ’structure’ of the relationship clear? Are boundaries understood? Are tasks allocated fairly? Is power shared appropriately? Are roles adopted with personal autonomy?
Is the emotional climate and feelings towards each other generally in the arena of love and positive regard, are positive views held by members about being in the relationships? Is sexual functioning healthy and positive?

Dealing with life’s challenges together

It’s important in any intimate relationship to understand stressors from outside that cause issues but don’t necessarily mean the relationship is bad. Learning to distinguish between if you like this inside and outside of the relationship in terms of problems is very helpful in maintaining healthy love towards each other. It’s about normalising stress responses to stressful life experiences rather than saying they are signs of danger or problems.

External circumstances can challenge the perception that our current love relationships are not meeting needs effectively in this area and this can cause a sense of internal stress. It’s perfectly normal, it doesn’t mean that the love relationship is bad, it means the circumstances it exists in are bad.

Act as if it’s ok

No matter what we can learn and implement a key take out from behavioural therapy is encapsulated in the saying, we don’t run away from the bear because we are afraid of it, we are afraid of the bear because we run away from it. It points to a truism that we are what we do. Cognitive behavioural therapy built on this to explain the link between feeling, thought and action. We have the power to take action and move ourselves into a better place rather than behaving in a way that reinforces our negative position. We can choose to act as if we are loving when we don’t feel it.

Mental health expert Noel McDermott comments:

‘Don’t go to bed angry’ is the little house on the prairie advice and really what it means is that actions and emotional tone are important in love relationships. Learning how to put aside issues and do the work needed for the relationship to flourish is a crucial skill to learn. Move out of zero sum approaches. Forgive to be able to celebrate the relationship but also don’t forget. Whatever the stress is can be dealt with if the relationship is strong.