How to have a healthy, happy relationship

Photo by Anne Haarmark Mollmann 2024

I know how to have a healthy and happy relationship. I am not saying this because my relationship with my spouse is healthy and happy (though I believe it is). I am saying it because I did the research.

More than a decade ago, coming out of a particularly brutal break-up, I needed to find out what had gone wrong. Being a researcher at the time, I deployed the skills I had. I interviewed dozens of women and non-binary folks about their “contracts” with their partners, and about how happy, safe, and fulfilled they felt. What I found was perhaps not surprising, but nonetheless weighty.

As it turns out, most people I spoke to had never clarified boundaries with their partners. They had some clarity about how they themselves would classify their arrangement (e.g. monogamous, open, monogamish), but often had no actual definition of what they meant, even for themselves, and had never talked to their partners about it in detail.

The few people I spoke to who did have clarity, who regularly and repeatedly had conversations with their partners about boundaries and expectations, and who stuck to whatever agreement they arrived at, those people felt happy and secure. It didn’t matter what the boundaries and expectations were, what mattered was that they were clear, negotiated and renegotiated, and adhered to.

Or put differently: what mattered was a shared and co-constructed understanding of accountability.

To me, this insight is applicable to so many parts of life: my relationship with my body, my work, my family, my core self.

Clarity in life is rare but essential. And it all starts with articulating what I need and want, and accepting that those things change over time.