Self-Improvement Is Essential for a Healthy Relationship
A relationship is only as healthy as each individual involved in it.
A strong relationship is like a building, it needs a strong foundation to sustain it. The foundation of a healthy relationship is made of love, respect, and commitment.
Love is what leads you to see the good in the other person.
Respect is what leads you to value and cherish that good.
Commitment is what makes you stay strong in the face of adversity.
There’s another part of the foundation to a healthy relationship that often ends up overlooked, and that’s self-improvement.
Any relationship, but a romantic one especially, depends on each individual involved in it. Relationships are based on exchanges, they can’t be healthy if there’s no balance in the exchange, and there’s no balance if one of the individuals constantly refuses to work on him or herself.
Self-improvement isn’t just about trying to be the most productive, amazing super-human on the planet. In fact, forget the productivity hacks for a minute.
Self-improvement is about getting in touch with who you really are and genuinely asking yourself: am I the best version of myself I can be? How can I be better?
Here are a few ways in which most of us can be better people:
Practice gratitude
Gratitude is actually associated with living longer. Not to mention that people who practice gratitude are more pleasant to be around. Being grateful doesn’t mean to blindly accept your circumstances and never seek to improve. Being grateful means to recognize what you have and work up from there.
In a relationship, an ungrateful partner can easily become a toxic one. Unable to recognize the efforts of the people around her, she can quickly become bitter towards her own situation, rebelling against her circumstances in an unhealthy way, or simply becoming stuck, since she finds complaining about her circumstances much easier than actually working to change them.
Practice kindness
Kindness is a virtue that makes us more attuned to other people’s needs. It shouldn’t be seen as forgetting yourself to always put others first, but as an exercise in thinking about someone other than ourselves.
In many ways, kindness is what makes being in a relationship worthwhile. Life is hard, but when we have a kind person by our side, it can be made a little bit easier, a little bit lighter.
In a relationship, kindness can also help reduce the stress over household chores. If both parts of a couple see doing chores and taking care of shared living space as an act of kindness towards the other, then more stuff will get done in a regular basis by both of them, which avoids just one person feeling overburdened.
Practice listening
A lot of people just don’t know how to listen. We think we do, because we join in on conversations all the time, but in practice, we’re not good at it. At all.
Crafting a response in your head while the other person is talking isn’t listening. Starting a conversation with your assumptions already formed isn’t listening. Filtering the other person’s speech for out-of-context sentences that only reinforce your prejudices isn’t listening.
Whenever someone says that good communication is essential for a great relationship, they don’t mean that you’re supposed to talk a lot, but that you’re supposed to listen properly. Listen with the intend to learn something about your partner. Listen with an open mind and an open heart.
Lastly, self-improvement is essential for the health of a relationship because it’s essential for the health of the individual.
Human beings aren’t meant to be stagnant. We’re meant to be always learning, always improving, always developing.
If we’re stagnant, we become bored, and become dull. We suffer, and so do our relationships.
Self-improvement isn’t about being perfect. It isn’t even about seeking perfection. It’s about seeking to make the best of your time on earth by cultivating your virtues, and using your strengths to keep yourself and your relationships healthy.
