What You Need To Know About Developing Healthy Relationships

A relationship can be considered healthy if both partners feel supported, connected, and independent while being with each other.

Building healthy relationships can bring a lot of joy and contentment into your life.

Healthy relationships become a cornerstone, a place where you can be yourself and know you’ll be fully supported and respected no matter what life throws your way.

On the other hand, unhealthy relationships are toxic and damaging to your emotional well-being. Unhealthy relationships are stressful and leave you feeling insecure, attacked, and doubting yourself.

But how to maintain healthy relationships? Is there a secret to having a healthy relationship?

Well, it all starts with you and how you relate to yourself, as well as your attitude to relationships and other people. Let’s take a look at how you can develop healthy relationships in your life.

The article shares 7 tips on how to maintain a healthy relationship:

1. Get to know yourself

It’s a cliché, but it’s also true: You can’t have good relationships with other people until you build a healthy relationship with yourself.

Maintaining healthy relationships start with you. When you know who you are and what you want out of life and relationships, you can start looking for relationships that fit those needs.

It’s also important to get to know your insecurities, frustrations, the things that make you angry or make you lash out, and how you respond to stress.

Knowing these things makes it easier to manage potential conflicts and handle situations with grace.

2. Be comfortable alone

Being comfortable alone is important if you want to be comfortable with another person and build healthy romantic relationships with them. If you’re comfortable alone, you’ll discover the joy of self-sufficiency and self-validation.

When you’re comfortable and whole within yourself, you can enter relationships from an open, grounded, and honest place.

You won’t look for the relationships to fix you or fill a gap in your life, because you know you’ve already found wholeness. Instead, you can enjoy each relationship for what it brings to your life, without relying on it.

3. Take responsibility

How to have a healthy relationship?

Taking responsibility for your feelings, actions, and reactions are essential steps to a healthy relationship.

We all get irritated by other people sometimes – we’re only human after all – but we can manage our reactions and accept responsibility for them.

Only you are responsible for what you accept in a relationship and how you treat the other person.

Taking responsibility for your life and your relationships make you feel stronger and remind you that you’re the captain of your ship.

4. Accept others as they are

Many a relationship has broken down because one party wanted the other to be different. However, you can’t force other people to change and be more like you want them to be. All you can do is accept them as they are now.

So, if you want to know how to build a healthy relationship, start by accepting each other.

If you enter a relationship with open eyes and acceptance of your partner’s quirks, foibles, and traits, your expectations will be realistic, and your relationship will be based on mutual respect, not manipulation.

5. Be realistic about relationships

Fairytale syndrome is a certified relationship killer. Every relationship has a honeymoon phase, and it’s a lot of fun, but it’s not the basis for a long-term relationship.

Want to know how to keep a relationship healthy? Get real about what your relationship entails.

There are going to be ups and downs, bills to pay, and perhaps in the future the demands of kids, promotions, or even illness. Your partner is human and has some irritating habits (and so do you).  

Prepare yourself for a real-world relationship instead of a fairytale, and you won’t be disappointed. You’ll be ready for a fulfilling relationship that embraces the everyday instead of rejecting it.

6. Be loyal and respectful

Loyalty and respect are some of the key aspects of a healthy relationship. Being loyal to your partner and making them your priority builds trust and reminds them that they matter to you.

Loyalty makes it easier for you to trust each other and build a relationship together.

Respect means listening to your partner’s needs, concerns, hopes, and dreams openly and with care.

It means learning to talk about even painful things without being cruel to each other, and it means putting the health of your relationship above winning or scoring points off each other.

Talk to your partner the way you’d want them to talk to you. Focus on your feelings and needs, not on trying to punish them or make them act a certain way.

Watch Dr. Emerson Eggerichs explain the two ingredients for a successful marriage.

7. Nurture the good

If you want a beautiful garden, you tend and water the flowers, not the weeds. Developing healthy relationships is just the same. Nurture and grow the good in each other and your relationship.  

Look for all how your relationship works and focus on those. Do more of what works and less of what doesn’t.

That counts for your partner, too. Look for what you love and appreciate about them, and focus on that. Tell them about it.  

Of course, issues will come up sometimes and need to be dealt with, but good relationships are built on being positive and nurturing, not nagging or finding faults.

Healthy relationships are a possibility for anyone willing to work on themselves and learn the skills of being in a healthy relationship.

Practice honesty and kindness with yourself so you can relate better to others and build relationships that are made to last.

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Marriage.com Editorial Team Relationship & Marriage Advice

The Marriage.com Editorial Team is a group of experienced relationship writers, experts, and mental health professionals. We provide practical and research-backed advice on relationships. Our content is thoroughly reviewed by experts... Read more to ensure that we offer high-quality and reliable relationship advice. Read less

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Backed by relationship science and evidence-based psychology, this assessment helps identify the area of your relationship that deserves the most attention right now, whether things feel strong or slightly off. Research shows that even healthy relat...

Questions: 20 | Last updated: Jan 23, 2026

Sample Question

When you and your partner talk about something important…

We listen with care — even hard talks feel safe and productive

We try to talk, but lately emotional closeness feels harder to reach

I want to be open, but part of me still guards my heart

Our discussions sometimes spiral or end unresolved

It’s hard to feel close because our physical intimacy hasn’t felt strong lately

We often see things differently about goals or priorities

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