Greetings and welcome!

In this article series we want to talk about what constitutes healthy relationships. We want to talk about the emotional, intellectual, psychological foundations of healthy, long-term relationships, what is necessary to maintain healthy relationship and, towards the end, talk about some of psychological and slociological obstacles which make having a healthy long-term relationship so difficult in our society.

As you may already know, speaking about what constitutes healthy relationships can be difficult, and this for several reasons. On the one hand, the majority of people who engage in intimate relationships really have no idea what constitutes a healthy relationship. There are several aspects of this problem. One, we often have poor role models. Relationships fail at the rate of 1 in 2 and most people will have experienced serious relationship collapse, and even multiple divorces, by the time they are old and grey. These individuals also have children and the children in these relationship do not see healthy, loving, and intimate relationships modeled to them. Instead they see anger, emotional blockages, betrayal (i.e. cheating) and all the other accouterments of dysfunctional modern relationships. The fact is, children we are rarely taught the requirements for healthy intimacy and relationship stability because the adults in their life either don't broach this critical subject, or simply don't know the requirements. The individual who experiences ongoing relationship crises and collapse is in no position to advice other adults, much less children, on the requirements of healthy relationships.

So if we are not taught by our parents and the other adults in our life, and if the models we follow are often dysfunctional and broken, where do we get our knowledge? From two places really. We get our advice on how to behave from the gender scripts provided to us by family, friends (who often don't have good relationships with their partners) and the media, and we get our expectations from the romantic Disney ideal. You know the one. This is the fairtytale wedding, the Beatles "All You Need is love," the Ella Enchanted magic of fortune and fate throwing two people together to magically live happily ever after. Prince saves princess from the clutches of the dysfunctional family and the young couple lives happily ever after. If we don't buy that one, then we absorb the gendered prescriptions of movies like "I Love you Man" or "Hangover" and weep and moan when our relationships inevitably collapse under the post-modern "anything goes" strain of hyper individualized modern culture.

And you can't rely too much more on the professionals either. While some counselors and psychologists may have a clue when it comes to healthy relationships, many don't. We have heard many horror stories from clients past "couple's counseling" experiences dealing with counselors and psychologists who quite clearly don't know the first thing about relationships. And it's not necessarily the counselors fault. We mean, it is not done intentionally. A lot of different things can interfere with counsellors ability to provide adequate advice.  Often they themselves have unresolved childhood issues themselves and when they do, this can create blindspots. How do you couch a couple on emotional intimacy, for example, when you come from a traditional family where the male cut off his emotions at an early age and where you now think that emotional amputation is healthy? How do you coach a family on emotional intimacy when you yourself cannot connect at deep levels because of unresolved childhood abuse?

Or how 'bout the issue of children? How can a young, single, fresh out of college psychologist have anything meaningful to say about the challenges of child raising? Further to this, how can a single white male, with no child rearing experiences, who works eighty hours a week, and comes from a traditional home where the mom bore the heavy burden of childcare, have anything meaningful to contribute to a relationship where the mom is deep in the jaws of post-partum depression and the dad remains oblivious to the burden of childcare and ignorant of the need for deep emotional connection betweens mom, dad, and newborn?

These are legitimate questions and while they aren't raised here to point fingers at professionals who should know better, or who should adopt a more critical stance towards gender, gender roles, and socialization, they are important questions. In a world where frank discussion about the difficulties of having relationships are rare indeed (though this is beginning to change), and where gender stereotypes, gender exclusions, and the emotional amputation of half the human race is common (big boys don't cry, right) it's not surprising that finding good advice is difficult to come by. It's also not surprising why relationships fail at such alarming rates.

And this brings us back to the point of this article series. In this article series we are going to offer some advice and guidance on how to have a successful, long term, intimate relationship. We will ask the questions what constitutes a good relationship, or how do we repair a faltering one, and we will give you our advice and opinions. These opinions will be based on research and our own experience in an eighteen year relationship watching our own emotional and intellectual responses, and the responses of our children. They will also be based on some theoretical observations that we've made over the years including the observation that:

1. Few people appear to have healthy relationship and many people get their emotional needs, and often even their physical needs, met outside their primary relationship. However, as we will explore later, lack of emotional and physical intimacy provide a very poor foundation for long term and healthy relationships.
2. Few people understand the depth of attachment that can be developed, and the damage that is done to that attachment, and the psyche of the individual, when that trust is betrayed. We are taught to be individuals and act like such but relationships are, by definition, and by natural inclination, not about the individual but about the "couple." Over time we have seen that there is pressure to develop more and deeper levels of connection and intimacy in relationships and when this pressure is not properly handled, relationships fail. As we will explore in this series, higher levels of intimacy are often undermined by a) childhood emotional trauma that creates blocks and fears, b) a socialization process that overemphasizes individuality in the service of work and consumerism, and that priviledges the needs of business and the economy over the emotional needs of individuals and the family.

Now before concluding we would like to say a couple of things up front. First of all, in this series we are going to going to put aside any notions of gender difference. Our assumption throughout is that while people may have different emotional and intellectual responses (people are comfortable with different levels of intimacy), and may be comfortable with different levels of connection, these responses cannot be organized along gender lines. If you want to know why the "typical male" flees from intimate emotional contact, or why women experience such high rates of depression in the industrialized world, you have to look beyond the popular (but erroneous) notion of sexual difference and instead examine childhood socialization (men are encouraged to "disconnect" emotionally at an early age), social structure (the media emphasizes and encourages a vision of the world based on gender), and even economic exigencies (i.e. it benefits The System when women stay home and do unpaid and unsupported childcare and emotional labour while the men go out and work).

Secondly, we would also note that relationships, at least the healthy ones, are based primarily on an emotional attachment and connection. As we'll see there are intellectual, physical, and psychological components to relationships, but in the final analysis relationships succeed or fail based on the attention to the emotional needs of the people inside those relationships. Unfortunately, this is not a well understood fact and, what's more, the emotional component of relationships can be tricky to navigate, and for a lot of different reasons not the least of which is that our economic order relies and even encourages the deconstruction and suppression of emotional attachments from an very early age (men, in particular, are encourages to amputate their emotinos), the separation of genders, and the idolization of individuality at the expense of relationships.

Gina and Mike

Next sections

Discarding gender.

The foundations of healthy relationships.

Physical and emotional exclusivity (the whys and wherefores of relationship fidelity)

The sociology of relationships

The social deconstruction of emotional attachments