This month’s podcast is based upon a video made by Terence Gorski and Claudia Black entitled Building Healthy Relationships. Mr. Gorsky and Ms. Black use the analogy that building healthy relationships is like building a house. When you’re building a house, the first thing you do is clear the land. The relationship equivalent of clearing the land is a program of personal growth: that is, you proactively working on you being as healthy as you can possibly be. You see this in 12-step programs when it is suggested that people not get involved in any new intimate relationships for the first 12 months of their recovery. Once you’ve established a successful program of personal growth, then you can set the foundation for your relationships. Gorsky and Black referred to the foundation of healthy relationships as the Three C’s: Communication, Caring, and Commitment.

Communication is the first C – the cornerstone, if you will – because without communication it is impossible to care about somebody as an individual. You can care about them as a human being – you don’t want to see them hurt, you don’t want to see them bleeding – but in order to care about an individual, you have to know somebody as an individual – and again, the best way to do that is through communication. After communication and caring comes commitment, and there are three commitments in any healthy relationship. The first commitment is to yourself; because if you’re not healthy, then there’s no healthy you to bring to a relationship. If you’ve ever flown on an airplane, then you’ve probably witnessed a really good example of this. Flight attendants will stand at the head of the cabin and say that in the event of cabin depressurization, a yellow mask will fall from above. They always tell you to put the mask on yourself first before you put it on your children or anybody who is sitting around you. The reason for this is obvious – if you’re not able to function, then you can be of no service to anybody else. The second commitment in healthy relationships is to your partner, because like a chain is only as strong as its weakest link, relationships are only as healthy as the sickest person in them. So if you’re healthy and your partner is not, then by definition your relationship is not. The third commitment is to the relationship itself. An easy way to remember the commitments in healthy relationships is “me, you, we.”

After you’ve cleared the land and set the foundation, you can begin to build. It’s helpful to understand that healthy relationships unfold in stages, with each stage representing a deeper level of intimacy. Before I describe the stages that healthy relationships go through, I’d like to refer you back to the March podcast entitled, “When Your Feet Hurt, Everything Hurts.” In that podcast there was an exercise where you were asked to describe the character traits that make up the perfect partner and the perfect friend for you. The Big Aha behind this exercise was that in actuality what you were doing was you were creating a blueprint for the person that you wanted to be. Because “opposites attract” works with magnets, not with people. So now, armed with this list of the things that you are looking for in a friend, by paying attention and observing other people’s behaviors, and gauging those behaviors against your list, you can determine how intimate you’d like your relationships to be, weeding out those that may be a detriment to your personal peace.

The first stage is casual contact, and that’s everybody that you come into contact with – everybody that you wave to, that you smile at, you nod at on the street. In the casual contact stage, your only obligation to these other people is that you do no harm. Before I describe the deeper levels of intimacy, it’s important that it be understood that as you graduate to deeper levels of intimacy, you don’t abandon the more shallow levels. Even the most committed relationships will have casual moments where your only obligation to your partner is to do no harm.

The next level of intimacy in healthy relationships is called companionship. The definition of companionship is when events are more important than people. And it works like this: You’ve passed the casual contact stage to the point that you are now involved in activities with these people. While you’re involved in these activities, you’re measuring their behavior against the list that you have for the people that you want to attract into your life. For example, if kind and compassionate are on your list, and you observe somebody berating a waitress because they got their order wrong, well then that’s a red flag, and you may not want to go on to the next level with that person.

The next level of intimacy that healthy relationships go through is friendship. And that is when the person is more important than an event. If you’ve ever given up a weekend afternoon to help somebody move – you’ve carted big heavy boxes up and down stairs – that’s a pretty good indicator that that person is a friend.

The fourth stage of intimacy in healthy relationships is what Gorsky and Black refer to as the romantic love stage. The romantic love stage includes passion as well as sexuality. This is where you might share some deep passion of yours; share some long-held belief – aspects of your life that you just don’t share with everybody. A lot of people make the mistake of jumping from casual contact right to romantic love. This is where you hear people say things like, “Well I fell in love,” and while I certainly don’t want to rule out the possibility of falling in love, a far greater number of people find themselves surprised and disappointed. Using the process that I’m describing in this podcast allows you the opportunity to grow into love.

The final stage is committed love. This is when you begin to make obligations and commitments to your friend or partner. At first the commitments start out small - yes I will have dinner with you, yes I will go away for the weekend – and eventually they work themselves into things of a much larger nature – yes I will marry you, yes I will go into business with you, yes I will buy a house with you – as long as the things that you are obligating yourself to do not undermine your commitment to yourself.

As I mentioned earlier, once you reach a deeper level of intimacy, you don’t abandon the more shallow levels. Another thing about these stages is that they’re fluid – not all parties in the relationship will be in the same stage at the same time. This is very important to understand, because it is the cause of a lot of conflict in relationships. You might be in a stage where you want to be with this person, friendship, and they might be in a stage where they want to go to an event, companionship. But if you understand that these stages are fluid, and you’re gong to be in one place, and they’re going to be in another place, and sometimes you’ll both be in the same place and that’s magical, but you allow for both parties and all parties to be where they are and can openly and healthily communicate about any discomfort that arises. That’s when you can be fairly certain that your relationship is healthy.

Before I end this month’s podcast, I’d like to share with you a couple of very common mistakes that people make in relationships. The first is staying in a relationship too long. If your partner has proven that he or she is unwilling or unable to maintain a healthy relationship, yet you continue to participate in the relationship, that’s a mistake. And in last month’s podcast I provided a process that will help you extricate yourself from such relationships. The second mistake that people make is giving up on relationships too early. If every time you have conflict in a relationship you leave the relationship, then what happens is you never learn to deal with conflict, which undermines your personal growth and well-being.

Healthy relationships are essential to personal peace. And as I’ve mentioned several times before, I’m a firm believer that world peace will become a reality when enough people find peace within their own heart.