Creating Healthy Relationships

By Carla Perez, MD

Carla Perez, longtime OPEN EXCHANGE lister, is known for her down-to-earth advice!

A healthy relationship should be able to survive what I call the "Desert Island Test." If the two of you are stranded on a desert island with one else around, you have enough love, lust, care, and concerns to keep life interesting and fun. The wedding is just the beginning. (In fact, I have a theory that the more elaborate the wedding, the shorter the marriage—though feel free to prove me wrong.)

Don't stay with someone who constantly criticizes you and/or tries to make you over—someone who pressures you to eat differently, lose weight, drink less, change your wardrobe or hairstyle, be more orderly, rearrange your furniture, avoid certain relatives or friends, play a sport or attend an event you dislike, or change other personal habits. Similarly, don't you try to make the other person over or orchestrate his or her life. If the two of you—unedited—don't fit each other's tastes, don't stay miserably glued together 'til death do you part. (And horrors be, you might even get stuck together in an afterlife!)

Too many people stay in not-good-enough relationships and turn them into not-good-enough marriages—marriages in which each party remains angry at the other for feeling caught and robbed of being happier; marriages filled with loneliness and/or infidelity; marriages covered over by pretense and denial.

Love becomes pain when two people share romantic love but not enough interests, much like Robert Redford's and Barbra Streisand's characters in The Way We Were. If two people share interests without enough romantic love, one of them might experience a dilemma similar to Ingrid Bergman's character in Casablanca—she's married to a "good" man but in love with another, Humphrey Bogart's character. And, as Francine Klagsbrun so aptly stated in Married People, Staying Together in the Age of Divorce, "Sex isn't everything, but it's an awful lot."

When you truly belong to yourself, if a relationship doesn't work out, as painful as a breakup can be, you will survive it. You are no longer a helpless, dependent child without options or resources, even though the end of a relationship may temporarily feel that way. Cut your losses, laugh with friends about your foibles, regroup, and get on with your search.