302. How Do You Know If You’re In a Healthy Relationship?

All right, the first one is responsiveness.

Do you feel understood and cared for? OK, responsiveness in a healthy relationship.

OK, here's what responsiveness means in a healthy relationship.

It means you are responsive to each other.

You make an effort to understand what the other person is feeling, needing, experiencing.

And of course, it goes both ways.

There's a relationship science term for a lot of what I'm describing here.

It's called perceived partner responsiveness.

Researchers use it to describe the feeling that your partner understands you, validates your experience, and genuinely cares about your well-being.

So what could this look like? It looks like empathy in a relationship, being able to put yourself in their shoes and vice versa, which is like, I mean, this is key to all healthy relationships and not just romantic ones.

You can see each other's point of view.

Even if you don't agree, you can bring something up that feels off without threatening the entire relationship.

There's room for curiosity and conflict.

And when you share something vulnerable, you feel more understood most of the time because they're listening and processing and asking questions and Just giving your vulnerability space.

And of course, you're doing all that for them too.

This is all a two-way street.

One key skill that supports responsiveness and healthy relationships is the ability to validate each other, especially in conflict or in more emotional moments.

Validation doesn't mean agreements.

This is one of these skills that I wish everyone could work on.

I think it's like one of the most important things, but it's really hard to do in conflict.

But here's an example.

Let's just say I come home and I say to my partner, I'm really upset.

I felt completely left out at dinner tonight and now wondering if my friends even wanted me there.

So validation and response would look like my partner saying, oh, yeah, I could see why you would feel hurt.

What happened? It doesn't sound like, oh, I'm sure they didn't mean to make you feel left out or, oh, you're probably overthinking it or jumping into, well, maybe you should text them and ask.