The types of relationships friends provide have extraordinary health benefits. In one study, researchers report that stressed hamsters with skin wounds that were paired up with other hamsters healed faster than those that were left alone.

The hamsters with friends also produced less cortisol, a stress hormone that creates negative emotions. Truly having a social network of friends enriches our lives and ensures a healthier, happier existence.

relationships friends
To create the type of relationships that friends need, you must first create time for them. It’s simply not possible to physically see every single friend each day, but phoning, emailing, sending cards in the mail and text messaging friends to let them know you’re thinking of them can go a long way.

Sometimes the easiest way to make time for seeing friends is to pick one mutual hobby you can do each week together, such as a yoga class, a weekly game night, a movie night, join a hockey league, choose a day and time to meet at your favorite bar or coffee shop, etc.

You need to make your friends a priority to reap any benefits from your healthy relationships. You want be there for the good times, such as for weddings, graduations and birthday parties, yet you also need to be there for the bad times too; for the funerals, the surgeries and the breakups.

healthy relationships
Even though the personal relationships provide are essential, we should be careful not to place too much burden on any one person. “Just as no marriage can meet our every need for intimacy, neither can a single friendship,” wrote Elisa Morgan and Carol Kuykendall in their book,

What Every Mom Needs. When we expect one friend to meet all of our needs for daily stimulation, support, companionship and advice, we inadvertently begin to suffocate him or her. We may even become possessive of that friendship and attempt to control that person.

Instead, we should look to several different interpersonal relationships to satisfy our needs. One friend may be good for relationships advice, while another might be better for taking road trips with or shopping.

interracial relationships
When we are kids, it’s easy to acquire relationships friends provide. We find them at school, in after-school activities, in the neighborhood and through our parents. However, once we’re older and married, we may see our social relationships dwindle. There are many places for you to make romance relationships with people.

You can take your pet to a dog park, join a gym class, join a cause or hobby group, get involved at your kids’ school, join a church, organize a block party or go back to school. Even so, it’s important that you don’t forget about maintaining healthy relationships with your friends, who will be there to rejoice over your triumphs and support you when times get tough.

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Positive personal relationships can provide great strength during hard times. They can add to our self-esteem, boost our confidence and illuminate our admirable traits. Forgiveness may require a new way of looking at the situation but certainly it is one of the pillars of healthy relationships.

They can be a daily comfort to our psyche and make life so much more fulfilling. Conversely, negative social relationships can tear at our sanity and cause extreme stress, depression, loneliness, anxiety and frustration.

love and relationships
The keys to successful personal relationships are often the same, regardless of what type of relationship you’re looking to strengthen, be it friend, coworker, family member or romance relationships. For instance, being assertive and drawing clear boundaries is a good practice in any relationship.

First you must explore your own feelings and decide what your limits are. Next, you will need to assert yourself using “I” statements, as well as cause-and-effect consequences. For instance, you might say, “I dislike being tickled because it makes me feel powerless and uncomfortable.

If you tickle me again, I will have to leave.” If the person violates your boundaries, then you must stick to your guns and do as promised to reinforce those boundaries. Over time, you may note that the other person cannot adhere to your boundaries and you may come to the conclusion that he or she does not actually respect you.

While it may be a tough conclusion to reach, you couldn’t have come to the truth without first setting boundaries.

social relationships
Another way to bolster any of your love and relationships is to learn to manage your anger better. Anger can be an extremely detrimental to building relationships, parent/child relationships, workplace relationships or friendships. Feeling anger is not the problem; rather, the problem arises from our mismanagement of anger.

The first step to managing your anger is to understand the triggers, both the superficial triggers and the underlying triggers. For example, you might blow your top over your spouse forgetting an anniversary. Yet, beneath that, you may see a pattern of behavior because your spouse also forgot to get you anything for Valentine’s Day, forgot to tell you all his friends were coming over last weekend, forgot to tell you your mother called and forgot to call to say he’d be home late from the bar.

Perhaps you’re really feeling like he doesn’t consider your feelings or inform you on important matters. It’s crucial that you learn to stop bottling your emotions and instead relieve them in healthy ways.

In any of your personal relationships, “Disagreements are going to occur,” says Dr. Phil. “The question is, do you go into it with a spirit of looking for resolution or do you go into it with a spirit of getting even, for vengeance or to gain control? You’ll never win if you do that.

romantic relationships
If you make your personal relationships a competition, then that means your spouse has to lose in order for you to win. It’s not a competition, it’s a partnership.” Whether you’re looking into marriage counseling or seeking healthy relationships with friends, family or coworkers, it’s important that you stop feeling like a victim and take responsibility for your feelings and your behaviors.

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Healthy love relationships and marriages are based around communication, intimacy, friendship and time spent together. When romance relationships graduate to marital relationships and child rearing relationships, it’s easy to get blown off-course.

Many parents focus all their love and attention on the children and lose sight of their own needs and desires as a couple. Instead, parents must put their love marriage priorities first so the children can learn love from their parents’ example.

love and relationships
The first step for creating happy love relationships is fixing any communication problems. Dr. David Burns suggests overcoming the silent treatment through a technique called “multiple choice empathy,” where you take on full responsibility for the other person’s feelings.

You might say a statement like, “I see you don’t want to talk to me. Is there something you’re upset about? Perhaps I didn’t listen to you as well as I should have or I tried to tell you what to do. I feel really bad that I’ve done this to you.” In most cases, the other person will open up.

If your partner is overly critical of you, the best move, Burns says, is to accept responsibility and make the statement more positive. For instance, if your partner accuses you of being a control freak, you might respond by saying, “I’ll admit I have a tendency to be controlling at times.” Then reaffirm how much the person and relationship means to you, mentioning your desire to make things right.

healthy relationships
The next step for creating happy intimate relationships is to share experiences together, no matter how big or small. Some couples get into a TV series together to spend that time cuddling on the couch, eating ice cream, laughing and discussing episodes together. With many top TV series available on DVD now, you can even indulge without all the time-wasting commercials!

In fact, it’s a great way to unwind from a long day and relax. Other couples may prefer to do something a little more active by taking a post-dinner bike ride, a Saturday morning hike and picnic or a daily treadmill workout at the gym. Creating time for each other doesn’t always come naturally. To borrow from an food analogy, think of relationships like chocolate cake: after five days of eating chocolate cake, it might not taste as good, yet after five days of talking about it, that chocolate cake sure sounds good!

interpersonal relationships
Another method to bolster love relationships is to get spiritual together. A University of Chicago survey of married couples found that 75% of Americans who pray with their spouses report their marriages are “very happy.”

Religion promotes many values that apply to building relationships, like respect, humility, faith and selflessness. You can have the satisfaction you desire if you are determined to get it.

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Dating relationships, whether good or bad, can teach a person a lot about him or herself. New relationships can fill a person with confidence, inspiration, hope and love. However, relationships that turn negative can lead to uncertainty, shame and depression.

Therefore, it’s important to understand what constitutes healthy relationships and unhealthy relationships. It can be difficult to objectively answer the question about what makes healthy relationships.

love relationships
Communicating properly within love relationships is often easier in theory than in practice, yet each partner should still strive for maintaining positive interaction. For instance, accusing someone with “you never listen to me,” or “you always forget to call me,” will automatically put the other person in a defensive position.

Instead, a positive partner will simply state how he or she feels. “Sometimes I feel that you don’t listen to me because…” would be a more appropriate way of communicating; or one could say, “I felt really disappointed when you didn’t call today and wondered why you didn’t do what you promised.”

Tone is also important. Couples should avoid sarcastic remarks, putting the other person down, blaming, name-calling, yelling or interrupting. Instead, a “How can we both work to fix this” approach should be taken to create more positive and effective interpersonal relationships.

sexual relationships
Marriage counseling therapists use tools that are also effective for dating relationships, such as a nine-step process called “Emotional Freedom Techniques.” When a couple arrives, the first step is to lay out the problems.

Most couples will fight over laundry or paying the bills, which are surface-level issues that may happen repetitively, but it’s the goal of the therapist to uncover the real relationship issues troubling them. The next step, then, is to realize the destructive cycle and the underlying needs/wants that fuel this negative pattern.

The third step is to understand what’s fueling one’s emotions. In the fourth step, partners become less combative and realize that no one is to blame, but rather, the cycle is the common enemy they must defeat. Partners become more honest and admit their deepest fears and desires in the fifth step.

In the sixth step, the partners should acknowledge each other’s feelings. In the seventh step, couples become closer because of the newfound realizations and the eighth step involves brainstorming and problem solving. Lastly, the partners vow to stay on-track and prevent relapses.

People from broken homes can find it extremely difficult to create healthy dating relationships. Our first experience of love and relationships begins at home with our parents’ example.

Therefore, if the social relationships at home have been negative, then the child will have a skewed vision of what constitutes a “normal relationship.” Many people from broken homes find that they are always searching for what their family life has lacked.

interpersonal relationships
It is entirely possible to view an abusive upbringing as an example of what not to do. Some people in dating relationships can break out of these cycles and learn to live and love positively; although, many more people require some counseling to uncover negative behavioral patterns that have been adopted from childhood.

It’s important for the individual to do some soul-searching and remain honest about where one has been and where one is going. Spending some time alone, soul-searching and trying to think more positively is really what this woman will need to make healthy relationships a reality.

Tags: Couples, Dating Relationships, Defensive Position, Destructive Cycle, Effective Interpersonal Relationships, Emotional Freedom Techniques, Healthy Relationships, Inspiration, Interaction, Laundry, Love Relationships, Marriage Counseling, Relationship Issues, Relationships Love, Sarcastic Remarks, Sexual Relationships, Shame, Surface Level, Uncertainty, Unhealthy Relationships