Evidence-based relationships
Translating Good Relationship Practices and Relationship Red Flags into the Real World.
During a conversation with a friend, the subject of relationships and how we measure success came up, which sparked off the following train of thought:
How do you implement those “Top 5 Healthy Relationship Habits”, “7 Things Emotionally Mature People Do” and “8 Signs You’re In A Toxic Relationship” listicles in your everyday life?
Listing out both positive and negative behaviours is an excellent start as it raises awareness of both things which you are doing right and those negative things you might be doing without realising.
The issue is that essays on the subject can be quite polar and absolutist, whereas very little in life is actually that clear-cut.
Toxic relationship habits
A lot of thought and discussion has been happening online on the subject of toxic relationship habits — how to spot them, how to avoid them and what to do if you’re in a toxic relationship. This is great and a long time overdue — people need to be aware of these things and I argue that they should be taught in schools as well as brought up by parents.
One of the biggest challenges in recognising toxic behaviour is that it very seldom appears out of the blue. Toxic habits and behaviour often creep in over time, so gradually that you don’t even notice and they become the norm. This is how many toxic relationships germinate.
This is one reason (among many) that people who are in toxic relationships don’t always feel like they are — the bullshit that is readily apparent to your best friend is just normal to you. You picture toxic or abusive relationships as ones where a partner goes to work with bruises and claims they fell down the stairs or where they’re kept chained to a radiator when they’re in the house and fed once a day.
Healthy relationship habits
In some ways, these can be equally difficult to isolate and identify because, like a top-notch IT Ops team, they’re invisible until they’re suddenly not there.
Because of how much we value the status quo and don’t want to upset it, it can be difficult to implement routines and habits for your relationship that are beneficial. It’s very easy to think “Everything is fine” and not necessarily look to improve things when some fairly minor changes can snowball into more awesome improvements in your daily life.
Evidence-based relationships
Unlike the days where leeches, bleeding and bad humours were considered to be the pinnacle of medicine, today we operate (mostly) on evidence-based principles.
We measure mortality rates, substances have LD50 values, we can measure how fast a disease spreads and its vectors. We also measure, by way of double-blind studies, the effectiveness of a drug on a random sample of a population. As with any scientific investigation, you design your experiment, state your base assumptions, define your metrics and predictions, then you run the test.
There’s no reason the same algorithm can’t be applied to relationships.
It’s possible to define a set of metrics for a relationship and then measure against those things to get a snapshot of the “health” of your relationships.
To get you started, here is a list of potential metrics you could use and expand upon as no template will ever fit every possible situation. Maybe you already do lots of things right or maybe you’re worried that you’re Not Doing It Right — all of this is a spectrum and where you fall is entirely different to where someone else might be.
Metrics
You could measure all these on a scale — what the values are is up to you, depending on how granularly you want to measure things. Or you could come up with your own thing!
Please bear in mind that these are suggestions not rules. The results you get are just data. Whether you act on the information is a decision that you will need to make — you can add weighting to any one of the data points you use as a measure of “How many fucks do I give about this?” to help you.
Some results may vary even between two partners and can be used as a starting point for further discussion.
The statements below sit on different points on the [positive — negative] behaviours scale — you will need to decide exactly what each of them means to you. There is no implicit order to the points below, but some of the statements are related to ones above. [*]
- I can express my feelings without being judged
- I feel comfortable & safe saying “I’m not sure” about how I feel
- My partner recognises and respects my desire for space
- My physical, emotional and sexual boundaries are respected
- I feel comfortable & safe re-negotiating boundaries with my partner
- I feel comfortable & safe asking for small changes to my environment — turning the music down, dimming the lights, putting things back where they belong
- My partner respects and acknowledges my experiences of a situation rather than trying to convince me that it’s not what happened
- I feel comfortable & safe asking for emotional support
- I expect emotional support from my partner
- My partner expects me to emotionally support them without reciprocating
- When challenged on their behaviour, my partner acknowledges what I say without immediately trying to argue
- I hear my partner out without trying to ‘fix’ whatever their issue is
- I ask whether my partner wants my input on the situation they’re describing
- I set expectations and follow through — meeting at specific times, committing to dates, communicating clearly
- I feel pressured to avoid ‘drama’ which makes challenging potentially problematic behaviour difficult for me.
- I feel like I have to keep secrets from my partner to avoid difficult conversations
- I can raise potentially uncomfortable or awkward issues with my partner freely
- My partner feels safe bringing up potentially uncomfortable or awkward issues with me.
Any of the points that start with “I…” can and maybe should also be flipped to analyse whether the same is true in reverse — to indicate whether you feel like your partner also does these things.
All of the points can be added to a spreadsheet and then assigned values on whatever scale you want and modified by weighting them to give you an indication of what is important to you.
An example can be found here.
Click File > Make a Copy to clone this over to your own Drive.
If you like this, I’d appreciate it if you shared it with your friends ❤️
