Keep Talking

I recently attended a talk on what makes for healthy relationships.

I was not surprised by anything presented that night. It's all common sense. Communicate. Validate. Forgiv-iate. (I've been told that you should always give examples in rhyming groups of three, and you gotta do what you're told.) Basic stuff that's always a staple of these talks, but it's still great to get a refresher.

However, one thing that surprised me was the order. Most important was to love and respect yourself, so that you can recognize disrespect when it happens. That, too, is common sense, but is it really most important in a healthy relationship? It might be the most important for getting out of bad relationships, but I feel like communication is far more important for staying in a good relationship.

If you don't communicate and work out your issues as they come up, they act like foreign objects in the human body. They get buried as new layers of relationship-skin form, and eventually start to fester and ooze. It doesn't matter how much you each love yourselves if you're both infected with incommunicitis. That poor communication, to me, is a sign of disrespect to both your partner and the relationship, and it'll turn your skin green like a carrot faster than you can say "mixed metaphor." 

(I do not have a medical degree, despite my vast and clearly accurate understanding of the human body.)

No matter what, it was good to attend and think about all this, and I'm glad I went.