Three Signs You’re In A Healthy Relationship

Photo by Will O on Unsplash

Almost everyone you meet has a “crazy ex-girlfriend/boyfriend” story. These romantic experiences can range from the more or less innocuousness overly-attached significant other to incidents of severe abuse and domestic violence.

Regardless of where your own relationships have fallen on the spectrum, when you’ve had bad luck with love in the past, it can be difficult to assess where your present relationship lies on the continuum of thriving to threatening.

Here are three signs to look for from your partner that may mean you’ve finally hit the jackpot.

1. They empathize.

Great partners are capable of understanding how you feel. Alfred Adler described empathy as “seeing with the eyes of another, listening with the ears of another and feeling with the heart of another,” and it was author John Steinbeck who said that you can only understand people if you “feel them in yourself.”

A romantic partner who can put him or herself in your shoes (on both the bad days and the good ones) is able to more aptly sense what you need, emotionally, in any given moment. Once, one of my friends came home after a rough day and her waiting partner took one look at her and — before she could say a word — told her, “I’m going to go draw you a bath.”