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Healthy Relationships: a crash course

Date: 2006-08-01

“You got WHAT?”

That was the text on the cover of a card I received a few weeks ago. It was a card congratulating me on my recent engagement.

So, I got engaged, that’s what. And it’s changed everything. My relationship, like Google, has gone public. Everyone feels they can have a stake in it. Everyone wants to know about it.

Not that people didn’t want to know before. But now, my engagement ring marks me as a relationship expert to some.

What’s funny is, I kind of AM a relationship expert. My job involves talking with people about their relationships and trying to get people to think about what goes into a healthy relationship. What do I do? I’m not a couples’ therapist. I work in a domestic violence program.

The problem I work against – domestic violence – exists at least in part because people don’t know a whole lot about healthy relationships. We don’t include relationships in our curricula, even though we have relationships in school. As Jews growing up, we had relationships in twice as many places – at “regular” school and Hebrew school, at youth group and camp. As adults, we now can have relationships online, at work, at school, temporarily, or permanently.

And as Jews, relationships are so much a part of our lives. As a Jewish child becomes a part of the Jewish community at a bris or a naming ceremony, a rabbi might hold the baby up and say, “May she (or he) be married under the chuppah!” We’re expected (from birth!) to meet and marry a nice Jewish boy or girl. And when we get there, we’re expected to know what we’re doing to make it work.

So, given that we didn’t have relationship class at school, what would a crash course in healthy relationships look like?

Lesson 1: Mutuality
Yeah, mutuality. It’s a relationship. There is more than one person involved by its very definition. So, more than one person should have a voice, more than one person should get to make decisions, and there should be a little giving of and giving up of from both sides.

Lesson 2: Communication
This is the one that comes up first in a brainstorm with 9th graders. Very connected to mutuality, communication begins with talking and listening. I remember my first experience with “active listening,” which involves being quiet for a few minutes and listening to someone else talk just to hear what they think. In active listening, the listener reflects the talker’s perspective back to the talker – without having an opinion about it. Communication in relationships, aside from including nonjudgmental listening, also, means saying what you really think. We, especially as women, spend a great and unfortunate amount of time trying to say “the right thing.” If you’re not honest with your partner about your needs, your wishes, and your expectations, it’s hard to expect that he or she will understand them.

Lesson 3: Respect
Also high on the 9th grade brainstorm list! Aretha had it right – find out what it means to you. Respect looks different in each relationship, and, like mutuality, it’s connected to communication. For me, it turns out, respect means that my partner thinks my life is important in its own right, supports me in pursuing my goals, and takes all of this life stuff as seriously as I do. As respect goes both ways, for my partner, respecting him has meant that I’ve had to learn to be more sensitive and less critical. (Not all people are interested in putting their clothes in the hamper immediately after removing them from their bodies, and that’s really okay.)

Lesson 4: Trust
Yet another link. Trust means that you are able to be secure enough in your own self and situation to let someone leave their dirty clothes on the floor and know that they will eventually pick them up. And, more importantly, that the dirty clothes on the floor do not reflect poorly on you. Trust involves giving up quite a bit of yourself, or at least being open to doing so. Remember the Trust Fall in the Ropes Course at camp? Closing your eyes, leaning back, and knowing/hoping that you will be caught is intensely frightening. But, also intensely exciting. It is a beautiful thing when you can do this kind of thing in a relationship.

Lesson 5: Affection
Sometimes this comes out on the brainstorm list as “intimacy” or even “sex.” Once, it came out as “dominatrix.” That was a surprise for me too! But, connected to all of the above, affection is what makes the kind of relationships I think we’re talking about just a little different from your connections with people at work, school, or from life prior to this very moment. So, in this case, be open to receiving and giving affection and ultimately figuring out together how affection is demonstrated in the relationship.

Finally, Lesson 6: Relationships are hard work.
When I was younger, I used to ravenously read teen magazines, looking for answers to questions which I think still elude me. Mostly, I was trying to figure out how to be myself, what that meant, what that might look like. I was looking for an easy answer - something I could read and just know. I don’t think I ever found it. I came to find out, instead, that life, and relationships as part of life, are not made up of easy answers. Life, and relationships, involve responsibility. Much to W’s chagrin, responsibility implies hard work, and relationships are about balancing rights (to feeling safe, whole, accepted, loved) and responsibilities.

Elana Premack
Shebrew.com





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