A good friend asked me yesterday about my once published "list of standards." I had to dig through the archive to find them, but re-reading them was cathartic. As I first wrote, this list may seem like a no-brainer for many, but I continue to struggle with a few items. I'm happy to say that that in the past few years, I've overcome a few key trouble spots on this list.
If your relationship falls within the "unhealthy" column, it may be time for a change.
In a healthy relationship, you:
• Treat each other with respect
• Feel secure and comfortable
• Are not violent with each other
• Can resolve conflicts satisfactorily
• Enjoy the time you spend together
• Support one another
• Take interest in one another's lives: health, family, work, etc.
• Have privacy in the relationship
• Can trust each other
• Are each sexual by choice
• Communicate clearly and openly
• Have letters, phone calls, and e-mail that are your own
• Make healthy decisions about alcohol or other drugs
• Encourage other friendships
• Are honest about your past and present sexual activity if the relationship is intimate
• Know that most people in your life are happy about the relationship
• Have more good times in the relationship than bad
In an unhealthy relationship, one or both of you:
• Try to control or manipulate the other
• Make the other feel bad about her-/himself
• Ridicule or call names
• Dictate how the other dresses
• Do not make time for each other
• Criticize the other's friends
• Are afraid of the other's temper
• Discourage the other from being close with anyone else
• Ignore each other when one is speaking
• Are overly possessive or get jealous about ordinary behavior
• Criticize or support others in criticizing people with your gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, religion, disability, or other personal attribute
• Control the other's money or other resources (e.g., car)
• Harm or threaten to harm children, family, pets, or objects of personal value
• Push, grab, hit, punch, or throw objects
• Use physical force or threats to prevent the other from leaving
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About Me
- Anima Sola
- Chicago, IL
- Anima Sola isn't fond of labels. She is, however, fond of embracing her many paradoxes, and walking the fine lines between religion and politics, with an eye turned toward postmodern religion, feminist theology, and challenging patriarchy from inside the Roman Catholic Church.
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Quoting...
There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love
anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken.
If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart
to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies
and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the
casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket — safe, dark,
motionless, airless — it will change. It will not be broken; it will
become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to
tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only
place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the
dangers and perturbations of love is Hell."
~From the book The Four Loves by C.S.Lewis
anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken.
If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart
to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies
and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the
casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket — safe, dark,
motionless, airless — it will change. It will not be broken; it will
become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to
tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only
place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the
dangers and perturbations of love is Hell."
~From the book The Four Loves by C.S.Lewis
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