Perfect Relationships: do they exist?

Perfect relationships. Do they exist?

Is it possible to have one and what happened to mine?

Where did things go awry?

This is a question many of you have asked me.

First I’ll talk about perfect relationships.

It is possible to have a perfect relationship.

Well, if not a perfect relationship, then a very healthy, balanced, adult one.

But it’s only possible if you are a healthy adult within you to start with.

We all have three elements within us and this was first identified by a psychiatrist in the 1950s called Eric Berne and he identified that all of us have a parent, adult and child within us.

The child obviously harks back to our childhood and is that childish self within us who is curiously full of wonder and innocence.

We have the parent within us that was absorbed via the parental role models we had when we were a child, be it parents, teachers or other parental adult role models in our lives.

Then we have the adults that we hope and aspire to become as we grow up.

If that child within you is low in self-esteem, needy, insecure then chances are you’re not going to grow up to attract the type of person with whom you can have a healthy adult relationship.

What you need to do is become the parent you need to be that nurtures that child inside you first.

Fill that hole inside with an abundant well of self-love and self-worth, until you know you are good enough and you deserve a healthy adult relationship.

That is the best place to start if you want to attract somebody who is also a healthy adult.

Like attracts like.

If you’re a needy insecure child you might attract someone who is a strict, dominating, controlling parent or a nurturing parent who wants to rescue you, fix you, look after you. Or vice versa.

If you are the sort of person who naturally goes into that parent role, rescuing and nurturing role then you’re most likely going to attract somebody who is a needy child.

Neither is a healthy adult relationship and it’s unlikely it will lead to long term happiness.

Now you might be a healthy adult. You might be in a very healthy adult relationship right now.

I am so happy for you if you are.

But you might feel like a number of people who have said to me:

My relationship was great for a while but then it started to veer off track.

I can’t work out what’s happened and I don’t know how to bring it back.

I’ve seen this many many times.

I remember one girl whom I mentored over the years when she was at the start of her career.

She’s a lovely, beautiful, smart and talented girl.

I mentioned her career and she started to ask me for advice about her relationships with men as well.

She said:

Your relationship with your husband seems so effortless.

You’re so lucky.

I said I am lucky and yes, on the whole, our relationship is effortless.

But I learned the hard way as I spent many years in relationships that weren’t right for me, culminating in a relationship that was abusive and violent and in which I was almost murdered.

I told her what I have come to learn is this.

The key to a good relationship is to have a balanced one.

One that you are relating to each other adult-to-adult.

What I could see was happening with her was that she kept choosing partners with whom she could go into that parental role.

And her latest boyfriend then went into the rebellious child mode.

The more he rebelled, the more it pushed her into the nagging parent role and she resented him for that.

She didn’t want to be that nagging parent and she wanted a man.  She didn’t want a child. Especially, not in the bedroom.

You don’t want to be intimate if you’re the parent in a relationship with a child and definitely not one who’s needy or rebellious.

You don’t want that.

You want to be in an intimate relationship only with a healthy adult.

So, she was attracting the wrong type to start with.

This can also happen though, to relationships that have previously been healthy adult-to-adult ones and great for a long time.

Something starts to go awry.  Communication starts to go wrong.  Arguments start happening and the sex starts to feel not right and eventually dies.

What’s happening in that relationship is that communication has broken down.

Whereas before you were communicating adult-to-adult now you’re playing different roles and your wires are crossing in your interactions with each other.

What I mean by crossing wires is you’re suddenly communicating parent-to-child or child-to-parent.

Relationships do better when you’re on the same level.

You might be parent-to-parent when you’re both nurturing your children.

You might be adult-to-adult when your relationship is really going brilliantly and smoothly and effortlessly, as I put it.

You might be completely ridiculous like my husband and I are on a regular basis, both being the playful curious silly child that we are inside.

And by childish I don’t mean needy and insecure. I just mean curious and innocent and tapping into that beautiful child that you once were.

But when you cross wires and suddenly, for example, one of you has lost a job or had something happen that’s been a real blow to your self-esteem.

You might then go into the needy child and start to get jealous, insecure or look to the other partner to fulfil your needs.

You depend on them to make you happy and feel good about yourself again.

There’s nothing wrong with that.

Balanced relationships

In a healthy adult relationship, there is a balance that can tip a little either way.  One can be strong for the other and at other times, your roles reverse.

My husband is strong sometimes when I am weak.  I’m strong when he’s down at other times.

That’s okay, as long as we stay in the parameter of adult-to-adult.

When that balance tips too far and the child becomes too needy and looking for you to fill that emptiness and blames you for not making them happy, then that may force you into a parental role.

You may become a strict, controlling, or nagging parent you never wanted to become.

That’s when your relationship goes off track.

You’re crossing wires as one of you is becoming the parent to the other’s child.

The more one becomes the parent or child, the more the other goes into the opposite role and then it compounds.

Relationship advice

What do I mean by adult-to-adult?

This is important as this is how you can get your relationship back on track.

You can get as close as you can to a perfect and healthy relationship.

A healthy adult to me is someone who finds happiness within.

One who has a full well of self-love and self-esteem and self-worth.

They don’t look at the other person to fulfil their needs or depend on the outside world to make them happy, as they are already.

They have the self-confidence to know what their boundaries are and can respectfully communicate those boundaries to other people in an assertive, calm way.

They’re not passive or aggressive.  Nor are they passive-aggressive.

They’re calm and assertive and respect the other person’s boundaries as well, treating them with the same kindness and respect that they expect.

A healthy adult is somebody who understands that they should live their life to the best they possibly can and allow others to do the same.

When you both tick all those boxes I’ve just described and you come together as two healthy adults it’s amazing.

When you are whole within yourself and then join together, then you are formidable.

The sum of your respective parts makes for an amazing partnership and team.  That is what you should aspire to become.

Relationship goals

If you keep attracting the wrong type when dating, then take a good look at yourself first.

There’s no point lamenting over the fact you keep attracting men that behave like needy kids.

Try growing up yourself.  A healthy adult comes first.

If you’re not, then nurture the child within you first and foremost before dating, to become the person you want to be.

The type of person you want to attract because like attracts like.

Adults attract adults.

If you are in a healthy relationship already and things have gone awry, then ask yourself this.

Have we swapped into either of those roles as parent or child?

Are we crossing wires with our communication?

If so, the way to get it back on track is first you strive to get your self back into that adult role.

Come back down from the parent to the adult.

Rise up from that needy child back into the secure adult.

If you do that, your partner or the other person in this dynamic will respond in kind.

If you behave like an adult they can’t keep acting the child.

If you’re an adult you won’t let them keep dominating you or controlling you as a parent.

Lead by example.

Step back into the assertive adult role and then they will respond to you by doing the same.

I’ve done that myself in our relationship when I recognized that this was what was happening to us once.

It was unbelievable.

There was a time when my husband was having a difficult time at work.

He lost his confidence and was needy and insecure and it wasn’t like him.

His behavior almost demanded that I take on the parent role.

That would have been okay for a while. As I said we can be strong for each other when we need to be.

But the balance tipped too far into the parent-child dynamic.

I didn’t like it.   Where had the man I loved gone?

It was difficult to find myself in this relationship with a child.

I felt pushed into that role and I started to resent him for it.

Worse, my behavior changed and I almost kicked him whilst he was down in a bullying kind of way.

I didn’t like who I was turning into.

The more I acted like the parent, the more of a child he became.

Our relationship was heading so far off track it scared me.  I couldn’t imagine us ever breaking up.

I want to grow old with him.

I realised something had to change.

Instead of looking at his behavior and feeling resentment, I realized I had to look hard at my own.

My bullying and controlling behavior were not that of a healthy adult.

If I was going to go back to the adult role I was going to have to do the opposite.

Let him be and treat him with love, kindness and respect and not behave as his parent.

Remember the man I loved was still there, he was just having a rough time.

The more I nurtured our relationship with kindness, respect and love, the more I allowed him to rise back up to meet me in the middle.

My adult was met by his adult.

Once we were back on an equal playing field we were able to communicate our needs.

I was able to tell him I understood what he was going through and how hard it is.

If his confidence and self-esteem were so smashed down by his job, why not chuck it in?

The relief washed over him.  It was what his gut was desperate to do.  But his heart was telling him he had to be the man and provide for me.

By then I was earning about the same, so I told him I could support him for a while.  As he had done for me whilst I worked my way up the TV ladder.

If only he’d expressed those fears in the first place.

I was able to say sorry for how I had behaved and explained why I felt resentful towards him.

I was able to reassure him of what an incredible provider he was to our family already.

He chucked the job in, which led to the brilliant one he has now more than a decade later.

This is the importance of communication in relationships and how you can get your relationship back on track.

Dating and relationships

To recap:

Number one, if you want to attract a perfect and healthy relationship to start with will then be a healthy adult within yourself first. 

Like attracts like.

Don’t go into relationships or dating as a parent because you’ll only attract a child.

Don’t go into relationship as a needy child because you will only attract someone who would dominate and control you.

Start as you mean to continue – as a healthy adult.

If you are and you’re in a relationship that has been great but has recently gone off track, then look at what’s happening.

How you’re suddenly crossing wires and communicating parent-to-child or child-to-parent, not adult-to-adult.

Start by getting yourself back into that adult space because then your partner will meet you in the middle and you’ll come back together as adults.

Your communication will be such that you can then have a healthy adult conversation about where things are going wrong and how you can get it back on track.

It is possible to have happy relationships, a perfect or near-perfect relationship?

I’m living proof of that.

Happy married life

I have an amazing beautiful relationship that I would call effortless, but when it’s not, we know exactly what we need to do to get it back on track.

So yeah, it’s pretty close to being a perfect relationship.

I know how lucky I am to have that.

Oh, and you know that girl I was telling you about?

The one who kept going for the bad boys, not the adult men?

She emailed me a while ago to tell me she’s found her perfect man and their relationship is effortless too.

They’ve just had a baby and are planning to get married.