Healthy Relationships
Everyone deserves safe and fulfilling relationships in their lives.
Your Relationship With Yourself Comes First
Having a good relationship with ourselves is the foundation to building and maintaining healthy relationships. Prioritizing alone time, being authentic, and pursuing our own passions help to build a strong and healthy relationship with ourselves. Here are a few ways to practice connecting with YOU:
Speak With Kindness
Practicing kindness and patience with yourself, especially during new experiences like college, can improve your relationship with yourself and others. When you notice unhelpful thoughts like I have no idea what I'm doing, try reframing it to something new like I'm just figuring this out.
Build Self-Trust & Confidence
Practicing skills that help improve trust and confidence is a way to ensure we stay true to ourselves and fight off self-doubt. Things like using comforting self-talk, practicing, grounding skills, and tapping into your senses help build self-trust & confidence.
Explore Your Values
For many people, staying true to our values can help guide our relationships. We should never feel pressured to change our values in order to connect with someone. What values are core to who you are and what you want out of life?
Healthy Communication
Healthy relationships, with yourself or someone else, need communication to handle conflict and establish needs, boundaries, and trust. Just like other skills, communication takes practice. Here are some tools to engage in healthy communication:
| Use "I" statements | Don't place blame | Actively Listen |
| Set & respect boundaries | Take accountability | Be clear and kind |
| Ask questions | Practice empathy | Take breaks |
To read more about communication with sexual partners, explore our sexual health page.
Putting tools to use
Here you can find examples of healthy communication in specific situations. There's not one right way to communicate, so practice these tips in different ways.
Asking for Space
Tools to use: "I" statements, practice empathy, be clear
I value our friendship and I like spending time together. I also need space this week to prioritize myself and my other friendships. Can we hang out next week?
Setting a Boundary
Tools to Use: "I" statements, don't place blame, be clear.
I need to study on Thursday nights, I can't go out. If you keep asking me, I won't respond.
Bringing up an Issue
Tools to Use: "I" statements, don't place blame, set boundaries, and ask questions.
I am frustrated and feel that I am taking on the bulk of the house chores. Can we talk and find a solution?
Healthy & Unhealthy Relationships
Noticing signs of healthy and unhealthy relationships helps us to identify if we are spending time with people who we can be our authentic selves around. Everybody deserves healthy relationships and, while they may take practice, checking in with yourself about how you feel in any relationship is important.
Remember: Any type of relationship can be healthy or unhealthy, not just romantic partnerships.
Healthy Relationships
Healthy relationships are a spectrum and they can take time to build. Not every relationship needs to be perfect but people should feel safe, heard, and respected. Healthy relationships often look like:
- Mutual respect, trust, and understanding of boundaries
- Emotional availability, honestly, support, and fairness
- Separate identities with individual interests and friends
- Good communication
- A sense of playfulness/fondness
- Forgiveness and a willing to work through conflict, grow the relationship, and fight fairly
- Experiencing more happiness and less stress
Unhealthy Relationships
Relationships that are unhealthy sometimes feel up and down, bring more stress than happiness, or they might feel consuming. If you have noticed unhealthy patterns in your relationship, try communicating what you need to move closer to a healthy connection.
Signs of unhealthy patterns include:
- Feeling pressured to do things you don't want to do
- Feeling unheard, left out, or silenced
- Attempting to control someone else's behaviors
- Persistent issues or requests for changes in the relationship
- Avoiding accountability by changing the subject, crying, or bringing up other issues
Remember that relationships take practice and you should always feel safe to bring these issues up and move closer to the healthy side of the relationship spectrum.
Abusive Relationships
Abusive relationships are connections where one or more people feel unsafe or are actively being harmed. They may include physical violence, emotional abuse, or control. These relationships can be hard to recognize because they can cycle between extreme feelings of good and bad. There are resources on campus and off campus for people who are in abusive relationships and for those who want to learn more.
Signs of an abusive relationship
- Controlling behavior like checking your phone, social media, or emails without permission or tracking your location.
- Isolation from family or friends
- Frequent put-downs or insults
- Extreme jealousy or insecurity
- Any form of physical harm
- Pressure or force to have sex
Learn More About Abusive Relationships
If you are concerned that you are currently in an abusive relationship, you are not alone. Survivor Support Services offers free & confidential support to survivors.
Resources & Next Steps
Practicing and building healthy, communicative relationships can take time and practice. Whether you need immediate support or want to learn more, these next steps are for you.
Survivor Support Services
Campus Health Survivor Support Services offers free and confidential services to University of Arizona students, staff, and faculty. Survivor Support can help you safety plan, find accommodations, file reports, or get connected to support.
Request a Presentation
Bring Campus Health to your club, chapter, or classroom for an interactive presentation about relationship topics. We'll talk consent, boundaries, healthy relationships, and dating violence while answering questions that you may have about relationships.
Learn More
Love is Respect is an educational website that dives deeper into relationships, setting boundaries, and relationship dating violence. Read more, explore quizzes, and get support.