Building Healthy Relationships
What is a Relationship?
This is a social association, connection or attachment between two or more people. The interaction between the two people may be open or hidden.
What are the qualities of a healthy relationship?
- Respect: to respect each other means to honour each other, to hold each other in high esteem, and to treat each other as worthwhile even when you are different from each other and disagree at times.
- Caring: to care for each other means to be concerned about each other’s feelings, needs and wants, and to want what is best for one another. It means feeling love or liking for each other and wanting to protect, pay attention to, and provide for each other.
- Responsibility: to be responsible to each other means you can depend on each other and each of you fulfil obligations for the benefit of the relationship. This also means being able to distinguish actions that could affect your relationship negatively and those that could affect your relationship positively.
- Understanding: this means to be compassionate towards one another; to know what the others feel, want and need. It means being able to put oneself in the other person’s shoes, and being able to look at things from other person’s point of view.
- Cooperation: to work at a relationship means to put effort into the relationship, and not take the other person for granted. It involves willingness to work with someone to be in a relationship and sustain it, and to compromise when necessary to come to mutually beneficial agreements.
- Acceptance: We need to be accepted for who we are. . This means that even when we make mistakes or fall short of our goals, a true friend will still be our friend and will try to help us or, rather than criticizing or condemning us
What are the types of adolescent relationships?
Alongside other relationships with family, community members, teachers, etc., the types of peer relationships adolescent may be involved in include:
- Friendship
- Crushes
- Romantic Relationships among adolescents Friendship: This is a relationship in which one individual may share, interact and spend time with another person or with a group of individuals. Friendship can help young people share ideas, thoughts and experiences without fear or betrayal.
What are the Facts about friendship:
- Adolescents often copy the behaviour of those they call “friends”
- Good friends lead young people to do the right thing
- Bad friends can get a young person into trouble and cause problems, such friends should be avoided
- Adolescents learn about intimacy and caring about other people through their friendships
- Young people may share experiences in their life that help them feel normal
- Adolescents can also explore and discover themselves as people; which is part of their search for identity
- Adolescents tend to select friends with similar characteristics to their own as a way of confirming their own opinions and a sense of self-worth
