No More Guessing - The Secret Ingredients That Make Your Relationship Really Work

By Dr Rob Bilton

What is a healthy relationship? What does it look like, what does it feel like? What does it sound like? And what is a healthy person, a healthy functional person?

Now for those of you out there who are wanting to create a Love by Design relationship it is important that, just as you would be building a new home, you would need good materials and just like parts of the good materials or resources that you need in order to build your dream home, in a relationship, you need to have a couple of things. You need to have a functional person who is compatible with you and you need to be functional yourself. So the question is what is healthy and what is functional?

Some people ask me, well isn't that normal, isn’t it normal to be healthy and functional? Well, actually in our society it's not normal to be healthy and functional, in fact, in our society most of us are taught to be dysfunctional. And what does dysfunctional mean? It means that it is not functional; it means that we are taught how to behave and act in relationships in a way that doesn't work. It actually doesn't get our needs met many times and the way we think about relationships, our mindset, our paradigms, our beliefs, how we view people, relationships and love is not very workable.

So being called normal is not such a great label these days. Now the reason we are dysfunctional is that our society has in fact picked up a whole bunch of beliefs, probably from books, tapes and movies. You know, watch the average soap opera and see the beliefs and attitudes and behaviors that are going on there and you know of course because of the media and movies, people get influenced by that especially because it is a form of programming. In any event, from our families, from media, from other sources, a lot of us are trained from many institutions such as church, schools and work to be Codependent so those are not good attitudes for relationship success or for creating a Love by Design.

The question remains what is functional? What is healthy? A healthy relationship is one where there is a lot of circulation, a lot of energy circulation. Both people are getting what they want, in the way they want it. In fact, relationships, are a mutual filling of needs, and when both party's needs on many, many levels, especially the needs that are very important to you which are called Deal Breakers, if they are met (they are requirements; they are absolute musts to have) there is a lot of meeting of each other's needs, at many different levels, then we have good circulation. From an energetic model point of view, it’s like electricity, an exchange of energy, back and forth, you know, your needs are met, my needs are met. If you are in a relationship it is where one person's needs are met and the other person's needs are met. So that's the key to a successful, healthy, relationship.

Now, let's define functional. Functional basically means not toxic or deficient. It's like looking at relationships as qualifications, you need to be qualified in fact to be functional and if you are qualified, you won't be lacking certain skills and you won't be having the natural habits, negative love habits or toxic sort of responses or behaviors. So essentially that will make you functional. That means you work well in a relationship.

You see, if someone isn’t toxic or deficient, then there is a great chance of working well especially if they do have the right attitudes or the right behaviors or the right responses and the right skill sets. So, if you are trying to create a Love by Design, it is important that you have a functional person that is able to meet your needs, so that you have a healthy and functional relationship.