20 Benefits of Healthy Relationships

In This Article
What is a healthy relationship?
Why are healthy relationships important?
20 benefits of healthy relationships
​People are born with the ability to form close relationships.
The need to connect and establish relationships is biologically supported and evolutionarily significant.
The innate tendency speaks the importance of relationships for a person’s life- evolutionary, physically, and psychologically. Our tendency to build close relationships was and is adaptive. The benefits of healthy relationships are abundant and reinforce further our desire to connect with others.
Before we move to list the benefits of healthy relationships, let’s define what we infer by healthy relationships. 
What is a healthy relationship?Having a healthy relationship means having interdependence, relying on one another without losing one’s own individuality and identity. 

Depending on the type of relationship and the people involved, different amounts of dependency are described as healthy. This will also vary depending on the life stage of your relationship. 
For example, it is expected to need more interdependence than usual when pregnant, ill or stressed. 
A healthy relationship is one in which both parties are respectful, communicating, and investing in the relationship. It is one where both can find comfort, encouragement, challenge each other in a productive way, and have individual, as well as shared, goals. 
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Healthy, positive relationships don’t exclude the experience of conflict and arguments. All love relationships are subject to disagreements, but people communicate on overcoming them because the relationship is worth it to both sides. 
Why are healthy relationships important?Many studies have explored and captured the benefits of healthy relationships on health, habits, and mental well-being. 
Not only do they permit us to have a sense of community, belongingness, and support, they also give an opportunity to grow and learn. When we have a healthy relationship, we communicate, care for another person, and depend on them too. 
This helps us evolve and, with the model of a healthy relationship in mind, work on improving other less healthy relationships or our expectations. 
If you are trying to respond to “why are relationships important,” look for the answer in the immense benefits of healthy relationships. Let’s elaborate more on the key positive effects of relationships on people’s lives. 
20 benefits of healthy relationships
Following are the benefits of healthy relationships and why they are good for you.

1. Better physical health
Social relationships, their quantity, and quality have important short and long-term effects on one’s health, and that impact starts in childhood. Being in a healthy marriage has a positive effect on one’s health, especially for men. 
This effect only exists for healthy relationships, where partners are respective and appreciative of one another. The research found that unhappy or toxic relationships have a higher negative influence on health compared to people who are single. 

It could be that a spouse is helping reduce the impact of stress and provide support. 
We can also hypothesize that a spouse helps get rid of bad habits and thus improve health. Regardless of the mechanism, the benefits of healthy relationships include lower blood pressure and a boost in the immune system. 
2. Longer life
Social connections are also relevant to our longevity. Although the actual mechanisms through which healthy relationships exhort influence are yet to be explained, the fact remains that social isolation is one of the major risks of mortality. 
A meta-analysis of 148 studies concluded that social relations should be included in the list of risk factors for mortality, along with smoking and alcohol abuse. They deserve this place due to the amount of influence they hold, exceeding factors such as physical inactivity and obesity. 

3. Decreased stress
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