Here are the four characteristics I feel are important to embody to be a good partner: Humility, Curiosity, Emotional Wellness, and a keen awareness of your Absolute Values. I will use the analogy of a house when referencing these traits. (I am no builder – but I love using analogies, so here we go).
Curiosity
I wrote about the importance of curiosity in a previous post. It is a POWER tool when it comes to building, repairing, and maintaining your relationship/house. In summary, humans love to talk about themselves, so when another person is genuinely interested in us, we are drawn closer and become more connected. It also provides a tool to understand the deeper parts of your partner and the true meaning behind their behaviours.
Humility
This characteristic does not need a lot of explanation. Think of the most humble person you know… Do you not just absolutely LOVE this person?😍 There is something about a humble person that has velcro-like qualities. They are normally quiet, friendly, and rather shy, but as they open up, you are taken aback. About our house analogy, I see this house tucked away in the mountains of Scandinavia or Sweden, very simple in style. But once you walk in, you see that everything was built with such precision, intelligence, and efficiency that you can’t help but to feel good existing inside of it. It’s decluttered, simple and nothing is of excess.
Emotional Wellness
Note I did not list Emotional Intelligence. Despite what you might hear many other relationship therapists tout, I do not feel your partner needs an A in emotional intelligence to be a good partner. Emotional intelligence makes up emotional wellness, but it is not the be-all and end-all. Resilience makes up a good chunk of your emotional wellness, self-awareness a close second, and open mindedness a third. Self-awareness is essentially having an awareness of how your actions affect yourself and others. Emotional wellness is the opposite of fragility. Therefore, our house analogy is comprised of the materials that make it strong and fortified. It is the foundation, the supporting beams, and there are no ‘short-cuts’ taken during its build.
Absolute Values
I use absolute in this title because I want to emphasize the lack of change over time. These values are objective, not subjective to the context. For example, in the past, I have referenced the importance of living by your values or that a happy person is a person who is living in alignment with their true values, but often it is not so much that the person stops living by their values, is it that their values have somehow become ‘subjective’. This is a person who states at the time of marriage that ‘honesty’ is a value they hold in high regard, until two months later when they ‘hold back’ telling their partner about an important financial decision they made because they ‘didn’t want to upset’ their partner. Or the person who places respect in high regard then later you realise this is only true in the workplace but at home, respect holds little worth. Absolute objective values do not change according to the context. Absolute values act like the design of the house. It doesn’t change according to the weather or other external factors. If the house design is altered over time, it is not the same house anymore. It is different. Then you need to ask yourself, do you still want to live in this house?
Perhaps not
The Gottmans have a PDF called the Sound Relationship House. I created a short video to explain the different parts of the house and why the Gottmans use floors of a house to explain the most important parts of a relationship. This is different from my explanation above on human characteristics using the analogy of a house.
What I wrote above pertains to YOU within a relationship, and how YOUR innate characteristics make or break that house.