Love | Create safety
How to build a strong relationship
So you found a great person that you consider spending your life with. Thatâs it, right? Think of the relationship like a diamond in the rough: If you put in some effort, it will shine even brighter. And considering that this is the person youâll spend most of your time with, that effort will pay off immensely.
In one way, the relationship with your partner is like just another friendship. The same ideas apply: Be curious, be the spark, give. But it doesnât stop there.
Step one for a strong foundation: Build safety. And yes, all of this of course also applies to other relationships in your life. It just fits best here.
How to build a strong relationship
Understand attachment styles
Attachment styles are a simplified framework that predict how people emotionally connect, behave, and regulate their emotions in relationships. There is both plenty of evidence and itâs simple enough to work with, which makes it so popular.
Avoidant (25%): You highly value independence and sometimes struggle with emotional vulnerability and tend to pull away when relationships get too deep. This is me in my relationships. I once dated another avoidant person - we didnât get very far.
Anxious (20%): You constantly seek closeness and reassurance. You often worry about your parnter leaving you.
Disorganized (<5%): You can be both avoidant and anxious. Craving commitment and closeness but also fearing it, which leads to unpredictable behavior.
Securely (>50%): If you are both anxious and avoidant youâre chaotic. But if youâre neither then you are securely attached. You can allow emotional intimacy without fear of abandonment.
Build safe attachment
Anxious and avoidant styels have been linked to lower well-being. So, the million dollar question: How do you become securely attached? And how can you help your partner.
Understand your patterns: While the attachment types seem quite simple, recognising your patterns is much harder. They often mask as unrelated thoughts. Read up about it and maybe try therapy if itâs affecting your relationships.
Demonstrate safety: The best way to build trust and safety is to just demonstrate over and over again that we are available when needed and are committed. This can come in many shapes and forms, talk about what would help.
Dare to go deep: For the avoidant among us, practice opening up more and more, experiment with co-dependence instead of in-dependence. Try to predict reactions of your partner to sharing things that scare you and see what happens.
Repair trust
Trust takes long to build and short to break. What to do when that happens? This framework is based on Emotionally Focused Therapy, where ruptured trust is framed as an attachment injury.
Get to the rupture: Escape the tendency to accuse and defend. Try to stay calm and feel into what actually happened in the moment the trust was broken. What was the hurtâs personâs fear, helplessness, or pain of abandonment?
Stay with them: For the partner who broke the trust, stay fully present with that emotion, âhold their painâ, without excuses. Allow yourself to feel genuine remorse for hurting them. Take full ownership and offer an apology.
Create a new narrative: Donât âforget about itâ but instead reframe it as something that shaped your relationship and helped you grow together. A rupture that will stay with you but something that helped you attach even more securely.
Get started
What is something small you could do today to practice building safety?
Are you afraid of sharing something? Bet money on doing it.
Is there a rupture in any of your relationships that might need repair?
Missing something? Add a comment and weâll add it to next yearâs version