Five Must-Have Ingredients for a Healthy Relationship

You may already know this, but I am a pastry chef. Part of what I do on the regular is to create new recipes, ones which I hope will both nourish and delight my consumer. So it’s no surprise that I often see components of a part as the intended finished product. You take a pinch of this, a heaping spoonful of that, and a cup of this other, stir, bake, decorate, and voila!

I had a lovely conversation the other day with Maggie Q. Collins where we were discussing the foundations of healthy relationships, and my mind began playing with the baking analogy. While different people will look for — and be drawn to — different personalities while dating, and will prioritize different facets of a relationship, there are still a few universal truths.

Just as a cake that is missing fat, flour, eggs, and sugar can’t really be called “cake,” I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that a relationship that lacks any one of these five essential ingredients cannot be healthy.

And while they’re simple, they aren’t easy.

Without further ado, here’s my formula to baking up your own great cake…er…relationship.

Trust. Respect. Love/Affection. Gratitude. Forgiveness.

The ratios might vary at times, depending on what needs to be prioritized, but that’s it. It really is that simple. Of course, putting these into action — and being consistent about practicing them — is the tough part.

Trust and respect dovetail. While both are absolutely necessary, they tie into one another. I don’t know about you, but I find it difficult to trust people I don’t respect.

Trust is a foundational building block that I must have in order to give someone full respect. I need to know that their actions will consistently match their words and intent. I need to be able to trust this so that I can fully respect them. I need to be able to trust my safety with them, and that isn’t just about my physical safety, but also my emotional, spiritual, and financial safety. I need to know that they are authentically showing up and they are who they say they are, and I need to see this through consistent actions. (My bullshit meter has been well-calibrated, and when it starts tripping, I tend to close down and retreat from the person setting it off.)

After my divorce, I realized that while I felt physically safe with my ex, early experiences in our relationship (which I did not properly and adequately address at the time), resulted in my losing trust in him for my emotional and financial well-being. Unsurprisingly, this hampered my ability to fully respect him, an essential ingredient loss that elicited anger on his end. Cue toxic spiral.

I questioned whether to include gratitude and forgiveness in love. I could probably have boiled it down to just trust, respect, and love, but I wanted to highlight a couple of shades of love that any healthy (long-running) relationship needs.

Call them different flavor variations, if you will.

Feeling loved by, and in love with, your partner means different things to different people, and a really great dating exercise is to ask your partner (or date) what kinds of actions make them feel loved.

For example, when my partner and I were first dating, I asked him this very question and asked what he felt was missing from his previous relationship that he’d very much like to see present in his next relationship. The answers were illuminating, they helped us each see how we could be better partners with the other, and they provided a springboard for deeper conversations.

Gratitude and appreciation ranked high on my partner’s list of feeling loved. After 20 years of emotional abuse at the hands of his ex-wife, he really wanted a partner who would see him and, instead of trying to whittle down his personality, would just appreciate him. Because I think gratitude is so important, I decided to call it out as its own ingredient category.

Here’s the key to expressing gratitude: It doesn’t need to be effusive, but it does need to be genuine. I’d rather have one authentically given compliment or piece of feedback than 10 trite or sarcastic responses.

I would thank my ex any time he took out the garbage or recycling, because it was a small task that helped me (so garbage didn’t accumulate or smell up the house), and it was something I didn’t enjoy doing. We lived on a flag lot, so taking out the trash required dragging a heavy bin over gravel down to the end of the driveway; not difficult but more than just an easy drop on the side of the garage. When I would thank him, it wasn’t just that he was pitching in and helping out, but that any time he did pitch in, it was one less chore that I needed to do. It alleviated the tasks I mentally cataloged, and made my life easier. That’s what I was really thanking him for. During our first year together, he appreciated that I was constantly expressing my gratitude to him, but somewhere along the way, he started telling me to knock it off; that I didn’t need to tell him how I felt so often.

When someone constantly tries to dampen expressions of gratitude, it diminishes the joy of sharing the things we are grateful for, but it also decreases the amount of expressions of gratitude. And eventually, it can decrease the appreciation at its core.

I’ve always been someone who enjoys identifying and expressing gratitude and appreciation. It might be a simple, “Thank you for the fun and connected day we had together,” or a more specific,“Wow! That vacuum job made a huge difference in how the house looks. Thanks for doing that!” It’s a way of letting those around you know that you see their efforts, and welcome them.

And while appreciation like this is easy to express (e.g., thank you for taking the time to read this today!) it needs to be received as well.

While you hope it’s needed sparingly, any long-term relationship will eventually mean a misunderstanding or hurt feelings, so forgiveness will eventually be needed. Properly addressing — and then letting go of — the hurt is essential to moving the relationship forward in a healthy way. It doesn’t count if you keep bringing up that hurt anytime tensions simmer. True forgiveness means handling the core issue, making a plan so something like that doesn’t happen again in the future, and then dropping it. It’s not about sweeping the issue under the rug, only to trip on it in the future.

These five essential ingredients contribute to a reliable recipe. Any relationship where each person involved is fully invested in continually making a concerted effort to exemplify these ingredients is sure to bake well. It’s up to you to add in your preferred flavorings and decorations to make it uniquely yours.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.

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