What Does a Healthy Relationship Really Feel Like?

We often ask, “What does a healthy relationship look like?” But maybe the better question is: What does a healthy relationship feel like in my body?

For many of us, our early models of love were tangled with unpredictability, chaos, or conditional approval. That wiring can make it easy to confuse intensity with intimacy, or to equate walking on eggshells with connection. From a depth psychology perspective, our work is not just to rewrite cognitive checklists of what “good” relationships should be, but to reorient toward the felt sense of safety, sovereignty, and being seen.

This is where rupture and repair become essential. Relationships without rupture can look peaceful on the surface, but often that “peace” is at the expense of honesty. True connection requires that we risk conflict and then work toward repair, because without repair, “good” often just means pretend.

So how do we bring this into practice?