How to Build a Healthy Relationship (Dating Check-In )

Want to build a healthy relationship long-term?

A friend asked recently for a sort of monthly check-in that might be valuable in intentionally building a healthy long-term romantic relationship. This blog is my response to her. I have written a similar free guide on a weekly marriage "staff meeting" that you can find in the resources here if you want to practice some regular intentional marriage care.

When you’re ready to start dating, you’re only at the beginning of a process. There’s a lot to learn, both about yourself and about relationships. There are a lot of people to meet! Perhaps you’re recovering from a painful marriage or have just decided to take a step out of singleness for the first time. Perhaps the last time you dated was thirty years ago and some major cultural shifts have happened. Depending on the context you’re coming from, there might be a lot of healing and growth that needs to happen. It’s not impossible to heal as you are dating, but it’s important to be intentional rather than haphazard about your process.

Being a Christian who is ready to date can prompt additional questions about how to best steward your heart and sexuality. How will you honor God in this venture? How do you maintain a close relationship with God when so much of your excitement may be focused on a new person? How can I have a relationship with God and a romantic relationship? These are great questions, all to be wrestled with in relationship with God. The Creator shows us He wants to be involved in all parts of our lives. He loves us and made us for connection both with Him and each other! It's a wonderful idea to bring each of these concerns to Him in prayer and to your Christian community.

So where to begin? How you decide to meet people is up to you. There are a lot of options from being set up by friends, to dating apps, to good ol’ fashioned talking to people at the grocery store. Simply interacting with strangers can be a social-emotional push if you haven’t practiced that in a while. Once you’ve found a potential option, it’s time to start practicing your relationship skills.

Healthy Relationship Skills

Here are some skills you can practice, no matter how short-term the relationship is:

• Identifying and communicating your emotional needs

• Asking for what you want in the relationship (without demanding)

• Identifying your own expectations and then communicating them

• Learning to listen

• Practicing curiosity and believing the best about someone (unless they show you evidence otherwise)

• Noticing glimmers (the positive moments between you that make you happy or feel calmer)

• Paying attention to your own body cues about safety and arousal

• Attuning to another person’s body cues

• Self-control and emotional management in the context of a relationship

• Voluntary vulnerability

• Being flexible and cooperative

WANT A DOWNLOADABLE DATING CHECKLIST AND CONVERSATION GUIDE?

All of these can be practiced in personal relationships as well, but romanticism is a different type of intimate experience. You can be an expert in the friendship department and still be a novice in the romantic one. That’s ok! The only way to learn is to try and practice. Gotta get your reps in! The best partners are the ones who are graceful with you as you learn.

After you’ve dated a few people, you may identify a person with whom you want to focus on a bit more. This may mean you find them particularly attractive or interesting, or perhaps you can feel a deeper connection than with the rest. You may be ready to commit to dating each other exclusively.

Healthy Relationship Check-In Questions

Here are some questions the two of you could discuss regularly to help you stay on the right track for building a healthy long-term relationship.

What are you expecting out of this relationship at this time?

Exclusivity?

For each phase of a relationship, it’s important to speak clearly about what you are expecting. Some people may just be interested in a temporary connection, while others are looking for a more long-term devotion. You won’t know this unless you talk about it. This goal can even change! The beginning phases may have very low commitment, with some people expecting to be able to date or talk to multiple people at a time, while others feel overwhelmed by that or prefer exclusivity from the beginning. Without judging, you both need to know explicitly what is expected. Don’t assume you know till you ask. And don’t expect them to know how you feel about it unless you’ve said so. People are very different in what they prefer in these early stages. 

Physically?

Some people are looking for intense physical connection quickly, while others prefer to hold off. You won’t know when your partner is ready for physical connection until you ask. If you’re wanting more physical connection, you need to say so. For those couples looking for deep intimacy in their relationship, I suggest pacing your physicality with your level of commitment and emotional vulnerability with one another. Going deeper physically than you are committed emotionally is a recipe for dissatisfaction and often heartbreak, if you desire deep intimacy.

Time and Attention? Communication?

You can’t know what’s reasonable to expect from a person without asking how available they plan to be. Especially at the beginning, it’s important to share how much time and attention you each have available for dating. Some prefer to see one another once a week, while others expect daily interactions. Similarly, different people prefer different frequency and responsiveness in their communication. If you like a “Good morning!” text every day and your partner prefers to only talk on the phone in the evenings, you need to voice those desires so you can negotiate something that works for both of you. As the relationship changes, it’s important to come back to this question to make sure you stay on the same page.

Community Integration?

You can’t really know a human outside of their context, so integration into your community is a normal part of getting to know one another. Someone who is holding back from introducing you to their friends and family isn’t quite ready to be known on that level. It’s fine to take your time with this, but it needs to be navigated directly rather than passively putting it off or avoiding publicity on the relationship. You might be in different places about how deeply you want to know and be known.

Pursuit?

All humans desire to be pursued. We love to feel wanted and made to feel special. In a more traditional culture men are often tasked with doing most of the pursuing, but this often leaves them feeling like they have to do all the work. All partners need to practice some form of pursuit, but it is up to the unique couple to decide how they want this to happen. What feels fair to each of you? How do you each like to be pursued? Who is going to pay (financially) for what the two of you do together?

What are we getting right/wrong so far?

As your coupledom progresses, it’s important to note and celebrate the things you’re getting right between you. Similarly, you need to be able to say the things that aren’t working. I advocate for saying the hard things early, rather than waiting until they have caused great anxiety or resentment. You could even keep a shared note as a way to regularly remember the good and keep track of what you’d like to discuss in the future.

What are we?

The clarification that comes from defining a relationship is important for understanding levels of commitment and expectation. Talking, dating, friends, hooking up, friends with benefits, exclusive, boyfriend/girlfriend, engaged—these labels have different meanings to different humans. Clarify for the two of you what label (if any!) you prefer and what that means to each of you. Labels may feel annoying or restricting, but they can also bring a sense of security and clarity. It helps to be able to speak to your community about your partnership with consistency. Being clear will prevent the two of you hurting each other’s feelings unnecessarily.

Are we moving at a pace that’s comfortable for you?

Every couple chooses a different pace. If you are wanting a healthy long-term relationship, I have three pieces of advice: 

1. Don’t move too quickly

2. Don’t commit too soon

3. Beware of plateaus

Don’t move too quickly. "Too quickly" means there isn’t enough time for your mind to catch up with your emotional experience. Depending on your context, you may have come into the relationship at a certain level of “love starvation.” Another way of saying that would be that you have an attachment injury, meaning you have been longing for a deep connection for a long time, so much so that you aren’t able to discern well about the type of “love” you’re now receiving. New relationships with a lot of chemistry can bring so much euphoria that you throw your mind and standards out the window, making you feel haphazard, chaotic, and incongruent with your long-term goals.

Slowing down means leaving space between the interactions with this new person. For example, starting with texting once or twice a day, rather than five-hundred messages all day long. Make sure you’re not cancelling plans with your other friends or losing connection with your family because you’ve suddenly filled your calendar and heart with a brand new stranger. Listen, you may really be in love. Who am I to judge? But a person who is moving so fast that they lose track of themself is not going to be healthy in a relationship. You have come into this relationship in a hopefully healthy context. Making drastic changes quickly is a recipe for catastrophe and likely isolation from the very community and habits that supported your health to begin with.

Don't jump into deep commitment too quickly. It takes time to know a person. We're multilayered beings! Your first meeting doesn’t have to be a date. It takes a lot of different contexts to see how they respond to stress and stimuli. It takes seasons to see how they actually handle their life (not just how they say they handle their life). If you desire life-partnership, you have a lot of assessing that needs to happen before you hook your wagon to theirs. Don’t assume it’s a match until you see with your own eyes that it is. This may seem like an arbitrary number, but a lot of terrible marriage experiences would have been avoided by couples delaying marriage for at least a year.

Beware of plateaus. While I love the idea of couples allowing lots of time to pass in order to get to know someone, a year is plenty of time to determine if this is the kind of person you want to continue to partner with. Good partners put in continued effort. If the goal is marriage, you don’t have to get married right away, but if there are ongoing unaddressed issues, persistent immaturity, or continued resistance to explicit commitment, those are significant red flags.

Taking time to address red flags is healthy progress, but continuing an unhealthy relationship dynamic without any changes happening is not. Appropriate reasons to take time could include building independence from parents and increasing responsibility, establishing your career, or getting to a more solid place with your individual mental health. Continuing to co-exist with red flags in a relationship is delaying (indefinitely) your finding a better suited partner. 

Considering the pace you’re going, the goal should be continued growth and deeper intimacy. Both partners have responsibility for making this happen, with ever increasing voluntary vulnerability and openness in productive conflict. If either partner “stalls out” with their effort, your relationship is on a moving sidewalk towards disconnection. If things seem plateaued for more than a month, it’s time to assess and decide your next moves.

How can I support you?

This is one of my favorite questions for couples. It’s easy to assume your partner wants to be supported in the same way you do, but humans vary widely in how they want to be supported. Some want curious questions, while others want to wrestle in peace till they ask for help. Some like space, while others like closeness. Some like reassurance, while others feel patronized by those words. In any given season we can’t know what our partner's stressors are nor how they want to be supported through them. You have to ask.

How well are we handling the changes we’re trying to make?

This question may be more personal than one you would ask together. As your relationship is moving forward, it’s important to assess how flexible and resilient your partner is. Rigid people do not make cooperative partners. They tend to be self-centered, not leaving much emotional capacity to care for you. They don’t negotiate well and struggle to collaborate in life. 

Is your partner willing to change and grow? Are they making the adjustments you’ve asked for and they’ve agreed on? Did they make those changes immediately but then revert to old ways? Are they working on themselves personally or have they stalled out? 

Even considering your own ability to be flexible might give you some clues as to how ready you are for this type of relationship. If you’re not able to follow through on changes you’ve agreed to, you might need to be more honest with yourself about what you’re actually wanting. Expecting a partner to adjust to you when you’re not willing to adjust to them is not kind or reasonable. If you really want a partnership, it might be time to seek counseling to help you become the person who can partner well.

Do we have any unresolved beef?

Whatever part of your relationship you’re at, it’s important to check back in on previous conflicts. Unresolved conflict or conflict that felt resolved at some point may have some lingering threads that need to be addressed. Why not catch them intentionally to prevent resentment and lingering pain between the two of you. If you are the one who called the conversation off because you needed to cool down or collect your thoughts, it’s your responsibility to come back to the table. Your partner won’t know what peace you’ve found unless you share it. They may continue in anxiety without direct communication from you. Just because you feel fine doesn’t mean that they feel fine.

How can I help you feel more loved?

Early stages of a romantic relationship may not use the word “love,” but once you open to it, it’s important to clarify what it means. For some people, love just means the high of feeling good. For others, it’s an intentional commitment to care. Asking how you can help your partner feel more loved makes safe room for them to be vulnerable with you. Plus, if you know better, you can do better!

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Conclusion

Props to all of you stepping into dating and willing to vulnerably risk for a deep intimate connection! This is an exciting and potentially deeply fulfilling opportunity. Connecting romantically with another human is a powerful chance for love—not to be taken lightly. Heartache is no joke, but it’s also something we can recover from. I hope these questions help you navigate a path to success, both in learning about yourself and experiencing a deeper closeness with another healthy human.

For those of you practicing a Christian faith, your desire to fully experience a connection modeled for us by the Creator has the potential to bring a new productive conversation with your Maker. Mulling over each of these questions with God is a great way to connect deeper with Him! Before sex is even on the table for you and your new partner, consider working through The Truth About Holy Sex, a Workshop for People Who Love Jesus and Want to Love Sex. The video series and workbook are designed to help you construct a vibrant narrative around sexuality that honors God, self and others.

Get the free downloadable companion to this blog on how to build a healthy relationship: Healthy Dating Guide.