• Good relationships take patience and honestyman & woman holding hands image by Pavel Losevsky from Fotolia.com
  
  Everyone wants and needs strong, loving, and healthy relationships to enrich their lives. These kinds of relationships share several identifiable "best practices" in themselves and as partners relate to the larger world. Most of them are about mutuality.
  
  

Mutual revelation

• Dr. Drew Permut, a clinical psychologist and counselor for 25 years, believes that partners in any relationship must be willing to reveal themselves. Open communication is irreplaceable. Whatever their backgrounds---successes, failures, heartbreaks and dead ends notwithstanding---both partners must reveal themselves to each other. "Security comes from being known, not from hiding," Dr. Permut says.
  
  

Be There When it Counts---And it Always Counts

• Relationships that last are those whose partners can be depended upon to be there for each other when needed. That reliability---indispensable in crisis---is also vital in the minutiae of life. Good partners talk to each other freely. Good partners listen. They share not only the milestones of life, but also the many small successes, hopes, irritations and disappointments that make up day-to-day living. Good partners regard each other realistically. They work patiently together rather than shackling themselves to burdensome and sometimes unattainable expectations.
  
  

Expect Goodness

• Dr. Permut believes that the spiritual component of a good relationship comes principally from the partners' understanding of the world around them. Good partners tend to see the world as fundamentally benign. They conduct their lives, and their relationship, from a place of confidence rather than from fear or expectation of harm. "This is an essentially spiritual view," Dr. Permut says. "The assumption of good, and their faith in each other, is both a relationship statement and a spiritual position."