I don’t know anything about relationships. I’ll be the first to admit it. My childhood template for them is about as poor as it could be. But one thing really irritates the hell out of me, and slightly clouds over my usually rosy affection for the female gender. All girls (yes, ALL of you) have this dreadful arrogance that only women understand relationships. Sorry girls, you do, even if you don’t want to admit it. Your mum taught you, and you’ll teach your daughter as well. Men apparently have no idea, and need women to “guide” them somehow as they understand it all so intuitively.

I always get a smile from any woman who is any age when I mention the in-built “relationship-o-meter” they naturally have. It’s something that’s installed from birth as they are totally defined by their relationships. They are constantly monitoring their relationships every second and know exactly where they are emotionally, physically and spiritually. Any disruption is traumatic. Scores are kept, grudges held and potential examined. I’ve read so much about them now that I can see the meter flicking from left to right in their eyes as they’re talking. The new men’s pact needs to be “you let me know how the relationship is going, I’m driving.”

I’m sat on the plane writing this whilst speaking to a lovely couple next to me who have been together for 35 years, who are complaining that people give up too easily these days. They seem bemused by how articulate I am, probably because I’m meant to be a lot more cavalier. It occurred to me that we make some massive assumptions about relationships, and we have expectations of them that are almost totally unreasonable. We don’t actually give it a lot of thought. The comment thread on my “what do you call this?” blog also stirred me as it’s a rather polarised view of the romantic world. I’ve asked a lot of people what their secret is when it comes to staying together long-term, and the answer is always “companionship”.

We take for granted the concept of “good” and “bad” relationships, and those we deem “healthy” and “unhealthy”. We have a classic stereotype at work which is not always right – different things are needed by different people at different times of their lives, and just because they don’t fit into our expectations doesn’t make them invalid. The romantic notion is of initial attraction, courting, honeymoon and then deepening or disillusionment. It’s over when communication and the natural “flow” have disintegrated. Girls of course claim they understand and know way before their partner.

Everything we learn up to the age of 8 is from our parents or “primary caregivers” as psychologists call them. Whether we like it or not, the way we see the world or understand things to be is subconsciously embedded in us from a very early age on a basic primeval level. Girls end up chasing their father and boys their mother. If you define your perfect partner and then look at the qualities of those you’ve sought out, the differences are stark. What you want and what you seek out are completely different. People with similar backgrounds tend to seek each other too and form extremely intense relationships. The cardinal rule is our parents’ relationship is the model template of our own, and one we “go home” to in later life unless we change our conditioning. Look at your mum and dad and then look at how a lot of your relationships ended. Trying to “save” one or fulfil the broken promise never, ever works.

This is also the case with self-esteem and self-worth: before we reach self-awareness in our teens, we are totally dependent on the worth and esteem our parents place on us. We are born blank vessels and are defined by their behaviour and feelings towards us. None of us are slaves to our childhood, but only a fool would ignore the importance of it.

Relationships challenge you and grow you. They take you out of your normal comfort zone and force you to become more than you are. You adsorb qualities from the other person and change from the experience of being with them. It works better when there are differences as long as communication is open, and the closer they are, the more you learn. Being with someone is like a mirror that shows you who you are and what the good and bad bits are. Being with someone too similar can be a frustrating and uninspiring time.

But relationships are also extremely strange and scary places. When you bond with someone, breaking that bond or damaging it hurts badly. Parentage is the only type of relationship where the natural and healthy end is separation. It means the walls and barriers come down, boundaries are stretched and its impossible just to have the good without the bad. Baggage gets in the way, and feelings start coming out that really need to come out somewhere else. They can become who you are, rather than just a part of the whole of your life. Some things are meant to be said, others only felt and kept in external silence.

When your heart is opened you are forced to deal with the things that have been holding you back. If you’re suspicious, you need to learn to trust again. If you’re angry, you need to learn ho to express your feelings safely and constructively. If you’re self-centred, you need to learn understanding and patience. If you’re intense, you need to learn to be moderate.

Counselling and therapy only ever works effectively through the bond of a therapist with their patient. Relationships are natural places for healing to take place, and a place to practice tolerance, compromise, patience, forgiveness and humility. Unwanted and strange feelings always bubble to the surface once the doors to the heart are opened as they the path is a 2-way street. Again, you cannot have the good without the bad; indeed you could argue one is there to justify the other.

Ultimately anyone you talk to randomly in the street is a potential relationship of some kind, as they are nature’s bonding and social exchange mechanisms. They’re started by a common interest, shared values, chemistry, humour or a mutual commitment. Every one has its storms and calms, its own lifecycle, periods of longing and means of fulfilment. They are a way if sharing the experience of life with all its struggles and time together to share the highs and lows. Every one could be classified as being in your life for a reason, a season or a lifetime.

There is this frightening cynicism about “honeymoon” or “fireworks” in the early stages of a relationship that gets to me simply as it’s so negative. Of course discovering and bonding with someone is electric – it’s meant to be as lust, infatuation and attraction are the means to bring people together. But its almost as if its thought of as false or unreal. These early feelings are part of the natural lifecycle of a relationship and as long as see them with the mature eye knowing they will lessen, it doesn’t have to be the end. If you are so naïve as to fall in love with love itself, you can only expect to be heartbroken.

For me, the fireworks don’t disappear, they only calm and mature as less frequent spikes on the graph. As time goes on, those moments and experiences need to be nurtured and invested in so they carry on. If you’re expecting them to happen naturally (as everything else in life for the naive), you’re a fool and deserve what you get. You have to make time to be with each other, to think of the other person and do things for them. You have to be open enough to change, compromise and accommodate in ways you wouldn’t if you were on your own. The natural by-product of that process is personal spiritual growth, the healthy end-goal of any relationship.

Anger, passion, love, sadness, joy, wonder, warmth, excitement, loneliness, affection and worry are all part of the ride. And that’s what a relationship is – a journey together, rather than a destination. There is a fundamental support frame that underpins your bond with the person, like the chemistry, your friendship or your natural attraction to each other that never dies or is lost as it’s the very nature of who you are as people and how you interact. Very rarely someone crosses your path that knocks the wind out of you and drives you insane.

Part of that is having a good distance between each of you, as living in each pockets means you lose sight of the one you love and can’t appreciate the other person fully or have respect for their individuality. If you’re looking for the cure to your insecurities in another person you are on the route to madness. Making someone the centre of your life with all their faults, weaknesses and shortcomings is a very painful way to find out that you need to get a life before you share it with anyone. Inevitably you start trying to forcefully change your partner into what you want them to be, and despair when they don’t. What you need is generally somewhere else.

Bad experiences in the past can be lethal to bonding with someone, as the baggage piles up so high between you that it’s impossible to climb or ignore. Often you meet people who are so cynical or scared that their own relationship pattern becomes a destructive self-fulfilling prophecy. When you assume all is doomed or superimpose the source of your previous pain onto the face of the one you love, walls get built and poison circulates. You block off, freeze up and stop giving because you blame the person in your life and amplify their own shortcomings to be a greater evil. It takes 2 people to make a relationship work, and when one is so reticent that they aren’t actually “there”, their own prophecy is fulfilled and their thoughts ratified and validated. If you don’t give, you don’t get.

One of the most interesting phenomena when stress takes it toll or a relationship falls apart is the emergence of childlike thinking and behaviour. Imagine a small child demanding its own way and it’s truly fascinating.

Circumstances also kill passion and love, battering you down and eating at your ankles so the distraction is louder than the positive things; It’s impossible to deal with what’s happened. You have to work through the obstacles as they arise or they keep coming back forever. And we all know women never, ever forget anything and nothing is ever in the past when an argument starts. Women never truly letting go of anything that’s officially forgiven and historical is another pet hate of mine. Love keeps no record or scorecard of wrongs, and yet the self-appointed experts can’t seem to accept that sleeping dogs are better alone to lie where they are.

Confrontation is healthy and normal, and doesn’t necessarily mean a relationship is suffering or over. The principle is how that confrontation is dealt with, and if you think it’s a bad thing, you are quite simply immature and naïve. Confrontation and arguments happen everywhere in any type of relationship and needs to be resolved maturely. If you’re female, it’s really very important as the idea of clear, direct communication, expressing your feelings in a meaningful way instead of bottling them up for months and resolving the issue permanently seems to be something that’s beyond most of you. Most of the time it’s an external stress (money, circumstances etc) that causes the difficulty and it needs to be worked through rather than run from.

The gentle healing care for a relationship that’s in trouble, or for one that is in the process of being cemented is simple and effective: intimacy. When things break down all hope is lost, the situation is final and you are totally powerless to stem the tide of disparate estrangement. The honeymoon brings you together with experiences and madness that are remembered for a lifetime, and the breakdown the first casualty is intimacy, as it involves the guard coming down and expressing vulnerability. Its not intimacy we fear, it’s the consequences of intimacy. Fear becomes bigger than the relationship itself.

For me, a relationship is a formless and metamorphic thing that knows no rules or boundaries, rather than fitting into a pre-defined social box for others to label. If we want to speak every 3 minutes, we bloody well will. Maybe we’ll go a week without speaking but we know it’ll be fine when we do. We make each other laugh. It’s a safe and secure place where its ok to flirt outrageously or where the other person can go so far as to sleep next to another person in their bed and the trust level is so strong that it would never cause a problem. A place that its safe to cry and share your secrets in confidence (I really need to work on that one), and grow as a person.

We can be on the phone for 5 minutes or 5 hours and it doesn’t make a difference. Somewhere you both have your won friends, dreams, goals and career, and help each other to achieve all the things you want and get to be where you want to be in life. I’ll take Shakespearean madness over formulaic sterility any day. Give me poetry, romance, rollercoaster waves of emotion and spontaneity and I’m happy. Oh, and good conversation. Morons with a capability and/or preference for small talk, an aversion of so called “deep” conversation and a predilection for mono-syllabic drivel need not apply.

My point is that you cannot judge the validity, value or quality of a relationship on its conventional stereotype. What you see as “unhealthy” may just be exactly what the doctor ordered and a very healthy process for two people to go through. It doesn’t always come in the package we expect it to, but that doesn’t make it bad, unhealthy, doomed or wrong. None of us can judge whether what life imposes on us is for our good or bad until many years later. They are more than their labels or articles in Cosmopolitan magazine. A relationship is a vehicle for change and not a Mills & Boon story template.

I wonder if my own relationships have been healthy, but then I realise I am here questioning, ruminating and wondering about them, which is an amazingly good thing. The painful experiences I’ve had recently have forced me to question what I know and assume, and to decide what I want for my own heart – the relationships I’ve had in the past, the ones I am in now and those I want to be in the future. I have to re-consider and re-model what I know. She’s doing the same, even in the midst of the madness. Only very rarely does a period in your life come along that teaches you something as fundamental and important as that, and not in a way that you’re doing it simply because the experience was so bad you really need to sort it out. Growth forces gaps and changes, and life has a wonderfully mysterious way of preparing you for what’s ahead.

Now that is healthy.