An ideal relationship is one in which both partners feel happy, secure, respected, and able to get along. This includes both sides being honest and open with each other, resolving problems fairly, and enjoying spending time together. However, every relationship can face challenges, and therefore relationship therapy can help couples solve their problems and improve their relationship.
Relationship therapy is a process led by a therapist and is designed to resolve problems and storms in relationships. The therapist can examine the couple’s ways of speaking and communication styles, address past traumas and losses, and encourage the couple to identify their future goals. Relationship therapy can be seen as a good option for resolving relationship problems and can help couples strengthen their relationship.
What Is an Ideal Relationship?
An ideal relationship is the construction of an ideal self. Every person has a self that is shaped in line with certain values, tendencies, or skills. This self is built as a necessity of one’s own inner world. However, when a person who has constructed their self in their own world forms a relationship with a partner who has likewise constructed their self in their own world, effects arise on both selves and the construction of the ideal self begins.
In relationships, partners shape each other’s selves like sculptors, giving new forms to each other’s behavioral tendencies, personality traits, skills, and values.
As Hegel states in his theory of love, the encounter between what is “self” and what is “not-self” is actually a conception of an ideal relationship. When the self of one’s own world and the self the partner has built in their own world come together in an ideal relationship, it makes it necessary for the selves to be reconstructed ideally. What we call togetherness or a relationship is not a state of being “me” or “one,” but a state of “being one together.”
In ideal relationships, each person reshapes their self according to their partner’s perceptual and behavioral approval. First, partners perceive each other’s behaviors and goals, and accordingly begin a new construction process through the responses they develop toward each other. In line with these perceptions and behaviors, each person may move toward their ideal self goals, or they may also drift away from those goals. Change and reconstruction in the direction of the ideal self have an effect that increases both personal happiness and happiness between partners.
Ideal Relationship and Ideal Happiness
In ideal relationships, each person experiences change in line with their relational partner’s perceptions and behaviors. This change can be explained by the Michelangelo phenomenon. According to Michelangelo, “ideal forms” lie dormant inside blocks of marble, waiting to be set free, and what the sculptor must do is simply trim away the excess stone so the ideal form can emerge. Just like the sculptures Michelangelo described, a person also has dormant ideal forms—what each person desires and calls the ideal self.
When evaluated through the Michelangelo phenomenon, interpersonal relationships and experiences have an important role in shaping the self. Relational partners in an ideal relationship function as “sculptors of the self.”
The relationship between the ideal self and the ideal relationship also shows itself in the relationship between the ideal relationship and ideal happiness. By reconsidering or changing their definitions and values through the relational partnership they form, a person is also constructing their own happiness. When a person’s happiness is shaped not only through their own preferences and behaviors but also by being influenced by their partner’s preferences and behaviors, it takes on a new form in the direction of ideal happiness. For this reason, partners provide each other with different opportunities in relationships and make change possible.
What Is Relationship Therapy?
In the partnerships people form, it is inevitable that problems will arise because each individual is unique and one of a kind. In many cases, this can lead to more difficult and more complex problems in couple relationships. Each partner has a certain life experience and a self that has been constructed in line with that experience; therefore, rebuilding themselves through the partnership they form is necessary for their happiness. Relationship therapies can be defined as a therapy model carried out precisely to address and resolve conflicts, problems, or other needs that arise in couples’ relationships.
What Is the Purpose of Relationship Therapies?
The main starting point of relationship therapies is the goal of establishing healthy communication between partners. In line with this, conversations guided by the therapist are carried out in relationship therapy.
- Healthy communication; relationship therapies are, with the therapist’s guidance, the process of revisiting all problems and situations that cannot be overcome. In relationship therapy, it is aimed for couples to understand each other better and to increase each partner’s ability to empathize with the other.
- An objective perspective; the therapist addresses each partner’s behaviors, mistakes, or the problems present in the relationship in a neutral and therefore impartial way, away from emotional involvement. The emotional state couples are in can often prevent them from evaluating problems from another perspective. Explaining, talking about, or expressing something is often the first step toward overcoming a problem. In this respect, relationship therapies present couples with healthy communication options through objective values.
- Producing solutions together; this is the main purpose of relationship therapy. Healthy communication enables each partner’s expectations and values to be understood again indicates with an objective perspective, and in this case, new solutions are developed together within the framework of jointly created goals.
