How do I know if I'm ready for a relationship?
5 ways to know you're ready for a (healthy) relationship
How do I know if I'm ready for a relationship?
Wondering if you’re ready for a relationship?
It’s a question I hear a lot. And the truth is, if you've constantly changed yourself to be liked by other people, then leaping into a relationship can bring up a lot of anxiety and can feel overwhelming.
You’re constantly questioning if they really like you, or if they are cheating on you. You doubt their honesty and struggle believing what they say. When you don’t hear back right away you spiral and you find yourself in repetitive and obsessive negative thought loops.
It’s completely understandable, too. For someone who has an insecure attachment style, your nervous system has normalized chaos and lives in a state of fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. You’re literally bracing for the fall or preparing yourself for the worst possible outcome. This part of us believes that doing so will protect us from getting hurt, but this trap limits us from experiencing intimacy and building trust.
Creating safety in our nervous system allows us to experience intimacy, which supports our capacity to see others authentically and to allow others to see us fully. Safety is the foundation of building a healthy relationship because the safer you feel with yourself, the less you project onto others. Projections of our own core wounds is what keeps most couples arguing in circles and hurting one another time after time.
You’ll also have more self-trust and confidence to enforce your boundaries when you feel safe and have a regulated nervous system. Cultivating an awareness of your needs, wants, and desires supports you in identifying your own boundaries. The safer you feel, the more you remember that you are worthy of a loving reciprocal relationship which encourages you to enforce your boundaries lovingly and firmly.
Today I’m sharing 5 ways to know if you’re ready for a relationship so you can focus on the ways you get to show up for yourself without believing that you need to be “healed” or “fixed” before you can enjoy a healthy relationship. You are not broken, you do not need to be fixed.
Let’s get into it.
5 ways to know if you are ready for a relationship
Only you can say for sure whether you’re ready for a relationship. If you’ve found yourself reading this, you’re probably in a good place to start exploring what it looks like to be in a healthy relationship. Maybe you’re even more prepared for it than you thought!
To help you decide, here are a few indicators that show you're more than ready to explore a relationship.
1. You are willing to stay curious and self-aware
The more self-aware I became in my relationship, the better it got. For the first 4 years of my relationship I had spent it obsessing over my partner and what he was doing or not doing. I wanted him to be a very specific way and tried to put him in a box. I was doing so much “healing” and he wasn’t (according to me), which made me feel not safe. I made who he was and what he was doing, or not doing, mean something about how safe or happy I was in our relationship. (ahem, is my codependency showing?)
Needless to say, our relationship was tense. There were of course moments of happiness and fun, but it was overshadowed by all the flaws I couldn’t pry myself from obsessing over. I fell into a depression. He fell into a depression. There was little emotional intimacy because I had painted him into this partner that didn’t meet my needs.
And to be honest, it got worse before it got better. We ended up breaking up, and I continued to avoid seeing my part in all of it. I found myself feeling like a victim, which I greatly benefitted from. It was in this breakup that I began to see more clearly than ever that I felt the same without him. There I was, staring at my own reflection in the mirror. All my relationships ended the same: with me running. And I was the common denominator.
When I first started becoming self-aware, I felt a lot of shame and guilt for how much pressure I had put on him and our relationship. I started pattern tracking and saw how I had played out this same situation in all of my relationships. I didn’t realize how much I had actually avoiding taking person responsibility and accountability for how I participated in the dysfunctional dynamics in our relationship.
Today I am sitting across from him at our favorite coffee shop, five years later. Our breakup lead me down a road of healing my unresolved trauma that effected the way I showed up in our relationship. Seven months after we had broken up something brought us back together, and Part 2 of our relationship, as we call it, is like night and day, and I truly attribute it to the self-awareness I have of my own patterns.
If you don’t have a support system or network of people to give you feedback, try asking a trusted friend, or join our growing community Codependency Alchemy: The Membership. You can absolutely do this healing on your own, the point is, you don’t have to.
All the answers and wisdom live within you.
2. You are ready to embrace interdependence
This may seem like a given, but it’s commonly overlooked. If you experience insecure attachment or codependency (which many of us do) then it is easy to use our relationships as something to fill a void, rather than an opportunity to walk alongside someone in life.
You may not feel it now, but your inner knowing about your deservingness to experience a healthy reciprocal relationship is there.
So if you think you’re ready for a relationship but struggle with fears that tell you that if you aren’t needed then they will leave you, or that a relationship that is interdependent means it lacks intimacy, it can be hard to admit that healthy relationships are based in autonomy and sovereignty.
Interdependence in relationships promotes mutual support, growth, and a deeper emotional connection. It allows partners to maintain their individual identities while also working together as a team.
I used to want to change the things that annoyed me about my partner, like the video games or the hours he would spend on YouTube or TikTok. I realized the more I tried to control who he was, the less intimacy and joy we experienced in our relationship and the more inadequate he and I felt.
Embracing interdependence in our relationship for me looked like allowing him to be himself, and finding what made me, myself. I found the things that I liked to do, and leaned into those things. I found my own autonomy and it actually brought more connection to our relationship, not less.
3. You have identified what you value in a relationship
Now, here’s what I’ve learned when it comes to things that annoy me in regards to what my partner does with his time. I realized that I made him playing video games mean that he didn’t want to spend time with me, which led me to he doesn’t love me. Of course I wanted to change his behavior because I was making it mean something about the love he had for me, and it gave me reasons to self-sabotage the whole relationship and run.
Something that has helped me is creating a values filter for my relationship. What do I value in a relationship? How do I desire to feel in my relationship?
If I value transparency, quality time, depth, and safety then can I make sure that I am meeting those for myself, first? If I am not meeting those needs for myself first, then the chances of me being able to receive those things from my partner are slim. It will feel like a hunger that can not be satiated. Most of us live in this place in regards to our relationships.
Then, am I providing that for my partner? Am I sharing with my partner, authentically? Am I hoping they will read my mind and discern what I want or need, or am I being transparent about my desires? Have I uncovered what quality time looks and feels like for me, and shared that with them?
So back to my partner playing video games and making that mean something about how they feel about me. Instead of sulking and feeling like a victim to the lack of connection or togetherness I feel, I get to communicate what I value and how I desire to feel, and welcome my partner into that.
“I desire to feel depth through meaningful conversations with each other. Can we find a time this week to do that?”
This is literally a conversation I had with Justin four years ago. I was able to identify my need for deep and meaningful conversations, and since that is a need of mine, it was also my responsibilty to bring the topics to the table. He was willing to show up for it, and I value that in a relationship.
Before doing this I used to cycle in obsessing over the things I perceived as annoying, but instead I started identifying the root of my annoyance and communicated that with him— and this built our intimacy and trust with one another.
4. You are open to communicating authentically
I want to speak to common thoughts and beliefs that keeps us from communicating our authentic needs, wants, and desires in relationships (and maybe these sound familiar to you):
“I want them to want to do it.”
“I don’t want to have to ask for it, because then it is not authentic.”
We want our partners to understand what we need and want without us having to tell them. We see it as a sign of love and care when they do things for us without being asked. But sometimes, thinking this way can make us expect too much from them, and then we end up feeling disappointed when our needs aren't met.
"I want them to want to do it" often comes from being afraid of being rejected or let down. We're concerned that if we have to ask for something, it makes the action less real because it seems like our partner is only doing it because they have to, not because they really want to. This worry can stop us from telling our partners what we need or want, which can make us feel upset and resentful when things don't turn out the way we hoped.
These mindsets can create a power imbalance in the relationship, where one partner feels entitled to have their needs met without having to communicate them explicitly. It overlooks the fact that perceiving the needs of others is actually a trauma response and dysfunctional to begin with.
Just because you have the trauma response of perceiving the needs and wants of others doesn’t mean it’s healthy for others to perceive the needs of you.
Honestly, no one should be perceiving the needs of anyone. We should be inviting ourselves and people we are in relationships with to share needs and wants authentically. This encourages autonomy, which is something that many of us have lost in a society that has benefitted from putting us in small conforming boxes.
When we expect our partners to understand what we need without us telling them, we're not giving them the chance to show us how much they care in the ways that matter to us. But when we tell them what we need and want that helps us in building intimacy, trust, and respect in our relationships.
5. You have a plan for handling conflicts
Now, I can hear you saying, "But you just told us that healthy relationships are built on trust and communication!" And that's absolutely true. However, every relationship encounters conflicts at some point. It's a natural part of navigating the complexities of relationships, babes.
Nothing worth having comes without challenges, right?
I’m going to share about a frequent conflict that took place in our household until recently. We’ll call this “The Cookie Conflict.”
There was this thing happening constantly in our home. I don’t have much of a sweet tooth, but Justin certainly does. Once a month (ladies, I know you get it) I would have a craving for warm, freshly baked chocolate chip cookies. I made enough for me to indulge in the over the course of the week. I had an expectation that I would have these for several days.
Well, as I mentioned, Justin has a sweet tooth. He would eat practically all of them, and I would be pissed. We would fight about it and I would leave the argument feeling unheard and unseen. I felt like he didn’t respect me or my wants, even though I never communicated my desires to have the cookies for the week.
So then I started clearly, communicating my desires. I would look Justin in the eyes and say, “These cookies are for you,” pointing to a bag of cookies he could have. “And these cookies are for me. I do not want you to eat them, I want to have them for the week.”
Well, lo and behold, my cookies would disappear even still.
We would argue again, and he told me if I didn’t want them eaten I needed to hide them and take them with me whenever I left the house.
I agreed, and began doing this. I mean, he was right to a certain extent: If I had a need for him to not eat them, then I needed to make sure I created an environment where I got that need met. But then it occurred to me, we both have a role to play in this, as two people in a relationship.
You see, conflicts like this are inevitable in any relationship.
Here’s what you can do to prepare so you’re ready for it:
Always prioritize active listening and empathy in your interactions.
Get in the habit of staying curious.
Remember that patience and understanding are key. Whenever I neglected to remain patient during a conflict, it only exacerbated the situation and led to more unnecessary tension.
Be ready to initiate a constructive conversation.
So I went to Justin with these things in mind. This is how I handled it:
First I cultivated a space for us to share vulnerably by being curious, rather than judgmental by asking “Can you tell me more about what happens for you when I make cookies and there are some left over?”
He shared with me that the thoughts he has is “I don’t want them to go bad”, or “they’re in my house, I get to have them if I want.”
Now, I could have rolled my eyes at him and been like “REALLY?! YOU DON’T WANT THEM TO ‘GO BAD’? SERIOUSLY DUDE?!” but we all know how those conversations end. And if you don’t know, I’ll tell you: they end bad, every time. It is so important to not invalidate our partners experiences, no matter how silly their reasonings might be.
Then I shared my authentic experience with him, “I feel a little resentful that I have to carry cookies in my purse just so that you won’t eat them.”
He agreed that it does sound a little over the top that I have to carry around cookies in my purse. I told him I appreciated him acknowledging that.
Finally, I pointed us towards solutions “What can we do so that we both feel supported, seen, and get our needs met?”
I could have gone down the rabbit hole of continuing to make him feel bad and shove his inadequacies down his throat, but this is someone I love, and he is already sharing vulnerably. I want to cultivate an environment where we can continue sharing and resolving conflict, so that means I get to move us in the direction of resolutions.
For those of you who want to know how this story ends: Justin came up with a brilliant idea that every time he eats my cookies he pays me $50. Obviously, I loved this idea! He only had to do it twice, and this conversation took place over a year ago, so I would say this conflict resolution conversation was successful, and it brought us closer together.
Having a plan like this, even if it’s only in your head at this point, will help you navigate conflicts with resilience and grace, strengthening your relationship in the process.
Standing in between you and a relationship: The Doubt Edition
Usually, the biggest thing standing in the way of your wildest relationship dreams isn’t something external. It’s actually doubt.
Some common concerns I hear from my clients are:
What if I'm not good enough for a healthy relationship?
Will I ever find someone who truly understands me?
Am I capable of maintaining a long-term commitment?
Does any of that sound familiar?
The best way to clear those concerns up is to challenge them head-on through shadow work and getting to the root of your fears and doubts around relationships and what you’re making them mean.
If you want to do shadow work and inner child healing around common codependency patterns so that you can take personal responsibly for how you contribute to relationships, you can check out Codependency Alchemy: The Course
The Modules:
From Prioritizing Others to Honoring Your Needs: Uncover the challenges of putting others before yourself, and learn to set healthy boundaries.
From Seeking Validation to Cultivating Self-Worth: Dive into the impact of seeking external validation, and discover how to find self-worth from within.
From Fear of Abandonment to Embracing Self-Trust: Explore the fear of abandonment and its effects, and embrace self-trust and intuition.
From Enabling to Empowering Yourself and Others: Understand enabling behaviors and their consequences, and transition to empowerment.
From Silence to Authentic Communication: Communicate with clarity, fostering genuine connections and navigating conflicts constructively.
Standing in between you and a healthy relationship: Real-Life Obstacles
Real-life obstacles are some of the most obvious challenges you’re going to face on the path to a healthy relationship.
We’ve already covered common obstacles in this post, but you likely will have some challenges that are unique to your situation, such as past heartbreaks or trust issues.
The good news is, you have the power to tend to them.
So in addition to what I shared earlier, I encourage you to seek support from trusted friends or join our growing community in Codependency Alchemy: The Membership, where we practice self-compassion, and taking small steps towards building healthy relationship habits, together. (This is not someone you go to and have a bashing session with)
And remember, when you’re ready, you’re ready.
If you find that you're struggling to overcome doubt or challenging real-life experiences, know that it's okay to seek support and take your time. You are deserving of a healthy, loving, and reciprocal relationship.
That’s a wrap!
I hope this post has helped clarify whether you're ready to embark on the journey towards a healthy relationship.
If you're feeling overwhelmed or uncertain, remember that you're not alone. With curiosity, self-awareness, and support, you can overcome doubt and navigate obstacles on your path to receiving love.
If you have a question about anything I covered today, I love connecting with you! You can leave a comment, reply to this email, or DM me on Instagram!
ILYSM 🤟🏾
Alyssa
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