Each module outlines key behaviors and skills that reduces stress and helps individuals and couples have happier, healthier relationships – at any stage of their relationship.
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Introduction
A number of tools have been developed to help professionals teach healthy relationship skills. These tools are based on teaching the 7 principles of the National Extension Relationship and Marriage Education Model (NERMEM). Learn more about HRMET and why relationship and marriage education is beneficial to families and children.
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Care for Self
While better health is a consequence of healthy marriages, attending to one’s physical, mental, and emotional well-being also fosters healthier couple and marital relationships.
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Choose
A strong, healthy, long-lasting relationship does not just happen by chance but, instead, through deliberate and conscientious decisions to be committed, intentional, proactive, and strengths-focused.
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Know
To develop and sustain healthy relationships partners must develop intimate knowledge of each other’s personal and relational needs, interests, feelings, and expectations.
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Care
Individuals who express kindness, attempt understanding, demonstrate respect, and invest time to be available and open to their partner are able to maintain stable, healthy couple and marital relationships.
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Share
Being a healthy couple involves spending meaningful time together and fostering a shared sense of couple identity in order to sustain a close, enduring friendship based on trust and love.
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Manage
Because problems and conflicts are a normal part of couple relationships, healthy couples use strategies to stay calm, contain their stress response, soothe their partner, listen attentively, make an effort to understand their partner’s point of view, accept differences, and ensure emotional and physical safety.
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Connect
The connections that couples develop with their family, peers, and community offer a source of meaning, purpose, and support that influence the health and vitality of their couple or marital relationship.