How to Strengthen Your Relationships - Elaine Gan

We all have relationships in our lives. If you’re a daughter or a son, your primary relationships are with your parents and siblings. If you’re married, your primary relationship is with your husband or wife. To grow healthy relationships, we need to know how to add strength to them. Here are some lessons I’ve learned about the keys to strengthening relationships.

Understand each other’s love language

The beautiful thing about love is that it can be so diverse. We love differently and uniquely as individuals and the way to strengthen your relationships is to find out how others love. When I first got married, my husband, Andy would buy me a lot of flowers and the flowers were beautiful! But, I was a practical person and what I really wanted were magnets. This seemed to be more functional and practical for our home. But I needed to communicate this to him rather than letting him continue to buy me flowers, while in my mind I was wishing for something else. This is essential – communicating and allowing each other to understand your feelings and the different ways you truly feel loved.

One of my favourite things about my daughter is that she loves through acts of kindness. Her 21st birthday was coming up when she had been living overseas for a while, and we wanted to do something special for her. Understanding her love language, we got her roommate to prepare meals for her so it would feel like home. On her birthday, she came home to different home-cooked meals that made her feel extremely special.

Understanding people’s love language is truly loving like Jesus – unconditionally and sacrificially – as is detailed in 1 Corinthians 13. If you’re in a tough situation with your boss, can I encourage you to find out how they feel loved and respected. For example, if they love gifts, perhaps getting them a thoughtful gift is the key to strengthening your relationship with them. Or, if you find yourself struggling in your relationship with your parents, you could cook them a meal, if they love through acts of kindness. The only cure for damaged relationships is this: to love like Jesus did.  

Find healthy support systems in your life

The next key to strengthening your relationships is to find healthy support systems. There are three tiers of relationships that we can discover for ourselves: mentors, peers, and people whose lives we speak into.

Mentors are people who we give permission to speak truth into our lives and allow to advise us where we fall short in understanding what God’s Word says about our situations. The important thing about mentors is that we see their lives an example that we want to follow, as well. Peers are people we can share our lives with, side by side, and people whose lives we speak into are those for whom we are playing the role of mentor.

“Refuse good advice and watch your plans fail. Take good counsel and watch them succeed.”

Proverbs 15:22 (MSG)

The thing about healthy support systems is that they help us run checks and balances on different areas in our lives. Where we need encouragement, our support systems can step in and speak the truth of God’s Word to us. More often that not, this boost of perspective through God’s eyes is all we need to push forward and to stay in faith.

As humans, we were designed for relationship at our very core; first for a relationship with God and then relationships with other people. Acting on these keys will strengthen these relationships we have.

By Elaine Gan

Elaine is married to Andy Gan and mother to Kimberly and Gerard. She lives in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia and is on team at Kingdomcity.