Finding a Healthy Relationship
How to Know If You're Ready
A guide brought to you by Jack Bohannan — Relationship & Intimacy Coach
Finding a great partner doesn’t need to be hard.
You don’t need to feel so frustrated, exhausted, alienated, hopeless, alone, hurt, disappointed, violated, jaded, freaked out, etc.
(Modern dating leaves us with a long list.)
You just need to do dating a little differently.
This guide helps with that.
Specifically, it supports your preparation for a good relationship with a good man.
You Attract What You Are
There’s a popular adage that “you attract what you are.”
This is true — but also false. We attract partners with complementary issues — not the same ones.
This “Law of Attraction” is not a reason to blame yourself for someone else’s bad behavior. But a pattern of “sub-optimal” partners is a signal to do some healing work and avoid those situations in the future.
Our traumas lie under the surface. We can’t see them. You may be psychologically healthier than 90% of the male dating pool, but it's easy to get dragged back into old patterns unless you address the root cause — which you’re clearly doing by consuming content like this guide.
Fortunately, there’s an ocean of good men available when you’re ready, and an increasing number of men value growth and conscious connection.
Sure — there are a lot of boneheads too. And narcissists. But if you’re healthy, you will attract healthy, mature partnership within 12 months.
Here’s how to tell if you’re ready or if you should focus on your relationship with yourself before jumping back into the dating pool.
The Right Kind of Hard
Relationships are hard. Sure.
But a lot of people get stuck in the wrong kind of hard relationship. They repeat the same patterns and the same types of partnerships — over and over.
Unless they consciously change, they waste time, energy, and emotional resources on partners who can’t love them the way they want to be loved.
Instead of the healthy difficulty caused by growth, they experience the difficulties of staying stuck. They’re re-traumatized by the same abandonments, same betrayals, and same lack of clarity in romantic situations.
They repeat the same patterns and the same types of partnerships — over and over. Unless they consciously change, they waste time, energy, and emotional resources on partners who can’t love them the way they want to be loved.
Instead of the healthy difficulty caused by growth, they experience the difficulties of staying stuck. They’re re-traumatized by the same abandonments, same betrayals, and same lack of clarity in romantic situations.
Why?
Our relational style — the things that feel familiar and “right” for us in partnership — are deeply ingrained. They start pre-verbally in childhood.
If we didn’t receive attentive love from our parents, not receiving love feels right — and it’s what we’ll attract even if we don’t consciously want that.
If we didn’t receive space or respect from our parents… same thing. We will find partners whose needs threaten our autonomy or actively violate our boundaries.
This is the premise of attachment theory.
How we “attach” to our primary caregiver informs how we will “attach” to our lovers in the future. So, if our connection to our opposite-sex parent was kooky, our relationships will be kooky too.
Attachment Theory:
How We Connect — or Don’t…
There’s more to attachment theory than this short description. Obviously.
But it’s helpful to oversimplify it into three basic types:
Avoidant Attachment
This partner “pulls away.” They fear losing themselves in partnership, value their independence, rarely experience their loneliness (though it’s there), often feel overwhelmed, and reliably attract partners with an anxious attachment style.
Anxious Attachment
This partner “reaches towards.” They fear abandonment, value security, and closeness, experience solitude as a threat, trauma bond, and lose themselves conforming to their partner — who is reliably an avoidant.
Secure Attachment
A person with secure attachment has more flexibility and freedom. Their early experiences of caregivers were neither inattentive nor overwhelming; they experienced healthy care.
In adulthood, the person with secure attachment is much more likely to find a healthy relationship wherein both partners respect boundaries, acknowledge needs and emotions, and create a lasting, loving connection together.
Avoidants don’t match with other avoidants; anxious people don’t match with anxious people.
This isn’t bad. It’s natural.
We need this push-and-pull dance of attachment as we develop as individuals and connect with one another. This is a mode of healing.
It’s how we recreate the unresolved experiences of our childhood: by subconsciously seeking a partner who had an opposite but complementary experience.
Re: Secure Attachment
Unlike the avoidant, a person with secure attachment doesn’t fear being overwhelmed by their partner’s needs.
They don’t need to pull away from connection.
Unlike the anxious person, the secure person experiences easeful solitude. They don’t have a compulsion to be in relationship.
They feel content and complete in their friendship with themselves.
After a relationship, anxiously attached people do well to take time for independence. But, at some point, they begin to ask if they’re ready for another relationship — one that’s happy, healthy, and supportive.
What Does “Being Ready” Even Mean?
Beyond having your life in basic order (e.g. financial stability, health), you need some self-alignment to be successful in relationship. “Successful,” in this case, means ready for productive difficulties and growth — not perfection or lasting partnership, necessarily.
Self-alignment stacks up in two categories: emotional stability and self-awareness.
Emotional Stability
Growth is hard. Relationships are growth.
To be ready for “hard,” we need a baseline of emotional strength and resilience. Without it, “hard” is likely to be too much of a stress — and destructive or retraumatizing rather than growthful.
Questions to Ask About Emotional Stability
Are you in tune with your feelings? Experiencing them yet seldom overwhelmed?
Do you come to your aid when distressed? Do you self-parent?
Have you created a life that feels good to your nervous system?
Are your other social supports in place? Friends, family, coach/therapist?
Do you feel meaning in your life?
A baseline of emotional stability means you have something to give your future partner. If we’re in a place of personal abundance, contentment, balance, and ease, we’re cool to hang out with. We won’t unduly add to our partner’s stress — and we tend to attract a partner who won’t be adding to ours.
A person in this emotionally abundant state has the ability to give and receive — and expand their capacities to give and receive.
That’s the goal of a healthy relationship — to increase our capacity for deeper relationship and union.
An emotionally stable person also has the egoic strength to tolerate being wrong. A good relationship requires a lot of being wrong ;-)
Self-Awareness
The other component of self-alignment is knowing yourself.
This is the territory of therapy, coaching, books, podcasts, and self-reflection. This type of work leaves us in a place of humility, with a healthy degree of detachment from ourselves. We’re less mired in our problems and more able to choose our behaviors.
Reflections for Self-Awareness
Are you aware of patterns in previous relationships? Your attachment style?
Are you taking as much responsibility as possible for those patterns?
Do you understand your boundaries, capacities, and needs?
What are your top two triggers? Top two turn-ons?
Have you explored your trauma history with the help of a therapist?
When we understand our strengths, weaknesses, and attachment style, relationships are simpler. Because when another person’s needs and desires are thrown in the mix, it becomes more difficult to distinguish our priorities.
Self-awareness will guide you in making choices that serve your well-being. Like a good parent, you’ll honor your head and your heart rather than betraying one in favor of the other — and hurting yourself as a result.
Signs You Might Not Be Ready
🛑 Lack of clarity about what you want in a partner or relationship
It helps to be a little more specific in terms of our ideal partner’s qualities. If you don’t know what you want, you’re unlikely to find it.
🛑 Significant “loss of self” in a recent relationship
If you gave yourself away in your previous relationship and prioritized your partner’s needs over your own, it may take more time to recollect yourself.
🛑 Same relationship patterns over and over
It’s natural to date avoidants if you’re anxious. But if the same dance happens in every relationship, solitary work is needed to break patterns.
🛑 Struggling with self-worth and believing you deserve love and happiness
Love yourself first. You don’t have to love yourself perfectly, but you need to believe you deserve what you seek if the universe is going to give it to you.
🛑 Unrealistic ideas of perfection caused by father wound
If no one has ever come close to meeting your needs — neither partners nor parents — it can result in unrealistic expectations of what healthy partnership is like. Disappointment is an important thing to accept in relationships. Otherwise, we’re reaching for something impossible and finding only failures.
🛑 Unaddressed Big-T traumas
Therapy can be an absolute prerequisite if you’ve been impacted by assault, childhood abandonment or neglect, accidents, loss of a loved one, or a major mental health condition.
A therapist with training in Eye Movement Desensitization & Reprocessing, somatic experiencing, or Progressive Counting (PC) can help.
🛑 General estrangement from men
If left unresolved, your overarching frustration with all men — though totally reasonable — will limit your capacity to connect with any individual man. Heal your relationship to the masculine before starting something with a flesh-and-blood man.
Get Support
As a coach, this is the part where I pitch my services. Straight up.
These problems are what I help people with and, if working together is a fit, it’d be an honor to you too.
I hold space for women:
To heal their relationships with men
To break out of old patterns and “rewire”
To project what they need to project onto a male coach and talk it out in a safe space
To do it all in an actual relationship — not with a therapist who hides behind a one-way mirror and shares nothing about himself.
My primary modality is the Somatica Method® — a type of experiential coaching that drops you into a “relationship lab” of safe relating. You develop new tools for connecting while creating a fresh imprint of what a relationship with a man can feel like: boundaried, respectful, connective, safe, and sexy.
This method helps break old patterns when therapy can’t. If you’re stuck in a cycle of Groundhog Day relationships or have the same arguments with your partner, I encourage you to reach out.
My name’s Jack Bohannan. You can contact me through my website.
Onward…
Finding a Good Partner
A woman once quipped that her “man picker” was broken.
I empathize — my “woman picker” has required a full rebuild!
It can feel like we’re broken if we’re attracted to partners who create more problems in your life than joy.
After you do some inner work, a healthy partner can feel strange. They’re incongruent with everything that came before — and they’re hard to recognize if you don’t know what to look for.
Dangerous fact: It’s hard to distinguish what’s healthy from what’s familiar.
So, watch out for these green and red flags.
Red Flags
🚩 Controlling Behavior
Nope. You get to do whatever you want that’s not impacting his ability to fulfill his own needs. The agreements you make in the relationship — like fidelity and openness — should serve you both mutually.
🚩 Shuts Down Hard Conversations
This is a critical weakness in a man that will undermine whatever chemistry or love is present. If he can’t handle talking about your unmet needs, can’t express his own desires, or flinches when tough emotions come up… next!
🚩 Discredits What You Think & Feel
“Gaslighting” is straight-up contradicting factual reality, but the more insidious version is subtle: he doubts what you feel to be true for yourself. He doesn’t want a relationship; he wants you as a convenient accessory that fits his life, biases, and limitations.
🚩 Disrespect (of Anyone)
How he treats strangers, co-workers, and friends is how he will eventually treat you. It’s his standard of relationship. If he speaks poorly or harshly of other people (or groups of people), he will eventually speak to you the same way.
🚩 Impulsivity & Reactivity
This applies in a short-term and long-term sense. A strong man makes well-reasoned life decisions. He also doesn’t lose his temper over a missed flight. Moreover, a strong man won’t overreact to your actions or words.
Green Flags
✅ Emotional Availability
Can he talk about emotions? Does he know what he’s feeling in his body and can he communicate his experiences? How does he respond to YOUR emotions? Can he navigate conflict? Hopefully, he’s curious, accepting, and open.
✅ Consistency & Reliability
It’s beautiful when actions match words — and this means more than refraining from lying. If his life matches his intentions… if he shows up on time and takes responsibility when he’s wrong… if he picks up when you call and texts you back… green flag.
✅ Sense of Purpose
A man needs an inner gyroscope. He needs a purpose or a project that serves the world. He needs a wider perspective and a personal directive for the greater good. Otherwise, you’ll be the center of his world — and the relationship will slowly implode.
✅ Asks Deeper Questions About You
His ability to volley a conversation tells you a lot about his emotional intelligence and ability to be present. Is he interested in you in a way that’s… interesting? Does he ask questions that show he’s listening deeply? Green flag.
✅ You Feel Relaxed Around Him — Not Overstimulated
And being around him might remind you of how you feel around a particular friend. In healing, we should question the connections that feel comfortable but, usually, a consistently calm nervous system is a good sign.
✅ His Self-Awareness & Spaciousness
We don’t need to be perfect — just aware of our imperfections and patterns. Does he express awareness of his? Does he have enough detachment and humor that he has space for growth — and space for you in his life?
Therapy, Coaching or… Bumble? 😬
Your future partner doesn’t need to have it all together, and neither do you. It’s beautiful to be messy.
But we do need a baseline of relational health if we want to access the next level of growth and connection.
However, don’t be afraid to jump back into dating! I’m not saying that. If you’re prepared to be hurt… if you’re prepared to hurt someone else — you’re prepared to date.
Love is a full-contact sport; the only prerequisite is being human.
However, therapy and coaching can each be beneficial in turn…
When It’s Time for Therapy
If you need to sort out the past… if you have unresolved traumas… if you feel confused about what you want, depressed, or addicted to substances or behaviors — therapy can be life-changing.
The best therapist is the one you feel a connection with. Like with dating, it makes sense to interview a few therapists before settling into a long-term relationship with any one of them.
When It’s Time for Coaching
If you understand your patterns and are sick of them… if you engage the same behaviors despite knowing better… if you want new ways to connect but don’t know what those ways might be — coaching.
I might be able to help. Most of my relationship-coaching clients are women.
If we work together, you will:
Dissolve old patterns
Release your frustrations with men
Write a new roadmap for the masculine
Empower yourself to have a healthy, loving partnerships within 12 months
Thanks for reading.
I hope you find brilliant love that deepens into calm and contentment.
Best,
Jack
