10 Signs Your Relationship Is Working

Okay, so let’s say you’ve always been in relationships that were one-sided and sad and twisted. And then you were single for awhile and just worked and hung out with your friends and did you. But then one day you met someone who you really liked and y’all got together and you start to wonder, “Is this for real? Is this relationship like, actually working?”

Here are ten signs that you’re not crazy:

YOU CAN COMMUNICATE HONESTLY

You know how in some relationships you spend a days tip-toeing around each other because you’ve been arguing lately and it’s clear that tensions are high? Okay, well arguing and high tensions will never go away (but they’ll lessen) because humans have bad moods, that’s the law. But! The tip-toeing stops. You can look at your partner and say, “Hey, your attitude sucks right now,” and they can say, “Your attitude sucks right now, too,” and you don’t hate each other for it and it doesn’t lead to a fight where your neighbor texts you to say they’re going to call the cops if you don’t keep it down.

YOU CAN TRAVEL TOGETHER

Not everyone is meant to travel together, especially not Ally and Jamie from MTV’s Rich Girls, but you’ve got to be able to travel with your SO. It’s inevitable that, at the very least, you will wind up on a very long car drive together if not holiday travel or romantic vacations. But shit goes wrong on vacation all the time. Once my boyfriend and I got put in a hotel room that was right above where a family of five was murdered the year prior. We had to leave and check into some Courtyard Mariott because we could feel their ghosts. And yes, we were totally freaked out and annoyed that we had to repack our stuff, but we laughed our asses off about it the whole time and stayed on the same team.

YOU’VE MET EACH OTHER’S FAMILIES

Until you see where your spesh someone is from, you don’t totally know who they are. I wish I could say that’s not true because it sounds unevolved or something, but when you touch the furniture in the house they grew up in and sit at the table in their mom’s kitchen, you’re missing a big piece of that person’s history. If you want to share that very personal, very important (whether you like it or not) part of yourself, you’re like, serious, man.

YOU’RE THEIR GO-TO PLUS ONE

When special occasions come up, you don’t think about being somewhere with anyone else than this person. You may mutually decide that going with a friend is the better route (he doesn’t really care for drag shows anyway) but you always check in with each other first. Not because you have to, but because you want to.

YOU LIKE EACH OTHER’S FRIENDS

This is one that I won’t budge on. I totally am a believer in “not everybody has to get along” but I do think you’re fucked if your boyfriend or girlfriend hates your best friend or if you’d rather die than spend another night with his or her group of friends. If you’re doing it right, not getting along with each other’s friends will be your downfall. Otherwise you’re not socially engaging the way you want which is unhealthy.

YOU’VE PEED IN FRONT OF EACH OTHER

You have to be able to do this. You just have to.

YOU TALK ABOUT THE FUTURE

You’re not afraid to talk about how you’ll spend your holidays together. You say stuff like, “We should go to the next Olympics” and be totally serious. You suggest you save up for a ridiculous hotel room on Valentine’s Day. There’s no “if”, there’s no “is it appropriate to assume”—it’s implied that you two will be together indefinitely.

YOU CAN’T LIE TO THEM

This is a big one because so many relationships are full of lies (ranging from white to ginormous) that shouldn’t have been told in the first place. There’s nothing that you’d have to or want to hide from them because you’re not afraid for them to know anything about you. You can call and say that you’re going out with your friends and that you’re doing molly and you’ll call when you get home. You don’t put yourself in situations that would require you to lie. You know that if something beyond your control happened that your boyfriend or girlfriend wouldn’t like, you can tell them about it without them flipping out because they trust you.

YOU CAN LAUGH THROUGH ANYTHING

I don’t think my dude and I ever laugh harder than when we’re leaving a restaurant with the worst service, stuck on a shuttle with a pack of weirdos, the morning after a huge fight or possibly getting heatstroke at a music festival. To this day I’ll laugh until I cry thinking about the mini-fridge we were lent that had the unmistakable smell of vomit. This goes back to the stuff about traveling together but laughter is key in location.

YOU ACCEPT THEM AT THEIR WORST

It almost scary how seemingly impossible it is to hate someone or have them hate you when you’ve committed yourself. This one blows my mind still because I’m so used to just breaking up with someone once we start fighting and we can’t ignore our issues anymore. It seems super obvious, but sometimes it’s hard to wrap my head around the concept that one of us can have some sort of personal low and the other one’s like, “it’s cool, I’m not going anywhere.”