Intro to My Big Question

How do you know if a relationship is healthy or harmful, and can it be both?

In my life time I have heard/seen many stories about harmful and healthy relationships. What inspired me to do this was the relationship that my best friend has with her biological father. Her Mom and Dad divorced when she was a baby and he split, so she hasn't seen him since. But recently he has tried to contact her and come back in her life. I know this has affected her life significantly and it can truly be  seen as both harmful and healthy because in one way without him she learned how to be independent and strong. On the other hand I imagine it would have been a very hard childhood growing up without a father. The fact that there is a lack of relationship between my best friend and her Dad makes her life tougher and more complicated. Therefore the relationship would lean towards the harmful side in my opinion. I want to explore this question this semester because I want to see how other harmful relationships affect the characters in the story and how the healthy ones can overpower the hurtful.

This summer I read the book, "To the Lighthouse" by Victoria Wolf. It was a story about a family on some islands near Scotland and it was very focused on the interaction of the characters. One of the main dilemmas in this story was the relationship between Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay. Mr. Ramsay was a brilliant philosopher who made life decisions based on his intellect, while Mrs. Ramsay based her choices off of her emotions. Throughout the story Mr. Ramsay would secretly beg for Mrs. Ramsay's sympathy; but she would not give it. When Mr. Ramsay wanted her to prove her love she would do so by a smile and a look in her eyes, not by her voice. This relationship was so complicated that it is in fact hard to tell whether it was harmful or hurtful. Mrs. Ramsay loved her children more then anything in the world and often times Mr. Ramsay was hurtful or cruel to them. James' life long dream, for example, was to go spend a day at the light house. He would ask over and over and Mrs. Ramsay would leave James with a ray of hope, only for it to be struck down by his father because the weather wasn't good enough or the water was too rough. Although they disagreed in parenting, they did love each other very much and could not be successful in their world without one another. The relationship that I mentioned earlier though with James and Mr. Ramsay was different. James disliked his father so much he had thoughts of murder and assault appear in his head whenever his father entered the room. This relationship was harmful and unhealthy because there was so much hatred and even though his father did not mean to, he made James detach from him. The only real connection there is, is when they finally make the journey to the lighthouse together at the end of the novel. There were many more relationships between each family member and overall I would say that this family was much more complex then the average family, at least nowadays. The novel was written in 1926 and things were much different then. Don't get me wrong every modern family has their problems, but in this novel the problems seemed to go much deeper.