Taking Relationships Education Seriously

There is very little useful guidance on what relationships education is and how to do it. This is despite the fact that the ‘R’ in RSE (relationships and sexuality education) is now so prominent. So here I thought I’d share my thoughts on why we should take relationships education seriously, but more importantly what it is and how we can do it.

(I first published a version of this for Delvvy’s 100 Days of Sex Ed.)

Before we delve in – I want to invite you to reflect on the following question: what was your ‘relationships education’ like? Don’t scroll down, just take a minute or ten and reflect back on what you were taught about relationships at school. This could be the explicit things you were taught, or the implicit things you took away.

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Our own experiences of Relationships Education

When I ask fellow practitioners this question on my training courses I often see shrugs and blank faces. For many people, their experience of relationship education was limited to when and in what circumstances they should have sex. Messaging often included that ‘sex should only happen in committed, loving, married relationships’ or ‘marriage is between men and women’. It also often peddled the fairy-tale narrative that finding the ‘one’ is the key to living happily ever after. 

These messages are continually reinforced by society, communities, government, media, and our own loved ones. They are framed as ‘common sense’ and often result in blame and shame when questioned. This ‘educational’ messaging does not help people navigate their relationships, in fact often it contributes to making them worse.

We’re not taking relationships education seriously enough

Sadly, relationships education has not progressed much. The R in RSE seems to be mostly silent, serving as a linguistic emollient to make “Sex Ed” seem more respectful or accepted. I rarely get to teach about relationships (I’m invited into schools, for a fee) and even when I do, it’s the odd single session here and there. When I do get requests to teach about relationships, it’s attached to other words. As if I can teach ‘healthy relationships, harmful behaviours and porn’ in one lesson.

If you do a literature search for ‘relationships education’ on Google Scholar, you’ll see the dire lack of academic research on the topic. Results are either about ‘relationships and sex education’ or relationships education for couples in therapy, so based on how to make an existing romantic relationship work. Look at this Good Practice Guide to RSE (pdf) from UCL and the School of Sexuality Education and the Sex Education Forum. The one mention of relationships education is in the ‘Consent and healthy relationships section’ and it simply says: “‘Healthy relationships’ encompasses all kinds of relationships”.

Why aren’t we taking relationships education seriously?

I think there are lot of things going on which means that we don’t take relationships education more seriously than we do.

Lack of time for relationships education

The first of these is, simply, time. There’s never enough time to do proper RSE. In the course which I wrote with Alice Hoyle DO… RSE for Schools we have just over 20% of the course time devoted to relationships: which is a lot more than most. If we don’t apportion enough time to relationships education then we will simply not generate enough interest in it. If we can’t see what relationships can do, then we don’t do it. It also won’t be fed into the evaluation feedback loop encouraging us to do more. ‘Relationships education’ has never been allowed to develop. It’s not ‘a thing.’

Relationships aren’t a ‘hot topic’

The second reason we don’t do more is that there is always a focus on the ‘hot topics’. So, just in the space of my career this has been: HIV / AIDS, teenage pregnancy, boys and young men, chlamydia, porn, consent, toxic masculinity (‘bym rebranded’). RSE has the tendency to follow the hot topic, or the spectacle, because this is how the attention economy works. We also tend to follow what is current because we can raise funding off the back of it. Relationships just hasn’t had it’s turn yet.

Relationships education doesn’t count as ‘harm minimisation’ (for some reason)

Related to this, the third reason that we don’t take relationships education seriously, related to the above points, is that it’s not seen as a ‘harm minimisation’ topic*. Why not? Do you know someone in your life, past or present, who has been in a relationship which was harmful: miserable, reduced their capacity to act, abusive, violent? Perhaps this has been you? Relationships can cause very real and very serious harm to the mind and body (which are the same thing). We should be offering people tools to help keep each other safe, as well as to find loving, thriving and nurturing relationships. Relationships education should also have a commitment to address the oppressive structures that are part of the production of unhappy / sad / destructive relationships.

*Though I have never been interested in RSE as harm minimisation myself. I think RSE should be about increasing our capacity to act.

It’s never gone beyond a ‘key message’

As I’ve said above, ‘relationships’ is just a modifier to make ‘sex’ sound more socially safe. To put sex within Gayle Rubin’s ‘charmed circle’ of sexualities that are ‘okay’ (from Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory for the Politics of Sexuality). Where we do see relationships it’s in the entirely discursive form of the term ‘healthy relationships’. It’s a phrase as a ‘discourse’ forming part of a broader ‘common sense’ of relationships.

We pick it up, we might say ‘is this a healthy relationship’ or ‘what are the signs of a healthy relationship’ but we don’t take it much further. It tells ‘others’ with less social capital than ‘us’ that their relationships ‘should’ be healthy (and that of course our relationships always are, nothing to see here). It becomes the ‘key message’. Did you deliver the ‘healthy relationships key message’, was the ‘healthy relationships key message’ received? Tick the box. We saw the same thing happen with consent (as I rant about in my article about the godawful Tea and Consent video).

The job of RSE is not to take one discourse and replace it with another ‘better’ discourse. My job, our job, should be to help us all find our relationship resources, not discourses. This is why instead of spending our time defining it, we should instead make two questions our main focus: what (else) can a relationships education do and how (else) do we do relationships education? I’ll explain the ‘else’ later.

What (else) could relationships education do?

Good RSE is participatory, experiential and conversational. It invites us to understand, critique, explore, and feel. So as I’ve said before it’s not about talks and lectures, but about workshops. For me I use the social pedagogic, or youth work approach I was trained in. This is informal, counter-hegemonic, helping people to build on their own resources.

Good relationships education can help us to understand and critique the ‘should stories’, the ‘common sense’ of relationships. The romantic relationship imperative. Hierarchies. The One and the ‘Happy Ever After’. That story about how your romantic relationship should be like your best friend, your confidant, your cheerleader, your caregiver, your lover all rolled into one. There is nothing necessarily wrong with any of these, just the imperative that this is how we should be organising our intimate lives. The should story.

Relationships education should beyond romantic relationships and includes all of the relationships we encounter throughout our lifetime – be it with ourselves, or with friends, family, colleagues, neighbours, etc. It should also look at relationships as they exist in culture, communities, society and how they are produced and reproduced politically. It should also give us an opportunity to explore more intentional ways of doing relationships, what good might look like for us, how we can do them, and how this will feel: how will we know? 

What can relationships education cover?

I’ve got some ideas for how you might get started doing this kind of critical relationships education below. Moving from a passive, or docile, way of relating to one which is much more active, consensual, and intentional. You can also just have a look at the wealth of advice, guidance, and educational articles I’ve written at BISH about relationships. It’s a huge topic: from how to get a girlfriend / boyfriend / themfriend, dealing with break ups, how to make sex and relationships chats easier, and how to use venn diagrams to work out how much to share with someone. There are nearly 50 articles about many different aspects of relationships. That’s about 50,000 words of guidance and advice. So you could easily spend a lesson a week on relationships education if we were taking it really seriously.

Intentional Relationships

When facilitating workshops with adults and young people about relationships I often use the following exercises. So hopefully they will help you to get started. (For many more of these you may want to buy my Relationships Teaching Pack called Love Innit, or buy it from the BISH Patreon Shop). These activities help people to critique the common sense ideas of relationships and invite them to reflect on how we might make them more intentional. It also gives people an opportunity to assess their own resources. So I will invite you to reflect on the following questions for yourself or with your loved ones. Pens and paper at the ready please!

1. Why might people have romantic relationships?

Think of all the reasons why people might have romantic relationships. For this exercise we are thinking about consensual relationships. Think of as many as you can and write them down. Don’t judge your answers, there are no right or wrong answers, and it’s not what you want from a romantic relationship, but people generally. Give yourself 10 minutes and see how many you come up with. 

This image below is from the BISH Activity Book

Now, looking at your list, what strikes you? If you replaced the title with ‘what do people need in life’, would your list be any different? Which of these can only be met by being in a romantic relationship?

2. Different kinds of love and relationships

Looking at this list, what are the different kinds of love and relationships that might meet these needs? List as many as you can think of. Side note, the Ancient Greeks had at least 7 different words for different kinds of love. 

This image below is also from the BISH Activity Book

Before we jump on to the next bit, you may wish to reflect on these. Which are given the most status in our / your culture? What if they were all treated more equitably? 

3. Relationship qualities

Looking at your list of different kinds of relationships (eg, romantic, friendships etc), are there any qualities, or values, which are necessary for all of them? What is necessary for any kind of relationship to work? Can you come up with 6 – 12 qualities which would be necessary for all relationships?

4. Relationship graph

Now that you have your qualities I’d like you to put them on a graph. Like this one. Put each word on a spoke of your wheel.

Once you’ve done that I’d like you to think of a famous fictional relationship. It could be any kind of relationship at all in any fiction you can think of (and yet most groups will pick Rachel and Ross, le sigh). Then once you have a fictional relationship, plot it on your graph. What goes well and what could need some work? How do all the qualities relate to each other? (It’s really much more fun to do this with loved ones). 

Relationships as ‘a becoming …’ 

By thinking about different kinds of relationships, the qualities in those relationships, and how we might use a technology like a graph to understand them, it invites us to think about ourselves.

By flattening the hierarchies in our relationships, and understanding that they all need the same (if not pretty similar) qualities to be good for us, then we can take the learning from one and apply it to another. From the moment we are born we are developing relationships skills and intelligence and, crucially, we can feel it in our bodies. How do we know we enjoy being with someone? What are the signs that we are in a trusting relationship? How do we know when we are feeling truly supported?

Abundant ways of doing relationships

It also implicates all of our loved ones in our relationships, we all need ‘more than one’ even if we are monogamous. Have you ever had the ‘if you treated me, like they are treating you, that wouldn’t be good’ conversation with a friend? Or reflected on how some relationships allow us to be both free and gently held, and others less so? 

So, by applying a more intentional and critical way of relating, our relationships might evade the capture of the common sense stories of ‘the one’ and the ‘happily ever after’ and instead we might find a way for our relationships to ‘become’ in ways that feel right for us and our loved ones. This is where our relationships unfold over time with us, as we also unfold and ‘become’. Think of the difference would it make for us being in a relationship that was great for us? What would that do, what else?

I’ve found this approach has really helped my relationships, so I hope that you find this useful too!

More Resources

I’ve got lots of other resources for relationship education. At my website ‘BISH – a guide to sex, love and you for everyone over 14’, I’ve got a whole section on relationships. The website is free and ad free, and paid for by wonderful people like us who just want to see this kind of resource in the world, so please do check out the support BISH page while you’re there. 

If you’re an educator you might want to check out my RSE workshop resources at bishtraining.com/shop, where you can find my relationships education teaching pack called ‘Love, Innit’. There’s also a free curriculum at my website called DO… RSE for Schools which features a lesson plan on relationships (but the whole thing is great). I would also recommend the book Great RSE, which has some really great ideas for teaching about relationships. As I mentioned in the article I also run training courses, all of which can be done online or in person.