By educating young people about the difference between healthy and unhealthy relationships, Katie Hood hopes to derail abusive behavior before it starts and impact the relationship health of an entire generation.
Katie Hood, CEO of the One Love Foundation and relationship revolutionary
- Big idea: There’s a crucial difference between healthy and unhealthy love, and there are sure-fire ways to recognize the difference.
- How? There are five signs of unhealthy love: intensity, isolation, extreme jealousy, disrespect and volatility. Isolation could mean that your partner takes away your independence, pulling you away from your family and friends. Volatility within an unhealthy relationship can look like constant ups and downs, as well as unpredictable and shocking behavior. Katie Hood believes that there’s a way to combat these unhealthy behaviors — and it’s not as hard as we may think. To build and maintain healthy love, a few core elements must be present: open communication, mutual respect and trust. No one is perfect — we all have bad moments where we don’t treat those we love the way we should. But by practicing these core elements as much as possible, we can put ourselves on the path to better and healthier love.
- Quote of the talk: “For too long, we’ve treated relationships as a soft topic, when relationship skills are actually one of the hardest and most important skills to master in life. Not only can knowledge about unhealthy signs help you avoid falling down the rabbit hole of unhealthy love, understanding and practicing the art of being healthy can improve nearly every aspect of your life.”
Why you should listen
As CEO of the One Love Foundation, Katie believes that healthy relationship education is a “simple but shockingly nontraditional solution that can impact millions and drive meaningful change. The problem is hard, but the impact of a scalable prevention approach that talks to young people in a language they can hear at the earliest stages of their dating lives could be massive.”
