Healthy relationships are interpersonal connections that are mutually beneficial, supportive, and respectful, with an emphasis on open communication and trust. Social isolation and loneliness can negatively impact the development and quality of healthy relationships and are associated with poor physical and mental health outcomes. Social isolation and loneliness are influenced by various risk factors, such as disability, bereavement, family structure, urbanisation, and technology use, and affect different groups of people differently.

Interventions to enhance healthy relationships can include improving social skills, enhancing social support, increasing opportunities for social contact, addressing maladaptive social cognition, and facilitating community engagement and volunteering. The relationship between clinician and patient is also a key factor for health outcomes, and can be improved by continuity of care, empathy, and trust. Clinicians can apply a Lifestyle Medicine approach to identify and address the impact of relationships on health, and support people to develop and maintain healthy relationships.

This chapter provides an overview of some of the unique characteristics, strengths, and challenges for creating and sustaining healthy marital relationships between heterosexual men and women of African ancestry. The approach to this work is grounded within the emerging field of African-centered psychology that privileges the lived experiences of African Americans and summarizes a marriage empowerment program, Conversations in Marriage© (CIM), which uses African proverbs to promote situational learning. A definition of culture is developed to conceptualize healthy marriages, and challenges affecting Black marriage are discussed. Key foundations, practices, and processes of a cycle of healthy marriages are presented and implications for building stronger marriages are discussed. Each of these elements are discussed from a perspective that centers sustainable marriage within a framework of community growth, empowerment, and sustainability.