12 TED Talks that will teach you how to have healthy relationships

Relationships come in all sizes and colors — there are romantic relationships, work relationships, and friendships, just to name a few. 

Regardless of what kind of relationship you want to strengthen, each is fundamentally similar to the next in a number of ways.

In all healthy relationships, we are able to listen well, empathize, connect, resolve conflict, and respect others.

The following TED Talks are a great refresher course in doing all that. 

SEE ALSO: A relationship expert explains how successful couples handle their biggest fights

Mandy Len Catron's 'Falling in love is the easy part'

Can you make people fall in love? Twenty years ago, psychologists believed they may have done just that. In their experiment, psychologists had study participants — one heterosexual man and one heterosexual woman — sit face to face and answer 36 increasingly personal questions and then stare silently into each other's eyes for four minutes. Six months later, two of the study participants were married.

"Hoping there was a way to love smarter," writer Mandy Len Catron explored this question in her popular New York Times article, "To Fall in Love With Anyone, Do This," where she chronicles her own experience simulating the experiment and that she did, in fact, fall in love with her partner.

In her TED Talk, Catron explains that the questions, while they may not be entirely responsible for her falling in love, do provide an efficient way for getting to know someone quickly, generating trust, and creating intimacy.

But, more importantly, she says that falling in love is far from the whole story when it comes to loving someone and explains what comes next.

Andrew Solomon's 'Love, no matter what'

Through interviewing parents of exceptional children for several years, the author of "Far From the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity" says he has come to understand that everyone is different in some fundamental way, and this core human condition of being different is, ironically, what unites us all.

Solomon explains that all people who love each other struggle to accept each other and grapple with the question, "What's the line between unconditional love and unconditional acceptance?"

Using a number of poignant anecdotes, he helps unpack this question.

Yann Dall'Aglio's 'Love — you're doing it wrong'

Dall'Aglio, a French philosopher and author of "A Rolex at 50: Do you have the right to miss your life?" and "I love you: Is love a has been?," says love is the desire of being desired. But in a world that often favors the self over others, how can people find the tenderness and connection they crave?

It may be easier than you think: "For a couple who is no longer sustained, supportedby the constraints of tradition, I believe that self-mockeryis one of the best means for the relationship to endure," he says.

In this surprisingly convincing talk, Dall'Aglio explains how acknowledging our uselessness could be the key to sustaining healthy relationships.