When it comes to relationships, their influence runs deep, shaping not only how women feel supported socially, but how they experience their bodies, navigate illness and make decisions about their health.
For Maha Khawaja, a PhD student in the Department of Health and Society, understanding women's health means looking beyond the individual and into the relationships and communities that shape well-being.
"A lot of what I study has direct implications for how care is delivered and how couples are supported. I feel a responsibility to ensure the knowledge reaches the people it can help," she explains.
Her work brings together health communication, relationship science and sexuality research fields that rarely intersect in clinical settings. She also examines how women turn to online communities to make sense of their health experiences.
Together, these lenses reveal the crucial role that close relationships play in supporting women's mental and physical health.
Why is it important to consider relationships as a health factor, not just a social one?
We do not live in a closed system. Our health is majorly shaped by the relationships, environments, and overarching systems around us. Friendships, family relationships and romantic partnerships all influence how health is embodied and manifests.
When we treat health as something isolated to the individual, we miss the surrounding network and intersecting spheres that shapes that production and formation of health.
In my research, I draw from intersecting fields like health and medical science, social psychology and women's studies to build a more holistic understanding of the many ways women's health is shaped. Relationships are a major part of that. From seeking comfort from a partner, to making major health decisions, to the long arc of caregiving, it is often those closest to us who shape both what health feels like and how it is lived.
As we strive to improve women's health in particular, it is vital for us to understand that relationships are integral not tangential to health, especially if we want to think more meaningfully about health equity.
How do healthy relationships buffer stress or health challenges for women?
Healthy relationships can buffer stress by redistributing the emotional and practical weight of illness and difficulty.
For example, menopausal women may feel isolated while experiencing symptoms like hot flashes or vaginal dryness, but close friendships can become spaces where women share coping strategies, reduce one another's emotional stress and make those experiences feel more manageable.
Even online, the weak-tie relationships developed with others in spaces like online forums or Facebook groups have a profound capacity to improve mental and physical wellbeing.
The same is true in intimate relationships. If a woman undergoing cancer treatment and has long relied on her partner for support, that relational foundation can help them navigate new symptoms, uncertainties and burdens together. This is consistent with what the literature shows:
The quality of close relationships is one of the more robust predictors of well-being outcomes for women managing health challenges.
Are there misconceptions about women's health or sexual wellbeing that you wish more people understood?
One of the most pervasive misconceptions is that women's health is relatively straightforward to address, which leads to overly simplistic conversations. Interventions can sound straightforward in clinical language but can feel anything but straightforward in lived experience.
Dilator use is a good example: A way to help the pelvic floor after cancer treatment, to lessen discomfort during sex. On paper, it may appear as a clear rehabilitative recommendation. In practice, it can be emotionally charged, exhausting, painful and bound up with worry and dread.
The issue is not just whether a treatment exists, but how women come to perceive it, what it asks of them psychologically and what relational conditions shape whether it happens at all.
Women's sexual health is also largely treated as secondary, something to come back to once "more urgent" things are dealt with. In practice, this means it often is not addressed at all. Public discussion about women's health tends to collapse into either sexual or maternal health (both of which are also poorly addressed), while much else gets ignored.
Women are more likely than men to be diagnosed with Alzheimer's, osteoporosis, and autoimmune conditions, and yet these do not figure prominently into how we talk about women's health.
Another misconception is that the systems of care surrounding women's health are more integrated than they actually are. For example, a woman navigating something like gynaecologic cancer treatment might appear to be moving through a coherent network of support, when in reality the relevant practitioners are quite fragmented, poorly coordinated and often lack a shared understanding of the full picture of what's being managed.
What barriers still exist in women's health research and how is your work trying to close some of those gaps?
One of the more significant gaps in this area is that relationships tend not to be treated as a unit of care. Research has largely focused on individuals, leaving the dynamics of how couples experience and work through illness communication breakdowns, relational strain, shared beliefs each person holds about the relationship, and what it can withstand remains largely underexplored.
But the clinical side has the same problem. If we know that the quality of a close relationship shapes how someone does during and after treatment, it follows that there should be some attention paid to supporting that relationship and not just the individual patient.
When couples struggle, that work of repair tends to happen privately and without guidance because the health-care system isn't really structured to hold them as a unit.
There are also dimensions of this that research has touched less, like how cultural and religious context shapes relational coping and well-being.
If you could change one thing about how we talk about women's health in Canada, what would it be?
Women's health cannot be understood in a vacuum. We are massively impacted by the world around us, and research and clinical practice has been slow to reflect that. Though notably, we all inhabit the world differently.
So while we fail to include an understanding of how close relationships massively influence women's health and well-being, we then also fail to consider how factors like culture, religion, innate beliefs, education and worldviews impact this as well.
Our fragmented health system tends to provide homogenized baseline support, and much of the nuance is offloaded onto individuals and couples who are left to navigate it largely on their own.
When we talk about women's health, we should do so with the full complexity it deserves because the health of women cannot be separated from the conditions in which they live.
