Mental Health Awareness Week, which ends today, has seen the publication of a new Mental Health Foundation report on the importance of healthy relationships.

Decades of research across the globe has now proved that it is not wealth, fame or power that makes us happy, but relationships. And while good relationships helps us to live longer, bad relationships are much more likely to shorten our lifespan. Like my granny used to say: that one will send me to an early grave.

From the moment we are born, relationships are the foundation of our survival and wellbeing. When a parent or carer (perhaps through no fault of their own) is unable to make a good enough attachment with their child, it bequeaths a legacy that can have far-reaching and lifelong consequences such as low self-esteem, inability to cope with stress, depression and vulnerability to engaging in abusive and dysfunctional relationships.

Many of us are more likely to think longer and harder about what colour of new kitchen units we want than we are about the quality of relationships in our lives. Too often, we take relationships for granted and treat them as part of the backdrop to our daily grind. Just like the kitchen units: built-in, static and flushed to the wall. After a while, we don’t even notice them.

Instead, many of us maintain our most important relationships on auto-pilot: same questions, same responses, same basic assumptions about who the other is, what their dreams are, their fears, their longings. There’s nothing wrong with habits in relationships: those daily rituals can enrich and deepen the bonds between us and make us feel safer, more contained and cared for. But if that's all there is, the quality of the relationship deteriorates, often descending into conflict or even an absent-minded kind of contempt. When we stop being curious about those we are in relationship with – whether it’s about the meaning of the monsters in the dream your child tells you about as he’s munching his cornflakes over breakfast, or about the significance of your best pal "forgetting" to invite you round to her little drinks party – we stop being able to understand the meaning and value of our relationships and the purpose they have in our lives.

If we don’t understand the impact and effect relationships have on us, we are ill-equipped to choose who we should allow into our lives and who needs to be given their marching orders. Toxic relationships often poison self-esteem, our trust in others, our ability to make decisions and to cope with stress and change. In the last year alone, 5.7 per cent of UK adults (1.2 million women and 700,000 men) were victims of domestic abuse. Domestic violence is associated with high levels of mental health problems, with an annual cost to the health service of £176 million.

But there are more subtle forms of toxicity in relationships. There’s the narcissistic relationship where it’s all about "me" (never "you"); there’s the co-dependant relationship where there is mutual reinforcement in all that is "bad" or dysfunctional in each other.

The 25-years anniversary of the first screening of Thelma And Louise has sparked debate about the nature of female friendship. And while it’s unclear whether the relationship between meek housewife Thelma (Geena Davis) and feisty waitress Louise (Susan Sarandon), was toxic, it was certainly lethally co-dependent to the extent that they drove over a cliff together.

Then there’s the friend who just somehow makes you feel bad about being you, and whose only commitment is to pulling the emotional rug from under your feet and replacing it with a fitted carpet of deep-pile self-doubt.

As we grow older, more tied up with work and families, we have fewer opportunities to make new friends and our social networks decrease. Adults, in general, report spending as little as 10 per cent of their time with friends, meaning that in mid-life, people feel more isolated. Divorce rates peak at age 45, often resulting in the loss of established social patterns and networks and increased loneliness. For those aged 65 and over, loneliness and social isolation becomes and even bigger problem because of retirement, bereavement or because adult children have moved away for cheaper housing or employment (worsened by recession and austerity).

It’s not easy being human and it’s not always easy relating to other humans. What is clear, though, is that if we are mindful of the importance of good relationships for our own wellbeing and the wellbeing of others, life is generally better and more meaningful. It is worth keeping this in mind and making the effort to nurture important relationships and to remain open to making new ones, regardless of age or status. Everybody needs a pal.