Even the healthiest of relationships could start to turn bad over time. Use these 18 unhealthy relationship signs to decipher your own love life.
A healthy relationship is every couple’s fairytale storyline.
After all, all of us want our love lives to be filled with bliss and happiness.
But other than a lucky few, most couples lose their way along marital
or relationship bliss and end up taking the unhealthy path towards bad
romance.
It’s quite sad really, because as lovers, your partner and you do try to make the relationship work.
You may try hard to understand each other and communicate with each other.
But unless you truly understand what matters for happy love, your
efforts may be as fruitless and random as trying to find something in
the dark.
What makes a relationship unhealthy?
A romantic relationship always begins healthy.
It starts off with infatuation, passion and sleepless exciting nights.
Love just feels so perfect, and your partner feels like the soulmate
you’ve been yearning for. And if things ever go wrong in love, it’s only
because of one simple issue.
The lack of communication and understanding.
It’s that simple really. All your problems in your love life and all
the heartbreaks you experience in your lifetime are the effects of just
one simple idea, lack of communication between partners.
But as simple as the thought of communicating openly may seem, it’s
also the hardest thing to do, especially when egos clash or when you
assume your lover will judge you for your opinions.
When you can truly understand what you feel inside, when you learn to
communicate how you feel with your lover, and both of you play an
active part in understanding and supporting each other, your love life
will bloom and withstand the test of time effortlessly.
But if you fail to communicate with each other, it’s only a matter of time before the healthy love starts to spoil from within.
Living through an unhealthy romance
If you’re already living in an unhealthy relationship, communicating
with each other is easier said than done. If you have no idea you’re
doing something wrong, or if you can’t give the bad feeling that weighs
you down inside a name, can you ever fix it? It’s like trying to find
the solution to a problem you don’t know or understand.
The difference between a healthy and an unhealthy relationship is
easy to see though. In a happy relationship, your lover is your pillar
of strength and your support, and you feel like a piece of you is
missing when they’re away from you.
But if you’re living through an unhealthy relationship, you’d feel
drained of energy and devoid of happiness whenever you’re around your
lover. In fact, you’d feel happier when you’re away from your lover
*with friends or with a secret crush* and you’d realize that you have
more happy things to talk about with others than with your own partner.
The 18 critical signs of an unhealthy relationship
It’s never easy to recollect when the relationship actually started
going bad. At times, it may be a simple roll of the eye, or a time when
you felt underappreciated or felt that nagging feeling of insecurity.
And at other times, it may be something more glaring and obvious like an
affair or an argument.
The start of an unhealthy relationship isn’t easy to decipher, but it
almost always begins with these 18 signs. If you see any of these
unhealthy relationship signs sprouting in your romance, weed them out
immediately. Doing so will not only save your relationship, but also
bring more love and happiness in your relationship.
Do you see any of these 18 signs in your love life? Communicate about
it with your lover, and the happiness will seep right back into your
lives stronger and it would last longer!
#1 Dishonesty and secrecy. Do you cover up a lie
with half truths even if it’s something as trivial as what you’ve been
up to the whole day? Or do you have a secret crush on someone and avoid
talking about it with your lover? Whatever it may be, talk about it and
you’ll see how much close both of you can get.
#2 Affairs. Affairs can come in different forms, be
it sexual or emotional. But what matters is that it can affect your
relationship with your lover. When you invest your partner’s share of
love towards someone else, it’s obvious that your partner will feel
neglected and hurt. And that may force them to drift away from you, even
if you convince yourself that you’re not having an affair.
#3 Desires and expectations. Do you have secret
expectations from your partner, something you haven’t told them about?
Or do you have aspirations that you wish your partner could help you
achieve? Expectations in love are good, but only when they are
communicated and realistic.
#4 Lack of respect. In a happy relationship, both
partners need to respect each other. They make promises to each other
and keep them, and they avoid speaking ill of each other’s shortcomings
just to feel better about themselves.
#5 Sex is the driving force. Are you and your
partner together only because both of you are smitten by each other
sexually? Is glorious passion between the sheets the only reason why
both of you are together? If sex is the answer to everything, be it
spending an evening together, making up after a fight or even to display
affection, that’s just unhealthy.
A romantic relationship needs two things to be successful,
communication and sexual attraction. By avoiding communication, you’re
only setting yourselves up for misery and misunderstandings in love.
#6 Unhealthy jealousy. Are you jealous of your
partner? Sometimes, there may be a few things about your partner that
you envy, like their high paying job or the number of friends they have.
Envy isn’t always bad, but if it turns to jealousy and you secretly
plot ways to isolate your partner from their friends or ask them to find
a new job, it’s a sign of unhealthy jealousy in love.
#7 Insecurity. Does your partner’s closeness to an
attractive friend threaten you? Insecurities are common at the start of a
new relationship where both partners are still learning about each
other, their exes and their cute friends. But in an unhealthy romance,
insecurity prevails all the time, even when the relationship flies past
the infatuation stage.
#8 Competition. When you feel powerless or small in a
relationship, and feel like you don’t have a big role to play in the
relationship, your love life could turn into a power struggle to prove
you’re the boss. In unhealthy relationships, a partner secretly wishes
and hopes that their lover will fail often so they can feel like the
more powerful one in the relationship.
#9 Testing times. One of the most common signs of
unhealthy relationships is the testing games these couples play. Every
now and then they intentionally ask their partner to do something,
knowing full well that they’d forget all about it or make a mistake,
just to catch their partner at a weak moment and say “I knew you’d
forget!” or “I told you so!”
#10 Lack of emotional intimacy. It’s never wrong to
have many close friends or have secret crushes in life. It happens to
all of us. But for love to succeed, your partner has to be your closest
friend, and you need to feel comfortable discussing anything at all, be
it money issues, sexual fantasies, or even kinky games in bed.
Emotional intimacy takes time to grow, but if one of you stops
building the intimacy because of the fear of awkwardness, there will
always be hidden secrets that’ll prevent both of you from getting
closer.
#11 Missing sex life. Do you believe that true love
is all you need for a successful relationship or a marriage? Then you’d
definitely be wrong. Unless one of you can’t perform or have to withhold
sex for medical reasons, both of you need to pay a lot of attention to
looking good and enjoying sex. A sizzling sexual chemistry plays a much
bigger part in romance than you may assume!
#12 Comparisons. We’re all individuals and we’re not
all perfect. Of course, there may be a few things you want to change
about your partner. But that gives you no excuse to compare them to
others, be it your romantic ex, your rich friend or your playful crush.
Comparisons always cause insecurities and damage a relationship.
#13 You love being in love. But you aren’t in love.
Do you ever feel that? Are you staying in the relationship only because
you like knowing you’re loved or because you’re scared of losing your
lover to someone else?
Sometimes, the only reason you may still be in a relationship is
because you’re afraid of what you may have to experience if you break
up. But you need to know that staying in a relationship in the fear of
losing your lover more than out of love for them will never give you
happiness.
#14 Expectations and demands from families. If
you’re in a long term relationship or a marriage, you would have
experienced several instances of this already. Does your family or your
partner’s family interfere with your life as a couple more often than
necessary, either by making constant requests or trying to involve
themselves with your decision making? This may be bearable today, but
someday, it will take a toll on your relationship and turn it into an
unhealthy one. Interfering families always do.
#15 Controlling streak. A controlling person is just
not cut out for a happy relationship, unless they make the effort to
change. A relationship is about balance and understanding between two
lovers. And it isn’t about being dominated by one partner. If one
partner takes most of the decisions or always does things their way,
it’s a sure sign of a bad and unhealthy relationship.
#16 Give and take. Every now and then, relationships
need compromises and sacrifices from both partners to function
harmoniously. In a healthy relationship, the compromises are balanced
and both partners are happy to accommodate each other’s demands. But in
an unhealthy relationship, it’s always just one partner who bends over
backwards while the other partner just wants things done their way.
Even if the relationship seems perfect today, it may be so only
because the giving partner may be timid or may not have voiced their
unjust treatment yet. But once the imbalance in compromises comes out in
the open, it’ll leave both partners bitter and angry because neither
can understand the other.
#17 Incompatibility. Incompatible relationships are
the worst of unhealthy relationships. The love may have blossomed
perfectly, but with limited communication and understanding of each
other, both partners may have strayed away from each other over time.
It’s not too late to come closer though, all you need to do is start
from the beginning again. And this time, you need to communicate!
#18 Silent treatment. It’s inevitable to have
differences between lovers now and then. But what matters most is how
you deal with it. What do you do when an argument arises? Do both of you
take a strong stand and stick to your own views? Or does one of you
give the other person the silent treatment until they learn a
lesson?
The silent treatment, though effective, is one of the most dangerous
ways of trying to fix a problem. And it’ll only lead to secrets,
insecurities and frustrations. Use the silent treatment if you must, but
only if you know the right way to use them.
So how healthy is your relationship? Do you see any of these
signs of an unhealthy relationship in your own romance? Almost always,
ignoring any of these 18 signs will only do more harm than good to your
love life.
