8 Signs Of Toxic Love

Loving relationships fulfill you and make you feel complete. Unhealthy love, on the other hand, diminishes you and gnaws away at your well-being. Conflict and misunderstandings can’t always be avoided in any relationship.

The spats, break-ups and make-ups that follow keep things exciting. Incompatibility and constant bickering can make a relationship slide from healthy to unhealthy and you may not even notice. There are some signs of an unhealthy relationship. Recognizing these enable you to look at the situation with clarity.

Below are the signs of a toxic, unhealthy relationship. Money, spending styles, jealousy, infidelity can all cause resentment. It can start with a small issue and left undiscussed, can pile up to become a major problem you have to deal with.

Bad blood and feelings

When the relationship you are in makes you feel bad about yourself, it could be a sign that the love you share is not nurturing but toxic. These bad feelings can stem from how you are treated by your partner. It’s the kind of feeling that stays with you and you can’t shake off.

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Feeling bad after an argument is a passing thing. Lingering feelings where you feel bad and diminished feels unhealthy. When you live with this on a regular basis it can impact you psychologically and lower your self-esteem.

Resentment
Resentment can create an unseen and unspoken rift in a relationship. There you are having a great time together and the unresolved resentment you feel lurks somewhere within. It can change how you perceive your partner and how the times you are together actually feel.

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These feelings of resentment don’t go away on their own. You can’t hope or wish them away, issues causing them need to be discussed for you to get rid of and heal from these feelings.

Abusive behavior

Verbal abuse can mean you get called names and accusations fly at you in the middle of a fight. These can hurt your feelings and baffle or stun you. A more snarky form is the casual, may be everyday comments that belittle you, your core values or your achievement.

It could be disguised as a joke or an adjective directed at your appearance that makes you feel less than good about yourself. Physical abuse is the kind of battery that harms you physically.

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If you start to fear your partner due to physical abuse, it may paralyze you emotionally where you no longer know how to deal with the situation or can’t leave although you want out of the relationship. Physical abuse seriously compromises your security. Leaving may be the only way to make it stop from happening to you again.

Trust Issues

Trust is essential in a relationship. Jealousy can cause trust issues. Your previous experiences with relationships can also cause issues, where you partner is trustworthy but something you experienced in the past makes you feel like something may be going on whereas actually it isn’t. If you feel you can’t trust your partner, it can make you feel uneasy.

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If you feel you need to track your partner or regularly cross check what your partner says to you, it could be a sign the relationship is unhealthy. If your partner keeps tabs on you, reads through your mails and texts or actually keeps tracks of who you are meeting and speaking to the insecurity and suspicion this highlights makes the love toxic.

Manipulative Behavior
Manipulation amounts to emotional abuse. You can occasionally or regularly be manipulated or talked into something whereas, given a choice, you wouldn’t think of it. Intimidation is more of manipulative behavior where you allow yourself to get manipulated out of fear or to avoid a fight.

Too much of competitiveness in a relationship can also create conflict. The competiveness can stem from earnings, opportunities, even which partner is more popular or has more friends.

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What makes this kind of excessive competiveness unhealthy is one partner may use it to comment on and reign in the options and potential of the other through manipulative behavior. It can also be used by the more successful partner to belittle the achievements and efforts of the other.

Communication Gap
Having fun together and honest, heart to heart conversations deepen a relationship. Whenever misunderstandings crop up, talking it over can clear things up and sort out problems. If you are communicative and you partner is not, talking about something that is bothering you can make it feel like stonewalling.

The mostly one sided conversations that become the norm solve nothing. If your partner hangs up the phone or walks out of the rooms or even remains closed and not open to frank discussions, it can point to an unhealthy relationship.

Lies And deception

Lies create trust issues. When you catch a lie, the next time around you will always wonder if what’s being said is true. Dishonesty and deceit in a relationship also create trust issues. The deceit could be intentionally hiding something from you to keep you in the dark about what is really going on.

Occasional white lies are different from lying about important things. Too many lies and too much of lying can mean an unhealthy relationship.

Control Issues
A relationship can feel like power play when the balance of the relationships gives too much power to one partner in the relationship. Control issues limit your freedom. When you have a partner who tries to control you, you are no longer free to make your own choices. 

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If you give in, toe the lines and stay within the boundaries placed on your freedom and choices, it can make you feel caged in. You could also become afraid to step over the boundaries, fearing fights or that the relationship may end if you don’t stick to and give in to what’s being demanded.

If you feel that certain terms are being dictated to you, about what you can wear, where you can go, work or even hang out with, the unhappiness these control issues cause you make the love toxic.