Get ready for a healthy bout of 'men are trash' mixed with a delicate flavoring of 'you deserve way better', ladies and gentlemen. Because both are enduringly true. Always.
No matter how irrational you feel, or how manipulated you have been by the withdrawn affections of another person, you are valid. You are never burdening someone that you love.
Because if they love you, there's very little they wouldn't do for you. You could run to the end of the earth for them, don't be surprised when they'd do the same for you.
It's just that things get dicey when this isn't reciprocated.
When the relationship dynamic is asymmetrical, or the power is weighted to one side over the other. If you're asking permission to do things, but not spilling your soul to them. Stop and take stock.
If they resist your attempts at intimacy, or won't pick up your tampons from the off-license, think about that. Think about the double standards they're expecting. The fact that they want intimacy on a one-way street.
Relationships are a two-person jig. Like, that's the entire point. It takes two to tango but it also takes two to break up a relationship or make it. You can't bear it all alone if the other person isn't as invested.
If they reject your questions or refuse to compromise when you ask them for things, that's not a good sign. Soon, you will stop asking them for things or gestures at all. Then the relationship is truly empty, exhausted of its emotional value.
You can't settle, but it's so hard to recognize that you are settling.
Comfort and complacency aren't so far removed from each other, after all. Sometimes you need a watchful friend to have tracked your patterns on the outside, in a way impossible to judge when it's all happening to you.
As with all relationships, there's a case of being in the right place at the right time. Timing, as we know of all good romcoms, is everything.
If they stop showing interest or even pretending to be interested in what you're talking about, it's a sign. They're not interested in your or your affairs. Heck, if they don't ask you how you are every couple of days, what is the point?
It's utterly bankrupt of meaning if there's not a single emotion being used regularly in a relationship. If you can't trust the other person to be there for you then they're just dead weight in your life and communication is dead.
This means that you might be forced to overcompensate for their poor partnership. Either apologizing for them or becoming someone different from yourself.
Feeling different. Not yourself.
That's the worst sign in a relationship, because if the relationship isn't being heralded by them, or even a version of you that you recognize, then what is it serving you. Nothing, that's what.
Falling out of love is one thing, but if you are so far gone that you are convincing your partner that they are the unreasonable ones, that's wrong. Don't be that person. If it's over, end it.
Otherwise, we get driven mad by thinking that we're irrational for asking someone to pick us up from the airport. The reality is that if someone truly loves us, no request is too great.
You would be each other's priority, rather than fighting all the time about nothing in particular. Know the difference between making mistakes because you're human and refusing to participate in the give and take of a relationship.
People make mistakes, yes. But if you aren't willing to cater to your partners' needs, you shouldn't be in a relationship. End of.
If the intimacy is gone, so is the love – and the relationship.
