Sometimes it’s hard to spot a toxic person or a trait as you see toxicity is often romanticised. Be it a family member or a romantic partner: when a relationship takes a toxic turn it affects your emotional and mental well-being.
We have compiled tips for you to identify a toxic relationship because, hey, you deserve to be in a healthy relationship.
1. “When you find yourself doing things not because you want to make them happy, but to avoid them becoming angry.”
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2. “Being unhappy constantly. Asking or being asked to change but it doesn’t happen. Constant fighting and arguing. And honestly your friends will start to notice and tell you it’s toxic but you’re too “in love” to see it until you break up.”
3. “Putting you or your interests or your life choices down, becoming obsessed, controlling you in any way, gaslighting, joking, when it hurts your feelings, being hypocritical, taking their anger out on you, ghosting you, straight up verbally abusing you, etc. God, I wish I didn’t know all of this firsthand.”
4. “An inability to take responsibility for their own actions, especially if you find yourself apologizing to them for being bothered by something they did.”
5. “Love-bombing is a classic emotional abuse tactic and the abuser often goes hard into it early in the relationship, to get you hooked. Let’s say you’ve been seeing someone for 3 weeks and they surprise you with tickets to an exotic vacation. Or an expensive gift. They’ll also usually profess their affection for you often and kind of exaggerate. Lots of “no one else has ever made me feel like this” kinda stuff.”
6. “Moving too quickly. Pressuring you into a relationship, living together, children, etc. Too fast and not taking no for an answer.”
7. “Your partner doesn’t respect your privacy. They check the car mileage, they sneak into your work to check your time cards, they show up randomly everywhere you go to check on you. In modern times checking your social and phone.”
8. “I find the first sign when my friends are in a toxic relationship is that they start making excuses and validating a person’s bad behaviour way too much.”
9. “When they tell you that you don’t understand your own thoughts/emotions and that you must be confused. Also if they tell you that specific people are talking about you behind your back and don’t like you, or that those people are bad/liars. That’s a big one for a toxic person trying to isolate and manipulate.”
10. “When they do things that hinder you, slow you down by words or actions or outright stop you from doing what you want instead of encouraging you. That is toxic behaviour. A relationship should make individuals exceed themselves, not the opposite.”
Read: 12 Redditors Share Most Important Relationship Lesson They Have Learned.