How to understand you are in an unhealthy relationship?

Being in relationship is easy but maintaining a healthy relationship is a cumbersome process. A relationship is something which should be enjoyable and have fulfilling experience. A healthy relationship is where your partner supports you and accepts you for who you are. When you are with the right person, you feel safe and comfortable; they will always be honest with you. The main qualities of a healthy relationship are equality, trust and mutual respect where both the partners honour each other choices and boundaries.

When you are in an unhealthy relationship, your partner starts to dominate you. They start acting jealous, possessive and they never respect your boundaries.

Check how often you are criticized

No one is perfect. Everyone has one or the other weak points which they need to improve upon. Sometimes you may have some habits that irritate your partner. However there is a huge difference between showing your frustration and critically outright.

Consider who you turn to for emotional support

When you are in a healthy relationship, you should be able to support each other mentally and emotionally. When it is an unhealthy one, people start to behave cold and stop caring for your feelings and needs. If you are having a bad day, you might feel hesitant to go and talk to them because you very well know that they are not going to help you to get out of that situation. When you face any problem in life and the first person you go to is a friend or a family member and not your partner, you are in an unhealthy relationship.

Evaluate your trust level

When you start having trust issues with your partner, then it can be a sign that the relationship is turning into an unhealthy one. Trust issues can be due to many things; it can be financial matters, relationship with others etc. Sometimes it can be the matter of loyalty. You will start feeling suspicious that they are faithful to you or not. It may depend on things that happened in the past.

Feeling controlled

In a healthy relationship, your partner will always wish you to have your own life and independent interest. Whereas in toxic relationship your partner will try to take control over your dreams and interests. They can control you in many ways. They will tell you how you should dress and how you should not. They will start involving in your hobbies and friends circle. A controlling partner will always want you all to themselves.

Analyse the support you receive

If your partner is not happy for your success and they are feeling bad when something good happens to you, then it is the beginning of a negative relationship. In toxic relationship, you partner will be disheartened by your success. They will look into your goals and dreams as an aspect to seek attention. They start to demotivate you when you going to achieve your goal, they will tell negative things which dishearten you and lead you to failure.

Manipulative behaviours

In every unhealthy relationship, there is some manipulation happening. This can happen when your partner does things to try to get you do what they want. Some of the commonly shown manipulative behaviours include:

• Never listening to your talks and maintaining silent treatment.
• Try to over burden you using facts and statistics.
• Shouting or screaming at you.
• Pressurizing you to take decisions which are favourable to them.
• Belittling you
• Judging and criticizing
• Blaming you for their failures.