Think aloud
We all think of cheating as a disease of the dating world. It’s that one thing that most of us would never forgive.
The moment you find out your partner is cheating on you, you head straight out that door, looking for happiness somewhere else.
But at the same time, other things harm our relationships the same way cheating does – we just don’t pay much attention to them.
If you or your partner do any of the following things, you would look for an excuse and give each other a second chance. This happens because we don’t see how harmful these things truly are to a relationship.
So, open your eyes and look for the following behaviors. If you find yourself or your partner in any of them, you better have a serious chat because, believe it or not, it threatens your relationship the same way cheating does.
1. Lying
No kind of lies should be allowed in a relationship, not even the white ones. Once you realize that your partner is lying to you, the excuse that he’s been doing it only to protect your feelings loses all sense.
Lying to your partner and hiding things from each other turns small arguments into heated fights. It breaks trust and makes you question every word that comes out of your partner’s mouth.
“Is he lying to me again?” – this feeling is something you can’t get rid of, no matter how hard you try.
Once your partner lies to you, he gets a mark on his face that reads “LIAR” and there’s hardly anything he can do to make it go away. The thing he did to you will chase him till the end of your lives – or relationship.
Lies never have a place in a healthy relationship. Even if you think that you may hurt your partner by sharing the truth, it’s always better to be honest than to lie and harm your relationship forever.
2. Manipulation
Manipulation usually starts slowly and as time goes on, it intensifies. In the beginning, you don’t even realize what’s going on, but when you do finally put the puzzle together, you figure out that you’ve been a victim of manipulation the entire time.
After that, your relationship quickly starts falling apart, piece by piece, as there’s no way to look at your partner the same way once you know what he’s done to you.
Sometimes, when you want to have things your way, you may choose subtle manipulation as a way of getting it. But at that very moment, you’re actually assigning the death-penalty to your relationship.
Because once you start manipulating your partner, there’s no going back.
Manipulation usually ends with one side feeling like a complete loser with ruined self-esteem, and the other who gets things their way and feels in control. And that’s not how a balanced healthy relationship should look.
3. Quiet resentment
We all do things that our partners don’t find appealing – something they’d like to change about us because it’s hurting the relationship. Actually, it’s hurting our partners’ feelings.
So, if your boyfriend notices something about you that he doesn’t like, but decides to keep quiet about it, thinking that it would go away, then you’re off to a bad start.
When that happens, he’ll start to quietly resent you. He’ll look at you and focus only on the thing that’s bothering him while ignoring everything else about you.
This can reach the point where your bad qualities become the only noticeable parts of you.
So, even if he now decides to share his feelings with you, the problem is that he’s already hit the point of no return.
All that time he’s been keeping his concerns to himself, resentment accumulated and had nowhere to go.
Now, it’s too late to try and mend things because his mind is so used to seeing you in a certain light that there’s nothing you can do about it.
That’s why it’s so important to be honest with your partner and together look for solutions. Otherwise, your relationship won’t be as bright as you expected it to.
4. The need to always be right
We all want to be right, but when your partner gets a thrill out of being in control and having things done his way, you know that you’ve hit a dead end.
Relationships are about compromise, and when you constantly feel that your feelings are ignored and your partner is the one holding the reins, you start to pull into yourself.
At one point, you’ll realize that you’re unhappy and that there’s nothing your partner does or will ever do to make the situation better.
He’s been ignoring your words up to now, so why would anything change?
5. Lack of communication
Communication is one of the pillars of a healthy relationship. It’s the only thing that can make you solve the obstacles that life throws at you.
When you stop communicating, you’re slowly ruining and devaluing your relationship.
Eventually, it’ll hit you that there’s no point in trying to make things work when your relationship is already drained of everything valuable there once was.
6. Relationship out of convenience
There are so many reasons why couples stay in a relationship only for the sake of convenience. They think of it as the best option possible, but don’t realize that they’re making a huge mistake.
Staying in a relationship only because it seems like a good idea carries the same feelings as staying in a relationship with a cheating partner. Over time, you can’t even look at each other because you know you’ve made the wrong decision.
7. Lack of emotional support
Who would’ve thought that you could equate the harm that cheating brings with being in a relationship devoid of emotional support?
Well, it’s all because emotional support is one of the things we seek from our partners. And when the most important person in your life fails to provide it, you start believing that you’re not good enough.
“If my partner doesn’t support me, then how could I expect support from other people?”
Then, you live your life constantly having that thought in your head, and over time, you start hating your partner because of it.
8. Jealousy
Jealousy is a silent killer of relationships, and if you’ve ever had a jealous partner, you’d know why I say this.
The constant pressure that your partner will always find something to be jealous about, the idea that every person you talk with could, in his head, be someone you’d cheat on him with – it all drives you crazy.
At first, you may think jealousy is a good thing and that a healthy dose of it pushes your relationship forward. But trust me, any level of jealousy brings more harm than good.
9. Pretending to be someone you aren’t
At the beginning of a relationship, we all want to show ourselves in the best light. That’s why we often pretend to be something we aren’t, thinking there’s no harm in doing so: If your partner likes a certain genre of music, you can always pretend that you like it as well, right?
Wrong. Trust me, this harms your relationship the same way cheating does.
As your relationship progresses, you’ll get more comfortable with your partner. At that point, you want to feel free and be yourself, no matter what.
But if you’ve set certain expectations at the very beginning, it makes no sense to change them now. And once your partner finds out that you’ve been lying to him all this time, all notions of trust go
.
