12 Signs You’re In A One-Sided Relationship
True love and commitment are rare to find but most of us spend a good portion of our time trying to seek out that comfort zone that only comes with a relationship. A lot of times relationships are not based on love at all but are these called casual? No! Sometimes people feel so averted by the idea of being in a “casual relationship” that they would rather choose to live with the delusional white lie that their relationship actually exists. That is why a majority of the relationships end, as they might not always be based on two people genuinely being interested in each other but two people who are just trying each other out. This could be due to several reasons: loneliness, set ups, peer pressure, social stigma that everyone needs to flock in twos, social status, sextimacy (confusing physical intimacy with emotional intimacy), a power play for a better self-image with one-sided love situations, denial of being used when you’re the loving party in the one sided love situations, because all your friends are dating and you wish to fit in, and then my personal favorite, the dire need to have someone that you can call girlfriend or boyfriend.
People can be sick, twisted and difficult to understand, not because they are terrible human beings playing with each other’s emotions and spreading around the epidemic of emotional damage but because living in denial is always easier than seeing things for what they are and a lot of people just run around the world in a need to be fixed when in reality they are just breaking more and more people on that quest. So if you are ready to take off the love goggles and see if your relationship is made up in your mind or not, here it goes!
1. Your partner is disrespectful.
Love is not the butterflies in your stomach or the hormones surging through your veins for the evolutionary purpose of mating. The key ingredient for love is mutual respect. If your relationship is abusive in any manner, it is as good as nonexistent. If you think you are entitled to being treated as a princess and your boyfriend merely exists to build you a throne, you don’t love him; he’s just a fix for your self-esteem issues. And if you think having an upper hand over your women by playing games, you are no better! If mutual respect towards each other’s existence, interests, profession, contribution to the relationship, time, space, bodies or anything else does not exist, then you are just either counting the days until you get sick of each other and break up or get stuck in toxic mess for eternity that will not let you grow in any way.
2. The allure of being emotionally unavailable.
Sometimes all our minds want is the challenge, so are you really into this person or is the fact that this person emotionally unavailable that draws you towards them? People have valid reasons for being emotionally unavailable; don’t break through someone’s walls just to realize that you did it for the challenge and now that you’re in, you don’t find them as alluring. A lot of people get very sucked up into this fascination and build something in their head that is completely nonexistent for the other person. The only time you should consider being involved with an emotionally unavailable person is when you are emotionally unavailable as well, and you two are mature enough to understand what casual actually means.
3. The foundation of your relationship is a bunch of dating rules.
Mostly it’s women who resort to self-help books on dating but even men have their little playbook of tricks to get laid. At least men are practical in this situation since they know how temporary the effects of such formulas are. You cannot manipulate someone into falling in love with you by withholding and rationing physical and emotional intimacy. The people who actually have success stories are the ones who would naturally go about dating in the same manner even if they were not introduced to these set of rules. Why? Because that is who they really are, and who they really are is what the other person is falling for. Pretending to be someone you’re not only works out for so long because sooner or later you will be comfortable enough to show who you really are and the other person will feel terribly cheated and manipulated at that point.
4. You want a trophy.
There are two kinds of people who construct an obscure illusion of love: teenagers, and the kind of people who are going to get married quite a few times until they figure things out the hard way. For the kind of teenagers who post updates of their current emotional state on social media rather than talking to the person they are dating, relationships are mostly to show off or to have a false sense of having someone in their lives. They have a very misplaced list of things that makes someone worth dating “He’s the captain of the football team, all the girls would go nuts if I date him!”, “He’s in a band, I would always get front row seats and backstage pass” or “He’s a DJ, I’ll have no issues getting in and he’ll dedicate tracks to me!”
Men have a similar thing too when they wish to date models or cheerleaders. The thing that they forget is that this is a fellow human being and there is a lot more to them than what they do for a living. If that person dates you, they deserve more than just being a trophy for you to feel better about yourself! A lot of adults do the same thing when they start looking out for someone to marry, they run around with a list of qualities and traits that they desire in their partner that will make them feel good while introducing their partner to someone else. Years later, you will see the same people hanging out in bars, bitching about how stupid marriages are, cheating on their partners on every possible occasion and going through messy divorces. If you look at them like a trophy, your relationship is as fake as it can get!
5. It’s a strictly online relationship.
Now people might meet online and have lasting relationships but compare the number of people who meet online and the ones who find love. If you meet someone on a site that helps you find hot single people living near you and your entire relationship is limited to chats and hooking up, do I even have to explain what is going on here? Then there are “cute” relationships where all interaction is limited to chats and the action is limited to Skype. Technology is great but our end game is not to become robots, there are primitive things like face to face human interaction and intimacy that will never go out of fashion. Being on someone’s online hookup rotation is not even close to what a relationship is.
6. You claim that you only text because calling is outdated.
I have nothing against texting and I love texting with people who communicate with actual sentences rather than a bunch of phrases like “Hey SSup?”, “Wht u upto?”, “Lol”, etc. Texting is a good way to communicate for people who need time to think before replying or who do not want the other person to notice their tone or facial expressions but do you know that words only constitute 7% of communication in the case of face-to-face interactions? It is also easier to lie on a text. Meeting up and talking over the phone are not outdated or stupid. If your relationship is constituted by a bunch of shallow texting phrases, nudes and booty texts late at night, you’re smart enough to figure out where this is heading.
7. Are you keeping your relationship secret?
Just like how women can keep men on emotional leashes while physically friend zoning them, men can have intimate relationships with women while emotionally friend zoning them. There is no point fighting this. If he introduces you to people as a friend than no matter how much you confuse your physical intimacy with emotional intimacy, that is what you are, a friend! If he or she doesn’t introduce you to people at all and convinces you in the best way possible that being in a secret relationship is completely logical, he or she is either ashamed of you are hiding you from someone else in their lives. People in love want the whole world to know about it, until you’re a celebrity but since you’re not, let’s just say that you are being played.
8. You have dependency issues.
Even though we live in a society where the “we” culture is considered adorable, once the infatuation phase is over, one of you will get sick of the dependency issues. People assume that spending every waking moment with their partner doing trivial romantic things is actually healthy. I hate to break it you but people in healthy lasting relationships have passions and interests of their own and being in a relationship doesn’t mean losing their individuality and fusing into this blob that is always together. They have friends like single people do, respect each other’s interests and space and choose to take out time and make the other person a priority, instead of being together because there is nothing else to do. There are several ways to make use of alone time rather than obsessing over what your partner might be doing or why aren’t they calling or texting you. If your partner is your only interest, hobby and even source of income, some people might make a run for it the day they realize how real healthy relationships should function.
9. You think fighting like dogs is normal.
There are couples that fight, and then there are whack job dysfunctional people who destroy the faith in love for everyone around them. If you know only one of the partners, you imagine the other one to be a complete monster and if you know both of them, all you wish for is them to break up. If every person you come in contact with knows how horrible your fights are and if they keep on circling around the same subjects as you howl over and over again for the same reason instead of issues that come to end after a few healthy discussion, your relationship is crack. You know it’s toxic and it’s killing you but you still want a hit for five minutes of high.
10. Meeting twice a month is normal.
It is if you’re in a long distance relationship — but if you live in the same city, a person who cares about you will make more of an effort to squeeze you into their schedule no matter how busy they are. I know a lot of people who are corporate lawyers, partners, doctors and others who have demanding jobs that take up more than half of their day but even they take out time for the people they love. When someone with a normal job is too busy to meet you, you are probably one of the many people on their rotation so don’t sweat it or give in to the lousy excuses that you and your friends think up in their defense.
11. You’re with them just because they’re hot.
A lot of times people date someone just because they are hot. It’s not easy to say it out loud because it makes them look shallow, so they cook up a bunch of reasons. Everyone knows that there is absolutely nothing in common between these two and the attraction is the only thing that keeps them going. The thing is that they are not just lying to others but even themselves about their feelings. Attraction is a strong force; it creates an illusion in the mind for liking everything about a person that you would normally hate. One day after the breakup, when the former hormone drunk person bitches about every characteristic of their partner, try posing a question, “Why were you with him/her in the first place? Just because he/she is hot?” Chances are good it will render them speechless.
12. You would hate them if they belonged to the same gender.
Imagine for a second if you met someone of the same gender who had the exact same personality as your partner, would you be great friends or would you punch them in the face? If there is something more important in a relationship than respect, it’s friendship. You cannot love someone if you completely despise their personality.