Signs Your Long-Term Relationship Is More One-Sided Than You Think

1. You put in more effort around the house. You are the one doing the chores, and instructing the other person to get things done. You’re also the one who ends up getting frustrated by their lack of effort. You dedicate a lot of your time to trying to make your life together as nice as it can be, and you often worry that the effort is not mutual.

2. You’re the one planning dates most of the time. You are the one who suggests you do different things, and actually takes initiative to make those happen. You plan activities or double dates for the two of you, you invite them to parties, you ask them what they want to do for the weekend and you spend a little too much time wondering whether you two would do anything if you didn’t fill that role.

3. You do a lot of things with your family, but rarely do things with theirs. You think of them as part of your family. They are part of every big occasion, your family is close to them, and there’s an unspoken comfort when you share family events with them. However, you don’t find that you have that same natural comfort with their family, and in fact often have to push them to include you in things with their family. You kind of wish you could be included in their family texts, or hear yourself mentioned when they’re on the phone with their parents.

4. They shy away from the important talks, and you constantly feel like you’re the only one bringing them up. Their level of relationship maturity isn’t where you need it to be. When you see a problem, you bring it up and confront it, and they react uncomfortably and often sidestep the problem altogether. Or, even worse, they make you feel guilty for having a problem with them in the first place, and you end up apologizing instead of resolving the issue.

5. They have more wandering-eyed tendencies than you care to acknowledge. It’s something that you know, but don’t bring up to them and don’t even discuss. Unfortunately, a good litmus test for issues you have trouble acknowledging is whether or not you’ll mention them to your closest friends. If it’s something you know is true, but you refuse to even mention it to a best friend, then it’s pretty clear that you’re struggling with it on the inside, but don’t want to confront the problem or admit it’s really there.

6. You are often the one making future plans, and bringing up things six months from now, etc. Even though you’ve been together for a long time, they don’t plan things in the future, nor do they even really talk about the future with you. Whenever you try to bring it up, they make excuses to get out of discussing your lives a year from now because it “freaks them out” or they “can’t think about that right now.” They wouldn’t try to plan a trip with you half a year from now, and more than wanting to go on a trip together, you want to see them take that initiative.

7. They think you’re going to stay together, which is reassuring, but their effort has been going down hill ever since. In other words, they treat you and your relationship like a security blanket that they assume you would never grab from under their feet. Because they think your relationship is so secure, they are content to put it on the back burner every so often, instead of realizing that a relationship means regularly making the effort and being present in the relationship.