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There may be a time in your life where you end up in an awful relationship. However, you may not realize that you’re in a bad relationship until someone else tells you — or until, eventually, you actually start to see it for yourself. You may be blinded by love or sex. Whatever the reason is, it’s important to be able to tell if you’re in a bad relationship to save yourself the pain/heartache.
It was some time last year when I witnessed my best friend and roommate going through the same process of being in an terrible relationship. At the time, she didn’t realize she was in a bad relationship. It started when she moved to Colorado from Baltimore. Her ex-boyfriend began to act sketchy. He began commenting on other girls’ photos on Instagram and Facebook saying how sexy and beautiful they were. He also started to drift away from her. He stopped calling her all the time and had a secret life she didn’t know about. As the year went on, she started to blame herself and her life choices on why the relationship wasn’t working out. I watched her battle with this and blame herself, until it was too late.
It may be hard at times to tell if you are in a bad relationship. If you are giving all your time and effort to make it work, you may be blinded by what is really going on in the picture. To begin analyzing if you are in an awful relationship is to start questioning it. If you notice that your partner is always choosing his friends or his social life over you, there is obviously something not right there. And if you’re like my roommate and begin blaming yourself for everything that is wrong in the relationship, you need to realize that every relationship is a two-way partnership, and it usually isn’t just one person causing the problems.
Another huge sign is if the sex is terrible. Sex is a huge part in a relationship. It is the most inmate time with your partner. If the sex is awful it could lead to a bad relationship. My roommate would always explain to me how by the end of their relationship the sex wasn’t satisfying anymore. She would say that her ex-boyfriend would always worry about pleasuring himself first then her. Their sex life also became very short and not as intimate.
If your sex life starts to lack, you and your partner may become less close, and your communication might start to diminish. Communication is one of the most important elements in a relationship. If that begins to stop, you basically don’t have a relationship anymore. My roommate faced this problem every day by the end of the relationship. She had no clue who her ex had become — he never told her where he was going or what he was doing. He started to hang out with people she had never met. By the end of the relationship her ex-boyfriend became a completely different person.
Being in an awful relationship doesn’t happen to everyone. If you’re lucky, you’ll be that person who ends up with the right guy or girl. Sadly, that did not happen with my roommate. She didn’t realize she was in a bad relationship until she caught him cheating and they broke up. However, if you are like my roommate and are in a crappy relationship, the best thing to do is to get out of it. You need to make yourself happy. If your partner isn’t treating you right, it’s not worth staying in the relationship, no matter how hard it is to let go; leaving your partner might hurt now, but you’ll be avoiding more pain in the long run. Just remember that your partner isn’t the only man or woman on this planet. There are plenty more fish in the sea — ones that will treat you how you deserve to be treated.
Contact CU Independent Staff Writer Alex Myers at alexandra.myers@colorado.edu.
