Baby Don't Hurt Me - Vin Boyd

“Stay away from people who make you feel like you’re hard to love.” The pleasure you get when you’re around someone you trust, someone you care for; that’s love. It isn’t fear. It’s the ability to be who you are. It is infatuation, but it is not possession. It is affection, but not an obsession. Love is caring for those who make you feel like the best version of yourself. It is the ability to control and express your feelings.

Being kind towards a lover or lovers is the main product of love. Expressing kindness or empathy towards someone creates a catalyst that releases chemicals from inside the brain to show attraction or adoration. On the opposite side of the spectrum, being unkind towards someone pushes their spirits down. It decreases a person and makes them feel lesser. It causes emotional and sometimes physical pain. It often puts out the fire that is seen inside someone, the spark or light they have that keeps them going. Being unkind douses this flame. It causes a break in character, an intense or fatal feeling of not being good enough, a pain often unexplainable. This isn’t caring for someone. It’s degrading and humiliating and painful. Love isn’t being unkind.

Often times, romantic love between people is seen as primarily or only a sexual attraction or expression. “Love” is seen as sex. It is seen as the bonding between people. It is taken literally; to make love, or to only have a high amount of compassion for your partner(s) when it is introduced through sex. A relationship can consist of sex and limited contact. This is the use of the human body. It isn’t emotionally stable, nor is it compassionate towards a person or people. It is disregard for a person or people. This isn’t healthy for a relationship. Love isn’t sex.

In breaking down the most toxic relationships, we find intensity. A partner who pushes the other into doing things quickly. Obsession comes in the form of always wanting to talk or see the other and never letting the other have time away. Unhealthy relationships are manipulative. They use your emotions and stress the lines between comfortable and not. Unhealthy partners try to use apologies and gifts to influence the other’s decisions and secure themselves a positive place in their partner’s good graces. Manipulation and blame-games aren’t love.

Unhealthy partners keep you isolated from others--this possibly being friends, family, and others entirely. They make the other person in the relation choose between them and their friends or peers, and making sure you feel guilty if you want to get away. They sabotage your reputation or how others perceive you. They make sure others know your theirs. Their obsession is strong enough to make others cut off ties with you. They guilt-trip you and belittle your emotions. “Walking on eggshells” and making excuses aren’t part of a healthy relationship. This isn’t love. Unhealthy relationships aren’t love.

Jealousy makes up the basis of an insecure relationship. A healthy relationship is filled with communication and trust. Without it, even more instabilities arise. Respect towards a partner or partners is seeing them as your equal and treating them as such. Insecure partners find the line between love and spite and erase the edges. In a relationship with an overly insecure person, the other can’t get away from the struggle of finding a way to please their partner. They can’t escape the crippling fear of failure. Jealousy and fear isn’t love.

Plenty of people in abusive relationships don’t recognize the harm being done. More often than not, an abusive partner will coerce the other party into thinking they’re at fault and don’t have free will. This commonly extends to hurtful or degrading terms. In a victim position, the abusee is tricked into thinking their being mistreated is actually healthy, or just how their partner expresses their care and emotion. Most are tricked into a situation in which they are not allowed to make their own decisions or form opinions without the help of their partner. This power, no matter how strong or weak it seems to be, is a form of possessive abuse. It limits one partner’s abilities and power in a relationship and physically shifts it, so that one has a higher title than the other. This is abuse. This is common. Love isn’t abuse. National Domestic Violence Hotline: 1-800-799-7233

In romantic, platonic, and familiar relationships alike, there are dangers. There are struggles and there are roller coasters or emotions and hardships. Healthy relationships make it through these, while others falter and fall apart. Some partners can cause these spikes in a bad situation--they may be the catalyst or the main point of the fighting in the first place. This isn’t love. Love is trust and security, communication and understanding, assurance and empathy and acceptance. It is growth and struggle, but it is making it through.