Toxic relationships can destroy you, but healthy relationships do the opposite: they build you up in ways you never imagined possible. When you’ve finally found a healthy relationship, you’ll be able to tell.
- You don’t feel pressured to play a particular part. When you’re dating someone who’s judgmental and hard to please, you sometimes find yourself walking on eggshells around them or stressing unnecessarily about their opinion. It can be hard to admit that they’re toxic, but that’s usually a pretty good indicator that they are. In a healthy relationship, you’ll feel comfortable just being yourself because you know that your partner loves you for who you really are.
- You’re comfortable being 100% honest. In a toxic relationship, you might feel the need to hide how much you spent on something, what you ate for lunch, or who you were hanging out with in order to avoid a conflict. Healthy relationships are exactly the opposite: you know that you can tell your partner anything without fearing that they’ll become verbally or emotionally abusive. If you’ve been in a toxic relationship before, this is one of the most refreshing things about finally finding a healthy love.
- Your partner relieves your stress instead of causing it. When you come home from a rough day at work, the last thing you need is someone getting on your case and making it worse. Any partner who’s worth a damn will care about you enough to see that you’re stressed and do anything possible to make your day better. That’s exactly what happens in a healthy relationship: you can actually find refuge from the stress in your partner’s arms.
- You never wonder if you’re loved unconditionally; you know. Toxic partners make you feel like you have to earn their love every single day, and that’s complete BS. True love is unconditional, and you only know that feeling when you finally find yourself in a healthy relationship.
- Your partner supports your career and life goals. In a healthy relationship, both of you want to see the other succeed and you’ll do just about anything to help each other. While crappy partners see your success as a threat to their power over you, healthy partners see your success and happiness as an extension of their own success and happiness.
- In a healthy relationship, the sex just keeps on getting better. In an unhealthy relationship, intimacy can be scarred by bad memories of fights, abuse and judgment. When you finally find a good guy, you know it because the connection and the trust deepen every day, which makes for some really amazing sex that continues to get better over time.
- You can freely talk about the future without worrying about losing him. When you’ve become accustomed to dating noncommittal losers, it can be scary to even consider a real future with anyone. You’re used to being ghosted or called “crazy” if you should dare to bring up the future, but that behavior is only commonplace for immature players. In a healthy relationship, you’re allowed to talk about the future because your partner sees it too (and they’re just as excited about it as you are).
- You would trust your partner with your life. It’s a deep, heavy thought, but you really shouldn’t be with anyone unless you would trust them with your life. In a healthy relationship, that thought is no problem. You know your partner would do anything possible to protect you because they never want to lose you.
- You never worry about being cheated on. You never need to worry about your partner cheating because you know they value you and respect you too much to ever do it. Even if an entire evening goes by without receiving a text from them, your first thought is that they fell asleep or their phone died, not that they’re out fooling around in someone’s bed.
- You can’t imagine being with anyone else. You may joke about having a “hall pass” with your celebrity crush, but the truth is that you can’t imagine being with anyone else because the one you’re with makes you feel simply amazing every single day and you wouldn’t trade them in for anyone in the world.
