Am I Being Clingy? 10 Signs You Need To Give Your Partner Some Space

While it’s completely natural to want to spend as much time as possible with your partner, it’s also unhealthy to neglect your life outside of your relationship. If you’re with your S.O. every waking moment and find yourself wondering, “Am I being clingy?” then chances are you probably are. If you relate to any of these behaviors, you might want to take a step back.

  1. You get jealous very easily. Whether he makes plans to go out for drinks with his co-workers or spends his day off with his family, you can’t stand the idea of him making plans without you. Even if you can’t go with him because you’re at work, an ugly combination of resentment and jealousy crawls up your spine when he doesn’t even think to ask you to forget your responsibilities and spend the day with him instead.
  2. You can’t stop yourself from texting him during guys’ night. The second he walks out the door, you’re happy to see him excited for a night out with his friends. But as the clock starts ticking, you feel your anxiety start to crowd around you and the doubts of his well-being grab a seat next to you on the couch. Your question of whether there are other girls around starts to pick at your bowl of chips. Before you know it, half an hour has gone by and you’re reaching for your phone, telling yourself that a short text to make sure he’s OK won’t hurt anyone. Maybe you could even FaceTime him to say high to his friends? Stop. Put down the phone and walk away.
  3. You hate having to share him with other people. Although not all nights you spend with your significant other are “date nights,” they almost always turn out to be when someone else wants to join you. And just as often, the idea of pretending to be too sick for them to come over rolls around in your head for a minute before you choose to take the “high road”: refusing to speak a single word for the rest of the night. Usually, your thoughts always lead back to the idea that if he’s so quick to invite others into our personal time, it must mean that he prefers to spend more time with others than you. Get a grip!
  4. You can’t have enough physical contact with him. Holding hands in the summer is a sweaty mess, but you’re more than willing to wipe your hand every other minute for an hour just so everyone on the street knows who you’re with. Even as you watch a movie together on the couch, you feel you can never be close enough to him. You’ll shove your feet under his thighs even if you’re not cold. You’ll place his hand on your thigh every few minutes even after he keeps pulling it away. And most of the time, you like to push him into the corner of the couch with your backside so he’ll have no choice but to spoon you.
  5. You don’t feel comfortable leaving his side. When you go to eat together at a restaurant, you want to bask in every second of your time together. So when you get the urge to go to the bathroom, you’ll hold yourself together for as long as you can and fidget in your seat until your partner decides to get up to do what you haven’t. At family reunions, even though you’re treated like a part of the family, you can never have him too far away from you. You can be sitting with the girls in one room sipping wine and laughing at jokes, but your real focus is on whether or not you can still hear his voice in the other room.
  6. You’re constantly looking for his attention. You live with him, you sleep with him, sometimes you shower with him, and yet you still don’t feel like you are getting enough of his attention. There’s no better time to try on a sexy new outfit than when he’s watching his favorite team win. When he’s on the phone, you make enough noise he won’t be able to resist asking you to keep it down. And if you ever get into a fight where he stops talking to you, you are definitely going to wear that dress he’s been dying to see you in.
  7. You devise schemes to intrude on his alone time. Time after time, you withhold from communicating how your significant other’s outings really make you feel. The agitation of him going out without you starts to weigh on your shoulders until you think, “I have to do something so I don’t feel like this anymore.” So you start to plot and you find different ways to “casually” run into him or someone who’ll be willing to do it for you. There’s a little voice coming from somewhere in the room that what you’re doing is not a good idea, but it seems like the easiest thing to do.
  8. You only have time for him. You don’t remember the last time you saw your friends. You don’t know when you last got your nails done. Your family has been calling to ask when they’re going to see you next because you always cancel plans to spend time with him. But he’s you’re partner, your love, he’s… everything. You think it’s normal to always spend all of your time with your significant other because “that’s what a relationship is.” So whenever someone questions you, you lash out. You tell people to mind their business and to work on their own relationship.
  9. You’ve forgotten how to be yourself. The few times you decide to go out on your own, you get this strange feeling of vague familiarity. It’s along the lines of déjà vu but the slightest bit closer to touch. As you leave your favorite store or step out of Starbucks, you start to remember all the other things you would do on your own before you met your soulmate. You feel like a pair of jumper cables just brought you back to life… but then he calls. And just like that, you find yourself missing him and rushing to be right back at his side.
  10. Your only focus is staying with him. Every flaw, every mistake, every slip-up he ever made, they all seem so minimal when it compares to the risk of possibly pushing him away. You overlook all the decisions made for the relationship that goes against what you really wanted because it’s easier to ignore the things that will make you unhappy when the real prize is so much sweeter. It’s easier to hold him tighter at night when you don’t allow yourself to think about the things he’s done that hurt because the idea of letting go will always seem so much worse.
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