When you’ve been with someone for a long time, it’s hard to imagine ever letting them go. But sometimes, no matter how much you care about someone or how much time you’ve invested, it’s important to acknowledge the signs that it’s time to end the relationship.
- Your fights are increasing. Fighting in relationships is normal and inevitable, but when you’re fighting every other day of the week and even the smallest disagreements blow up into a huge fight, you know you’re headed down a slippery slope to an unhealthy relationship.
- He doesn’t put in effort anymore. The first few months of a relationship are the best. You want to do nice things for each other, you’re super considerate, and you can’t get enough of each other. But when even the most basic relationship commitments such as having a date night is regularly getting canceled or your partner is forgetting important anniversaries and not even making an effort to make it up to you, this is a red flag that your partner may have checked out of the relationship.
- He’s becoming controlling. Getting to trust each other in a relationship is something that takes time. We choose to believe the best in our partners and trust that they wouldn’t intentionally do anything to hurt us. However, when the dynamic in your relationship shifts so that one partner starts feeling insecure for one reason or another, they can begin projecting these feelings on to you by becoming controlling. There’s nothing worse than someone you love not trusting you when you’ve never given them a reason to doubt you.
- You’ve discovered things about him you’re not sure you can live with. We all come into relationships with our own baggage, but when you find out certain things about your partner, it’s hard not to change the way you think of them. For me, having discovered that a previous partner had repeatedly cheated in past relationships when he was younger made me paranoid because I couldn’t help but feel that that part of him was still there and he could do the same thing to me.
- Your sex life is dead. Intimacy in relationships is necessary for me to feel connected to my partner, so when a previous boyfriend began turning me down for sex and making excuses of why he wasn’t in the mood, it made me feel rejected. I couldn’t envision having a relationship where it felt as if we only had sex when it was the obligatory pre-designated night of the week. I decided it was better to go our separate ways after a year of not being in sync on the sex front.
- You prefer to hang out with your friends. It’s good to have the balance of having a life outside your relationship that you enjoy so that you don’t end up overwhelming your partner by insisting on spending all your free time together. It makes the time you spend together more special and your conversations are richer as you can share your experiences outside the relationship with each other. However, when you start avoiding your couple time in favor of hanging out with your friends, it may be time to re-evaluate your relationship or accept that it’s time to end it.
- You can sense that you’re both growing in different directions. Having compatible life goals is essential to having a long-term relationship in which you each feel fulfilled. When one person in the relationship is happy with life as it is and the other wants to grow to create positive changes they desire, it’s hard to keep a relationship going.
- He’s not maturing at the same pace as you. When you fall in love at a young age, you tend to grow up together, facing similar issues in life and learning how to navigate them together. However, when your partner has Peter Pan syndrome and refuses to grow up and insists on not taking life too seriously, it can get frustrating. On the one hand, you love your partner; on the other hand, you’re not connecting on different areas in your relationship because he refuses to grow up!
- He’s disrespectful and plays it off as a joke. Respect is key in cultivating a healthy relationship and when it is lost, there’s not much left. When a previous boyfriend of mine started making catty comments about things I told him in confidence and then kept playing it off as a joke, I knew that he no longer respected me. Having a disrespectful partner was not something I was going to tolerate given my history with such behavior. I dumped him and never looked back.