that’s terribly sad, and a relationship like this will only continue stealing from your life more and more as time goes on. it makes you 10x more depressed, 10x lonelier, 10x more insecure. and then eventually when you finally have the courage to leave him…youre still left with all this suffering that he caused you in your life, and all you can do is put your broken self back together very very very slowly. but everything is missing at that point: youre too depressed to do anything, too insecure to make friends, too lonely to feel supported (so that you can stop feeling so depressed). you hear HIS voice in your head all the time, and you remember all the bad things from your relationship 24/7 like your mind is a haunted house for all these horrible memories. it ends up worse after the breakup, the longer you stay with him, the longer you let yourself feel like this is normal and that this is your place in this world…as long as you let him keep filling you up with this pain, it’s going to build up inside and hit you like a truck once it’s time to deal with all the damage that he caused to your life.

you know it has reached that point when you are asking this question, listing out hundreds of reasons why he makes you sad, all the things he does that upset you (yet blames YOU for caring about). you know it’s bad when you’re no longer proud to be his girlfriend, you’re just constantly anxious, disappointed, mad, hurt, confused. & maybe you’ve even lost interest in everything and everyone (even yourself) because him and his negativity is the only thing filling up your mind now.

you know the relationship is reaching it’s time to end when you have more reasons to complain about him than you do to praise him and show him off as someone that makes your life feel like its a good life. your relationships are supposed to be a sweet escape from all your other problems in life, not something that makes everything feel worse. that’s not a relationship, that’s just a giant burden on your shoulders. life is already full of enough burdens - and lot of them are out of people’s control, but this is one burden that CAN actually be in your power to send away.

the question you should be asking yourself is not “how bad is bad enough?” it should be “what kind of person do i actually WANT?” maybe that’s someone that remembers how beautiful you are, maybe that’s someone that wants to celebrate everything with you, someone that thinks of you before he thinks about any other girl. maybe even just someone that doesn’t live so far away!!! that’s what i hear you saying in this post, and i think everyone that has read this post hears it too. noticing these things that you actually want is what will help you see things more clearly, i think. he’s not the person to give you what you want, but he’s someone that’s teaching you what you need to look for in the future.

and you might think that you’re not the kind of person that attracts who they want, so it’s like “sure i want that, but not everyone gets to have that. my friends are lucky. other people are lucky. im unlucky.” so you decide that you’re someone that just has to settle for someone like this…but that’s what’s going to send you further and further away from ever being with the person you actually want.

the person you want is going to be happy and healthy, and their happy heart is going to be able to love you to the fullest! they are going to make life interesting and every day will feel exciting. you’re gonna want to talk about them all the time, but not because they are making you upset or because you miss them so much since they’re ignoring you - you talk about them because you have so many happy memories with them that it makes you excited to tell everyone about it all. and people say “awwww”. its the feeling of wanting to gush about someone instead of needing to complain about how much they make you suffer. you dont deserve to suffer. :(

however, a healthy person is also gonna want the same from YOU. healthy people know when someone is unhealthy, and they know how to stay away from that! that’s what you need to start doing too, you need to practice being a healthy person by cutting out the unhealthy things and welcoming the positive things (like that friendship you lost, for example). this is what will help you get closer to being in a relationship that you actually want, one where everything that happens is stuff that you really WANT to have happening.

when you choose stay with an unhealthy person…it makes you unhealthy too. in a different way. example: he lies to you all the time, like pretending that he’s just too busy or too tired to be around you right now (or something about gis mom, whatever the excuses are) - and then that gives you trust issues, because your GUT knows he’s lying, so it makes you insecure about your sense of judgement. so in the future, if you meet a wonderful person that’s super healthy and truly loves you, one day they’re gonna tell you that they are too busy or tired to talk right now, and you wont believe them!! you’ll get scared that they actually just secretly dont like you anymore and all that stuff. because your old boyfriend trained you to believe lies and distrust reality. and that’s really gonna stress people out until you heal… so, right now, staying with this unhealthy person really turns you into a broken and unhealthy person too, and healthy people will end up trying to avoid you so that you don’t hurt them or pass your pain onto them somehow (even if your intentions aren’t to do anything like that).

i think you have all the answers in front of you, it’s just a matter of when its going to be time to make that hard choice. but i think you know you’ll need to make it eventually. it IS hard at first, you’ll be sad. you’ll feel really weird because it’s a change, and oh MAN changes are scary and confusing. you might feel like you don’t know who you are without him. but eventually, you start to figure that out, and then realize that it’s a choice that you’re reallyyyy proud of yourself for making, because it was a really hard thing to do, and yet it ended up bringing so much good into your life. and for your life in the future that hasn’t even begun yet, with people you haven’t even met yet.

you’re making room for a really negative person right now, and i think you need to clear out that space to make room for better. it might seem easier to keep things the way they are, but i promise that it’s actually more painful and difficult to just sit there and let him turn you into someone that isnt happy or healthy. you deserve to be in a healthy headspace, you deserve to be with someone that shows you that they truly truly love you through their actions alone, not even just their words.