Love, Not War: 5 Things I’ll Never Settle For In A Relationship Again
I ve been in a good number of bad relationships, and every time — even after I realized the people were wrong for me — I stayed in them a little longer than I should have.
I guess I’m just susceptible to the human condition of not wanting to be alone.
I would choose to be with the wrong person because it seemed like the better alternative.
After a string of bad relationships, I asked myself, “What is wrong with me? Do I have some kind of a defect that makes me pathologically doomed to meet the wrong people?”
Luckily, from all that time I spent making these mistakes, I learned these 21 things:
1. There’s a good kind of anxious, and there’s the bad kind.
I’ve learned being with the wrong person makes me anxious.
Not the butterflies-in-my-belly kind of anxious; I’m talking about the there’s-a-scorpion-close-by kind of anxious.
And I shouldn’t have to feel that way.
2. I shouldn’t have to stalk someone to know the truth.
It is utterly disrespectful for you to spend the weekend with your ex and lie to me about it.
I have to literally stalk you to catch you two together when you told me you had to work.
I’m better than that.
3. I shouldn’t have to pretend to be someone I’m not.
After years of desperately trying to fit into someone else’s world without even the slightest bit of effort from him to fit into mine, I realized I don’t have to change for anybody.
If you care about me and you’re right for me, you’d take me as I am and stop trying to mold me into someone I’m not.
4. I shouldn’t have to feel like I’m not good enough.
This is when all I hear is criticism and judgment and when all you do is compare me to your better ex.
This is when you shove other people’s success in my face and make me feel like a loser.
This is when you always make me feel like have to prove myself worthy of you, and I hope you feel the way about me as I do about you.
I’ve learned I don’t have to live with that.
I don’t have to feel like that.
I’m my own woman, and I’m good enough.
5. It’s not my fault I don’t trust you. You gave me reason to doubt.
If every time you say “good morning” I feel compelled to check my watch and be sure it’s actually morning because you have a habit of lying, it doesn’t mean I have trust issues.
It just means you have truth issues.