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I Missed These Red Flags in the Beginning of my First Relationship
Navigating love, mental health, and your personal well-being
Confusing love with attachment.
At least, it was what I thought was love. A day of speaking turned to a week turned to a month turned into going to college together. Eventually, we lived together — Four years had passed before it was over.
It wasn’t love. And I would say that’s unfortunate, but I was very fortunate that it wasn’t. Much of the relationship was misery, rooted and coated in familiarity.
The end of a relationship is a normal occurrence. Sometimes, those occurrences are reflected in our mind as an unacceptable failure. We will pair a failure of a relationship with a personal failure, even when the two are fundamentally different.
We allow the idea of failure to consume us, disallowing us to accept something that is healthy for the long-run. It’s the mismatch of a prospective future cost and a sunk cost. We believe the latter to be the former, so we attempt to preserve and salvage in the hopes of future recovered value. We confuse attachment for love because we believe the person hurting us might one day stop. Those decisions and situations and the incurred pains are irrelevant to the outcome of the…
