How Can I Tell When a Relationship Is Just Bad for Me?

A reader recently wrote to me with a question that I suspect a lot more women have than they realize:

“I’m in a relationship that I’m pretty sure is not abusive, because I’ve been in plenty of those before and my radar is in hyperdrive to detect any potential signs of abuse. And yet, I feel profoundly unheard, unappreciated and unloved, although he verbally says he does love me. I don’t know if I’m crazy, since I can’t really explain why I feel like this just because he chooses to withdraw from potentially difficult conversations, for example.”

So yes, this is technically one of my reader advice letters, but I decided to answer it in a longer article because the question is very important. You can read all previous entries of reader advice HERE. For those of you who want to write me a letter, you can fill in THIS FORM directly.

Back to my reader: No, you are not crazy.

And you don’t need to produce a PowerPoint presentation proving that your relationship is sufficiently bad before you’re allowed to admit that it’s bad for you. You’re allowed to feel lonely in a relationship. You’re allowed to feel chronically disappointed, or to want more emotional availability, more affection, more reciprocity, more communication, more enthusiasm, or simply more of the things that make a relationship feel like a good place to live. You don’t have to establish that your partner is a terrible person before your own unhappiness becomes legitimate.

In fact, I think this is an important question precisely because we have become so focused on identifying obvious dysfunction that we sometimes forget about the enormous territory between ‘this person is abusive’ and ‘he’s not abusive therefore this relationship is good for me’. A relationship can contain genuine love and still leave one person profoundly lonely. Someone can mean it when he says he loves you and still lack the emotional capacity, skills, beliefs, or willingness necessary to create the kind of relationship you need.

Sometimes he loves you, but cannot stay present when you are hurting. Sometimes he loves you, but experiences your needs as criticism. Sometimes he loves you and genuinely means every promise he makes, while repeatedly demonstrating that he does not actually have the skills to keep those promises. And sometimes you slowly discover that you have become the relationship’s emotional engine, project manager, conflict mediator, and chief supplier of hope.

So, if you have been wondering whether you’re ‘allowed’ to call a relationship unfulfilling when nobody is technically doing anything terrible, here is the answer: yes. Here is how you can tell when a relationship is just bad even if he’s not abusive and even if he genuinely cares...