How To Realize You Are In A Toxic Relationship

Ixion Chained in Tartarus (1824) by Alexandre Denis Abel de Pujol (French, 1785-1861)

How To Realize You Are In A Toxic Relationship

First of all, I will speak from my own experience and this is totally relative. Just because I said it, it does not mean that it is a hundred percent true. This is just my own experience and the things I had realized after my break up. I only want from the people to realize if they are in a toxic relationship or they are being toxic to anyone.

It is not something which happends out of the blue!

When you are in a toxic relationship, you actually do not realize it at first because it does not happen out of the blue. It is not like someone comes into your life and starts take things out of you and beat you to death or abuse you emotionally with constant swearing, nope. 

It generally begins with word abuse or emotional abusive through pressure you to do something. Again, no one says "Do this or you are stupid!" or "You have to do this or I will abuse you!". For me, it started from make-up. 

I am not against make-up or I do not think who uses make-up is ugly or anything but I did not prefer it to use when I was 16 to 17 which is pretty normal if you think about it. I did not use it because I do not know I was not into it, I guess. Then my beloved, let's call him "last", started saying nice things when I used my regular colourless lip balm. When I asked the reason why, because it had no colour it had literally no effects besides making my lips look oily, he said "Oh I thought you started making make-up.". After this I started to ask "Why do you want me to use make-up?" he always said, "I dunno, maybe, you would look cuter though". 

It seems like a normal dialogue between couple, I agree that, but it actually gives you the hidden message of necessity of using make-up. When you get this comment, you start to think that to feel cute or beautiful, you have to use make-up.  

Anyway, Last then started to show me his friends and their girlfriends who used make-up. He started to compliment their make-ups in a friendly manner. I was not upset or anything from this manner because it is normal for anyone to have opposite gender friend and complimenting them, I believe. 

After months of talking about make-up and telling how beautiful I would look with it, with all the examples I had to take as an model for me, I wanted to try make-up. And boom! When I even applied eeny miny tiny make-up like coloured lip balms he started to act like I had gone some sort of Kim Kardashian make-up and he acted like I looked someone new and beautiful. 

Okay, everyone loves getting attention and when you are in a relationship, all attention you want is the attention which comes from your beloved. When he gave me the attention I wanted, I felt happy of course.

Then I started applying more and more make-ups. I had two reasons to use make-up, first he loved seeing me with make-up, second I felt like I was someone mature like I was a young-adult. I also felt beautiful but the abuse came over and over again. When I stopped using make-up, he started commenting about my looks. He always said he loved me no matter how I looked but when I did not use any make-up he asked why and encouraged me to use make-up again. 

After a while, I started developing the idea of I was looking ugly without make-up or I had to use make-up to look alive. I was used to having foundation to cover my purple circles under my eye or using orange and pinkish lipstick to cover my purpleish lips. 

So my journey of using just coloured lip balms turned into to applying fully make-up products, except foundation because I hate the feeling of that thing. I did not realize that I changed that much in only couple of months and you may say that "it's not that bad, it's actually good, he did something good", yes you may look from that window but even now I sometimes think that I look bad even ugly without make-up and at those times it really damaged my self-esteem. 

If he ever came to me and said, "I want you to use make-up, you look ugly for someone who is supposed to my girlfriend", of course I would say no and would break up but everything happened so slowly that I did not even realize the changing process I was having. 

When you feel bad, upset, angry do NOT make excuses!

Have you ever heard the line "Love makes people blind <3", it is stupid. It is nonsense. When we had our arguments like a normal couple, I felt bad through his nonsense. Even when he was guilty, I was right, he always said something bad about him before apologizing. For example, he said how he never felt love and he was learning love with me and gets upset from me being right, then he said he was sorry. 

From this sentence, I got two things, first he was like a child who learns everything and it is okay to make mistakes, second I was a monster because I was treating bad to someone who did not even know the thing was bad. 

Oh yes, screaming into my face when I was literally crying and wishing this conversation to be end is something a child should learn. Come on people, even a child would stop when someone starts crying. Or yes be fricking rude to me, be mean because you do not know any better and you have to learn. 

Here is the thing, you are not responsible for anyone's education, you do NOT have to teach anyone ANYthing. 

You may say that, "Pschh Aylin, that so obvious and you should have left him" but NO. It does not work that ways. When time goes by in your relationship and you start to imagine about how cute it would be to have tiny babies that look a little bit of me and little bit of you BOOM it's over for you. (It is also another abuse from society to think everyone should get married and have babies otherwise they will burn in hell and their bodies will not be even accepted by the ground buuuuuut this is something I have to write in another post, in detail.) 

When Last used his chances to treat me bad, in other words, to empty his rage, he first started an argument out of nowhere even when I did not know what the heck I did wrong to be shouted this bad and this long then he started giving me excuses like "I am so sorry, I had a really bad day this and this and this happened and when you did really tiny mistake I could not handle my anger." 

Look I get it, everyone can have their bad times to talk. You can not make a joke to someone who just lost their pet, for instance. I get it but you have no right to take your anger out from someone just because they are there, just because they listen and think they are badly in love with you. 

If you are doing this to anyone, you should not do this thing too. 

When sometime passed, I started to feel bad because I said something that made him sad. Even when I was talking about something which make ME sad, he always gave me excuses. This is kind of private and I do not take pleasure from revealing this but when I said I did not like the smell of sweat(doughhhh), he told about how he busy he was. He was so busy that he had no time to go shopping or had no money to buy deo. I am not making any fun of economical problems, do no get me wrong but how much does a deo cost? 

Or when I wanted some attentioni he started listing the reasons why he could not. Instead of listing tons of excuses, he could use that time to give me the attention that I needed when I was down. However, I would not feel bad, I would not blame myself for asking such thing, would I?

Again when time passed I started to question everything I did. Not only the things about him, I started to question myself from everyone. Even I knew I was a hundred percent, swear to God right, I always stepped back because I started to think about the consequences other people might had and maybe the reason they treat me bad is because they got treated bad in some period of their time, maybe they do not even know that the thing they had done might hurt me. See what am I doing? I am creating excuses. 

When I started doing this, since I already had damaged self-esteem, I started to get isolate myself from the people. I am not an extrovert nor an introvert, I consider myself as someone anti-social. I can hang out with people and I really enjoy the time I spend with my friends but I prefer to be alone a lot more than I hang out with people, time to time and I also really enjoy the time I spend on my own. This is probably not the definition of anti-social. When I thought everyone had their reasons to treat me bad, even when they did not treat me bad I thought they were, I wanted to save myself from them. 



Anyway, I can write my whole relationship from the bad and good sides but first I have to be sure that my effort on this post is worth it. Plus, I know you can see all the thing I wrote in short forms at other places but I just want to help people via sharing my experience. I wish someone wrote their experiences online before I wasted my whole time. 
So, see you again, I guess?