5 Types of Emotionally Devastating Relationships You Need To Avoid

There is no value in such relationships.

Olga Olson
Hello, Love
6 min readDec 17, 2021

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Crying helpless black woman sitting on windowsill
Photo by Liza Summer from Pexels

Sadly, you can’t realize that your relationships are emotionally unstable. You’ve already given away pieces of yourself to the wrong person. Bad relationships experience can ruin your inner happiness and devastate you emotionally.

If you start relationships based on sex and don’t care about humans near to you, the chances of meeting the wrong person are high. It’s not only because you don’t care about whom you want to sleep with. In most cases, one-night sex stories don’t have a good continuation.

On the other hand, you might have relationships that started from interests and friendship. A new step into you and your partner finished with a strong connection and sex isn’t the main thing for both of you.

What is interesting, it doesn’t matter how your relationships started, because you’re not secured from devastated ones even if everything started great. So you need to be aware of signs that can lead to an emotionally unhealthy love experience.

The Narcissistic Relationship

Just as you would expect, narcissistic relationships are characterized by a deep-seated need for attention and admiration.

This is often sought through grandiose gestures and often includes believing that only your partner is capable of doing something or that he or she knows more than anyone else.

Your partner might be aware of his personality trait but doesn’t believe it to be a problem, or may admit to some level of understanding and work on it with little success.

Check your partner’s behavior. Is he typically confident in his skills, intelligence, and accomplishments and will often try to put the attention on himself only?

Additionally, your partner is so concentrated on getting attention to him but doesn’t care whether he gives you enough attention at all. Being the social object of others’ admiration can be satisfying, but often this narcissist’s pursuit is not reciprocally rewarded by others.

A narcissistic relationship is essentially like being courted by a narcissistic person. However, once the relationship begins you are unlikely to be courted back or desired as a long-term partner or spouse.

The Enabler Relationship

The enabler relationship type can be characterized by a man or woman who keeps their partner from experiencing consequences of their actions and consistently provides an unhealthy lifestyle.

A person that fits this type of relationship might have been impaired in some manner, whether by addiction or mental illness.

Take a look at your partner. He might be super worried whether your behavior never harms him and he is feeling absolutely happy and satisfied. Also, he wants to live as he wants and doesn’t care about the reality of consequence-based living.

In most cases, such behavior is self-destructive. Just imagine if you used to live healthily, have an amazing job, but suddenly everything ruined because of your partner.

He wants crazy things, parties, traveling over the world right now! And it doesn’t matter if you want it or not. He wants your action now or you don’t worth his attention.

Imagine how your life will drop immediately. Instead of having plans and goals, your career and personal life will be destroyed in a second.

An enabler is a person whom you need to control all the time as a child. But instead of a child, you got an adult without logical thinking.

In this relationship, one or both partners have some sort of impairment, whether it be addiction or mental illness. The relationship can be very destructive as long as the enabling continues.

It is crucial to understand that the enabler relationship type is a form of enabling when you have an addiction or a mental health issue. Think carefully do you want to break your mental health and be with such a person?

The Codependent Relationship

Codependency is a state of being in which someone, typically known as the “codependent,” seeks to meet emotional needs through outside relationships with people who are not capable of providing healthy emotional care themselves.

For example, if you found a partner who has bad habits and you started to copy them. There are really serious self-destructive relationships and you don’t need to continue them.

If you know a singer Amy Winehouse, then it’s a great example of how relationships with her husband impacted her own life.

If you never drank before but started to do so because of your partner’s habit — you’re in danger. You have a codependent relationship that usually ends badly for both sides.

The danger is such relationships that no one is going to improve. Rather than find a solution to a problem, bad habits from one partner transition to another.

I wouldn’t advise you to experiment with your life or check if you’re strong enough.

Instead, you can focus on finding the right person for the sake of your healthy life. You can spend much time fixing destructive relationships, but in the end, you spend your health, time, and energy.

The Unforgivable Behaviour Relationship

You’re human and make mistakes. We all do them. In a relationship, it’s important to work on mistakes, and forgive each other.

The basic principle of your and your partner’s growth is the ability to forgive. I’m not talking about affairs or similar things. What I mean is really small things that happen every day — like washing a plate.

Just imagine a situation if you woke up, took a shower, but didn’t prepare breakfast on time. You were so busy in the morning that you lack time even for the simple and fast breakfast.

As a result, your partner is angry, and because of that, he stops talking to you. Days are going but he can’t forgive you for such a little thing.

One by one other small things happen in your life and there is no understanding or forgiveness. What you hear instead is that you’re bad, slow and there is no excuse for your mistakes.

This unforgiveness is kicking you out of your normal life. It’s something that repeats again and again and you can’t impact this.

Analyze these things. Ask yourself if you want such partner behavior until the end of your life or there is a better way?

The Manipulating Partner relationship

I often hear from my friends that women need to do X, and man needs to do Y. Who the hell are these people to tell others what they need to do? Do they need to do something at all?

I believe that you’re own boss in your life and no one can tell you (or order) what you do next. You’re not a slave to be manipulated.

You already have a job that is pretty similar to this, but at least you get paid for what others tell you to do.

But in relationships, there is no “must”. If your partner manipulates you and starts to order what to do every day — it’s time to say goodbye.

Manipulating is not a thing you can use. If your relationships are based on manipulation, there is no love, I’m sorry. Just think logically about your last days, your feelings, and your partner’s words.

If you find that there are strict orders, you were shouting at each other, and still have some problems — it’s time to stop.

Final Thoughts

A relationship is a great thing that can inspire you to live happier than before. Unfortunately, some relationships ruin your life instead of making it’s better.

The most popular devastating relationships that we talked about can make you not only unhappy but decrease your mental health. As a result, sometimes people stop trusting even and can’t start new relationships.

To avoid bad relationship experience type, you should find signs of emotionally unhealthy relationships before you got too complex.

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Olga Olson
Hello, Love

Writer sharing thoughts on self-improvement and relationships. I’m a passionate life learner who shares personal experience for your growth.