Which have you had? I had a discussion with my ex today. Haven't talked to him in a while, it was very mature, it was about how immature our experience was together. This is from mindbodygreen: Unhealthy love is being powerless, selfish and enabling. It has no boundaries. Unhealthy love is unconditional and yet contingent. It is immature, irresponsible and dependent. Unhealthy love is urgent. There is a desperation behind it which produces manipulation and compromise of self. Unhealthy love is a pissing contest, a tug of war, a mute silence and a kick stand. It is obvious. Unhealthy love promotes the false self and stunts growth. It is a drug. Healthy love is a choice. It is something you decide to give as a gift. It has conditions that shape the self and strengthen the other. Healthy love is feeling powerful and independent. It is grilled cheese and vegetable soup on a rainy day but not every day. Healthy love is patient, kind and accepting. Healthy love requires a tremendous amount of responsibility which involves communication on all levels and constant reflection. It is building trust, having faith and holding a commitment. Healthy love promotes growth and two strong containers. Healthy love is rare.
The way I see it...this is in describing love from the perspective of the all-encompassing drug-like state that people get into vs. the mature, logical, choice-driven love. Since I have for sure, had a lot of unhealthy love and a little bit of healthy love it rings true to me, but I am just learning. I have children, so I can't say that my love for them is conditional, but if they were perhaps psychotic, I would imagine it would be.
I only read the unhealthy love part and thought it was nonsense. No one is anybody to criticise and judge a relationship based on boundaries and desperation and urgency. Who's to say that doesn't work at all? Why can't that be healthy love? Can a couple who's been married for 20+ years living in similar circumstances, who love each other, who've only been with each other really be slated to an "unhealthy love" status? Do you think that? Neither do I.
Or maybe unhealthy love article reeks so true to me that....... I must be living in an unhealthy relationship for like 13 years and didn't even know it. And now I'm in total denial.
Well...nothing towards you at all, but people have been in unhealthy relationships for 10, 15, 20 years and not known it because it was "normal" to them. I've talked to some of those people. It was clearly unhealthy to people outside of the relationship. I was in a very long term relationship for close to 10 years and it was definitely unhealthy...enduring doesn't always mean healthy. That's not to say your relationship is or isn't.
Most (if not all) relationships have some healthy and some unhealthy aspects to them, so it's hard to characterize any relationship as strictly one or the other. Additionally, a relationship that's growing and functional may start with many unhealthy characteristics but become more healthy over time. I've certainly experienced that. A lot of the attributes in the "unhealthy" section of your post certainly are unhealthy - lack of boundaries, loss of a sense of self, etc., but other things like urgency are not necessarily bad in and of themselves. New love is often so very urgent, so very overwhelming, so much like a drug - but that's just the rush and blur of it all, and it's perfectly ok. A better measure of the health of a relationship, I think, is the growth or lack of growth of the two people, both as individuals and as a pair. It's not so much a question of where they are, but what direction they're going. If that makes any sense. Just my $0.02.
Makes perfect sense and I agree...mostly. I'm still not sure about the urgency being okay. Urgency to get into a relationship? Either way I definitely think relationships can and should evolve. If there is always an urgency (perhaps to prove yourself to the other person) in the relationship because there is a constant sense of instability, then that's certainly not healthy.
I agree for the most part. But where I disagree with the original post is that it is a little vague especially one it mentions the concept of urgency. For instance there are different types of urgency because the underlying issues about why someone feels that way depends on more specific issues pertaining to their psyche. Whether it's a job they're really going after or a particular crush they want to pursue a relationship with all depends on the underlying reasons why they feel urgent about something, and sometimes that's a good thing because it motivates one to do something rather than go through life apathetically. I don't think a healthy relationship would include the word apathy, do you? Also unhealthy and healthy relationships are like two polar extremes one can fluctuate between the other at any given moment in time depending on how the individuals involved grow and change as individuals which then influences what they bring to the table into the relationship. This also goes for friendships as well. --- I agree with the general message of the poetry above, but it's vagueness irks me, and it presents a false black and white dichotomy, which is not what real life throws at us. Also because real life isn't black and white like this, people will struggle to recognize healthy from unhealthy relationships like this because they're looking at life as if real life will tell them with "signs" and whatnot, which extreme they're relationship is, when in reality it is probably a real grey area. This helps one stay in denial and only those like yourself usestobe, realize what the OP means in retrospect/hindsight. That is my critique on this. I'd like your response.
How you manage to put those three words in the same sentence and expect it to make sense is beyond me. What would be unhealthy about that? There is no such thing as unconditional love. Maybe you are right. But mature responsible, and independent love would mostly be boring as hell. Almost everything I do is urgent. I could be run over by a bus tomorrow. Now that sounds unhealthy. But without compromising somewhere sometime you won't get very far in a relationship. Now you're just putting a bunch of words together. At first glance they seem to sound good together. When I read them the second time something appeared to be out of whack. Then it came down like a house of cards.
