toxic relationship

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ometimes, with friends, without realizing, we’re the ones always texting, always initiating, and always wanting to talk things out. Some people exit our lives with proper goodbyes, they list reasons why they don’t want to keep sharing their time with us, they blame the weather, their cat, or their busy schedules; other times, people vanish from our lives...

Woman wonders if a friendship is really worth keeping after she is forced to initiate every encounter or text exchange between them: 'I don’t think she’s lying to me but I’m finding it really hard to believe what she says when she’s then just so passive'

When the birthday requirements are over the top We definitely deserve some form of special treatment from our loved ones on our birthdays, and if we are lucky enough, we get it. Having said this, some people demand a little bit more than special treatment and command week-long tributes, constant attention, praise, and presents. All the while believing those requirements are an obligation for the people around them. Beliefs like that are really hard to shake, and that’s exactly what happened to…

30-year-old woman wonders if she exaggerated by telling her 28-year-old boyfriend to plan his own birthday dinner: 'He has been staying with dad because “I ruined his birthday”'

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These blessed phones Let’s start by saying that going through phones is NOT okay. There is nothing we can do now because the protagonist of this story has already gone through one and found things she shouldn’t have. The only thing we can do now is deal with the aftermath of what came to light.

29-year-old woman goes through her 35-year-old girlfriend's phone and finds out she is planning to leave her: 'Whole time she was miserable and apparently using me which she won't say she is because we live together and split bills'

When the household chores won’t do themselves I can’t say how many times my mother has tried this technique with me when I was a teenager, surprise: It never worked. I’m not saying I don’t do my household chores now; in fact, I just put all my clothes in the washing machine, I’m saying it didn’t work THEN. I had to learn this all by myself when I became independent, having countless issues with roomies.

24-year-old girlfriend decides to only do her laundry and dishes and leave her slothful 27-year-old boyfriend to fend for himself: 'You can’t really help me help you. The only way to take something off my plate is to do it yourself'

Have you ever lost a friend? Not naturally, not through the passage of time, but through concrete action, a good ol’ breakup just like lovers do. I have, many times, some I have gone back to, some I haven’t, but it’s always funny how so many words and songs and books and films exist about the end of romantic love, and how few about the end of a friendship.

Woman breaks up with a long time friend due to him changing his attitude and developing feelings for her: 'Someone who had become such an important part of my life was gone. Years later I still think about him'

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Have you ever had a friend who has simply everything going right for him or her? Have you ever had the same friend having everything going right not for a period of time but FOREVER? I had, but I never reacted with jealousy. I don’t want to seem like the moral police here, but I think there can be plenty of postures to take that are much more beneficial than jealousy.

30-year-old woman runs out of the headspace she needs to handle the jealousy she feels towards her decade-old best friend: 'I’ve started resenting her for always having it so easy, always being just “lucky” and absolutely every single aspect of her life;

Sometimes a relationship ends but one part is unaware of it I’ve been in this situation so many times, almost always on the aware part, but either way, it never ceases to be heartbreaking. Friendships, sadly, sometimes take the worst part of romances, and people in them exhibit behaviours such as nagging and jealousy outbursts; or you find out one day that you are much more important to your friend’s life than that person is to you.

33-year-old woman is trapped in an unwanted frienship because she is unable to say no to her very insistent friend: 'Every other time, I cook up a lie to say no. The annoying part is she doesn’t even ask or request'

When should our nitpicking stop? In these modern times, there's a pretty widespread idea that our partners should be there to satisfy our every need, and that we should be so pragmatic as to leave them ASAP if there is a very minor box they don't check. Evidently, I do not subscribe to that way of thinking, and today I'm going to explain why.

44-year-old woman considers leaving her boyfriend over a pillow: 'I just feel like I've run out of ways to calmly communicate why this is important to me'

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Who determines our relationship to love and marriage? At first, I thought this was yet another story about a guy getting cold feet right at the moment he is asked a big question. This is how it always goes for me: everything seems to be going fine, and at some point, I decide to bring up some variation of the ‘what are we?’ question, and all we had goes up in flames.

25-year-old woman asks her 27-year-old boyfriend about clarity on their future and he breaks up with her: 'He later said he spoke to his mother and she said he should marry 6 months after finishing postgrad'

We’re not born knowing how to not be anxious around love, and our first experiences with it are filled with all-or-nothing scenarios. I remember how I felt every time my high school sweetheart didn’t immediately text back. I would succumb to the deepest pit, thinking my life was definitely over. At that age, it’s very hard to tell the emotional mind that the other person might be occupied and has not spend its afternoon thinking about how to destroy you.

17-year-old boyfriend wonders if its okay to not want his same age girlfriend to go to a girls night out: 'I was unable to go to the girls night because I was a boy'

The movies that taught us how to act and feel when in love forgot to mention stuff like mortgages, inflation, and the cost of airplane tickets. When we enter a partnership, we do so without knowing what pervasive bad habits our loved ones have and what damage they’ll eventually cause in our relationship. That unknowingness is, in part, good because if we knew everything from the get-go, we would never form any kind of couple.

Frustrated husband considers leaving his wife due to her repeatedly making bad major life decisions over the last 10 years: 'Am I being resentful and unfair?'

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I wish someone or something could protect us from the ridiculous fights we pick and the mistakes we make in our first relationships, but we are at the mercy of stronger forces and find ourselves pushed to go through that character arc alone. Everything feels so dramatic when we're in our early twenties; you couldn't pay me enough to go back, but no one can take the pleasure of watching and analyzing someone who's still in the trenches away from me.

22-year-old college student got dumped by his 21-year-old girlfriend simply for talking to a female friend: ‘From my girlfriend's perspective, she believes: I hid important information.’

Are we always obliged to follow our loved ones' rules? Our most meaningful rules might appear ridiculous to somebody else, but part of the art of learning how to love is respecting what our significant others deem important, even though it sounds ludicrous to us. That’s my position anyway, but let’s see what this Redditor has to say.

32-year-old neat freak is mad about his same age fianceé not taking her shoes off inside his house: ‘Refusing to respect my rules regardless of how silly you think they may be will send me into orbit’

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31-year-old man states that his coworkers' flirting is part of their culture, insists on ‘separating family from business’, leaving his girlfriend questioning whether he simply enjoys the attention: 'Am I overreacting?'

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Husband lands himself in hot water by proposing they purchase a Mother's Day present that is clearly for himself: 'We have a 50-inch that is older but works well enough for me...'

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26-year-old boyfriend who earns considerably more than his 24-year-old girlfriend grows wary of her increasing demands for his money: 'I earn $95k working in corporate finance'