4 Signs That May Conclude You’re Attached rather than in Love with Your Partner
It is a thin line between being attached and being in love with somebody. Being in love comes with a level of attachment to it, but being attached and confusing it with being in love is the unhealthy aspect.
Why is it important to highlight these differences?
Often the confusion that springs from an attachment can culminate into something else — such as wondering if you have a personality disorder, dissociation disorder — or just about anything that questions your being.
Being attached to someone is a big deal, it is an innate part of who we are as humans. But due to negligence or other life traumas, people are thrown to the extreme spectrum of this attachment. Meaning that a healthy dose of attachment is allowed in a normal relationship, but an unhealthy one explains where you are consciously and perhaps, subconsciously relying your entire being on somebody else — such as your self-esteem, self-worth, value, and so on. This helps explain why you would undergo rigorous questioning in the bid to differentiate who you are from what your partner says or treats you as.
Hence, the grave needs to understand the signs or what it entails to be attached to somebody antithetical to loving them.
Here we go:
Being attached to someone makes you underestimate yourself (in all ramifications)
If your entire framework bows to the opinion or love that comes from your partner, it sure means that you underestimate everything to do with yourself. But the dangerous aspect of this is underestimating your instincts. This arises due to your lack of sense of self. You’ve attached so much meaning to how your partner upholds you in such a way that it has numbed out your ability to pay attention to yourself and see if any of it is aligned with you or not.
What you need here is some sense of self-awareness, to not disregard feelings, thoughts, or (bad) experiences that keep repeating themself and analyze what you truly feel for them.
Being so attached makes you accept everything
Making excuses or coming up with reasons to abolish a threatening word, action, or situation while dating is normal. But constant neglect of the other’s behavior towards you shows you lack the inner compass to guide you on what to accept or not. Thus you’re bound to keep foregoing all the red flags that will eventually lead you to a dead end with immeasurable pain. Again, you need to learn to question questionable things before or while getting into a relationship. I was once engaged to a guy who never acknowledged his mother for the mere reason of being a woman. I found it strange, but I thought he would never disregard me. Long story short: I received a full dose of neglect and contempt from the said guy for being a “mere” girl. Watch it!
Attachment makes you enslave yourself to your partner
There is compromise and sacrifice needed to make a healthy relationship sustainable. But in a situation where you’re constantly enslaving yourself, neglecting your needs, values, and wants, and getting trampled on for the sake of a relationship may just conclude you’re more attached than you think in love. Love doesn’t come without its boundaries. Your partner cannot ask you to steal or sleep with somebody else for them for example, and you deem it fit to. People in this situation are often carried away by the idea of being with someone rather than actually being with them — aka attachment.
Attachment makes you absorb only the good
Remember when I talked about making excuses for bad behaviors? People heavily attached to their relationships or partner equally dwell on the fantasy aspect of things. They often refuse to smell the coffee. They capitalize on all the sweet poems and romance from the beginning or middle of things that they forget to fully comprehend the toxicities in between. Or maybe there’s none. This is a problem, as every relationship always has its good and bad. It just depends on which one outweighs the other.
In a nutshell:
Self-awareness is a vital tool that will save you from the penury of unhealthy attachments. At times it comes as a sharp pain in your heart, like a burden that needs to be lifted. Do not confuse this pain to mean it wants to languish you. Oftentimes when we go against ourselves we never have peace. And lack of peace with oneself or another manifests itself in the most uncomfortable ways known — and unknown. It means that if you’re self-aware or self-aware enough, you will sit down with that discomfort, have a nice chat with yourself and see how you’ve attached your meaning to life (such a great mantle) to somebody else in the name of attachment confused as love.
Good luck in deciphering those differences.
Thanks for taking the time to read x
