So when you think about a child, a close friend, or a romantic partner,
the word "love" probably comes to mind,
and instantly other emotions rush in:
joy and hope,
excitement, trust and security,
and yes, sometimes sadness and disappointment.
There might not be a word in the dictionary
that more of us are connected to than love.
Yet, given its central importance in our lives,
isn't it interesting that we're never explicitly taught how to love?
We build friendships,
navigate early romantic relationships,
get married and bring babies home from the hospital
with the expectation that we'll figure it out.
But the truth is, we often harm and disrespect the ones we love.
It can be subtle things like guilting a friend
into spending time with you
or sneaking a peak at your partner's texts
or shaming a child for their lack of effort at school.
100 percent of us will be on the receiving end
of unhealthy relationship behaviors,
and 100 percent of us will do unhealthy things.
It's part of being human.
In its worst form, the harm we inflict on loved ones
shows up as abuse and violence,
and relationship abuse
is something that one in three women and one in four men
will experience in their lifetime.
Now, if you're like most people, when you hear those stats,
you'll go, oh, no no no, that would never happen to me.
It's instinctual to move away from the words "abuse" and "violence,"
to think that they happen to someone else somewhere else.
But the truth is, unhealthy relationships and abuse are all around us.
We just call them different things and ignore the connection.
Abuse sneaks up on us disguised in unhealthy love.
I work for an organization called One Love
started by a family whose daughter Yeardley was killed by her ex-boyfriend.
This was a tragedy no one saw coming,
but when they looked back,
they realized the warning signs were there
just no one understood what they were seeing.
Called crazy or drama or too much drinking,
his actions weren't understood to be what they really were,
which was clear signs of danger.
Her family realized that if anyone had been educated about these signs,
her death could have been prevented.
So today we're on a mission to make sure that others
have the information that Yeardley and her friends didn't.
We have three main goals:
give all of us a language for talking about a subject
that's quite awkward and uncomfortable to discuss;
empower a whole frontline, namely friends, to help;
and, in the process, improve all of our ability to love better.
To do this, it's always important to start by illuminating
the unhealthy signs that we frequently miss,
and our work really focuses on creating content
to start conversations with young people.
As you'd expect, most of our content is pretty serious, given the subject at hand,
but today I'm going to use one of our more light-hearted
yet still thought-provoking pieces,
the Couplets,
to illuminate five markers of unhealthy love.
The first is intensity.
(Video) Blue: I haven't seen you in a couple days.
I've missed you.
Orange: Aww, I've missed you too. (#thatslove)
Blue: I haven't seen you in five minutes. It feels like a lifetime.
What have you been doing without me for five whole minutes?
Orange: It's been three minutes. (#thatsnotlove)
Katie Hood: Anybody recognize that? I don't know. I do.
Abusive relationships don't start out abusive.
They start out exciting and exhilarating.
There's an intensity of affection and emotion,
a rush.
It feels really good.
You feel so lucky, like you've hit the jackpot.
But in unhealthy love, these feelings shift over time
from exciting to overwhelming and maybe a little bit suffocating.
You feel it in your gut.
Maybe it's when your new boyfriend or girlfriend
says I love you faster than you were ready for
or starts showing up everywhere, texting and calling a lot.
Maybe they're impatient when you're slow to respond,
even though they know you had other things going on that day.
It's important to remember that it's not how a relationship starts that matters,
it's how it evolves.
It's important in the early days of a new relationship
to pay attention to how you're feeling.
Are you comfortable with the pace of intimacy?
Do you feel like you have space and room to breathe?
It's also really important to start practicing using your voice
to talk about your own needs.
Are your requests respected?
A second marker is isolation.
(Video) Orange 2: Want to hang out later?
Orange 1: Me and my boyfriend always have Monday Funday.
Orange 2: Awww. (#thatslove)
Orange 2: Want to hang out later?
Orange 1: Me and my boyfriend always have Monday Funday.
Orange 2: Tomorrow? Orange 1: It's our Tuesday Snooze Day.
Orange 2: Wednesday? Orange 1: No Friends Day.
(#thatsnotlove)
KH: If you ask me, isolation is one of the most frequently missed
and misunderstood signs of unhealthy love.
Why?
Well, because every new relationship starts out with this intense desire
to spend time together,
it's easy to miss when something shifts.
Isolation creeps in when your new boyfriend or girlfriend
starts pulling you away from your friends and family,
your support system,
and tethering you more tightly to them.
They might say things like,
"Why do you hang out with them? They're such losers"
about your best friends,
or, "They want us to break up. They're totally against us"
about your family.
Isolation is about sowing seeds of doubt
about everyone from your pre-relationship life.
Healthy love includes independence,
two people who love spending time together
but who stay connected to the people and activities they cared about before.
While at first you might spend every waking minute together,
over time maintaining independence is key.
You do this by making plans with friends and sticking to them
and encouraging your partner to do the same.
A third marker of unhealthy love is extreme jealousy.
(Video) Blue 2: What are you so happy about?
Blue 1: She just started following me on Instagram!
(#thatslove)
Blue 2: What are you so nervous about?
Blue 1: She, she just started following me, like, everywhere.
(#thatsnotlove)
KH: As the honeymoon period begins to fade,
extreme jealousy can creep in.
Your partner might become more demanding,
needing to know where you are and who you're with all the time,
or they might start following you everywhere online and off.
Extreme jealousy also brings with it possessiveness and mistrust,
frequent accusations of flirting with other people or cheating,
and refusal to listen to you when you tell them
they have nothing to worry about and that you only love them.
Jealousy is a part of any human relationship,
but extreme jealousy is different.
There's a threatening, desperate, and angry edge to it.
Love shouldn't feel like this.
A fourth marker is belittling.