In relationships, loyalty is the main component of building a healthy relationship. Loyalty builds trust within partners, but what happens when too much of even a good thing can turn into a bad situation.
Are you in a relationship or friendship that no longer works for you?
When you are around the person your energy feels drained, your mind feels distorted and maybe even angry at times.
We often linger in relationships that we feel to be over but somehow our unwavering loyalty makes us commit to this person over and over again even though it is painfully killing us to stay in it.
Many times our connection to the past is what binds us to this person even though they could be a totally different person than who they were when you first met.
Holding on to sweet and nostalgic memories of the past can at times make us loyal for the wrong reasons.
When loyalty turns into sacrifice
A healthy sense of loyalty is when you are using loyalty to nurture and build your relationships while it evolves and grows.
Toxic loyalty is when you have invested too much time in a relationship that is a dead-end but you are unwilling to release it due to being afraid of the outcome or change.
We need to understand the beginning stages of any kind of relationship will usually be sweet. It is called the ‘’Honeymoon’’ stage.
Everything goes great. You are always happy to be around each other and to get to know more of each other.
This stage can make you quickly form a bonded connection especially if there is chemistry and you both have a lot in common.
It’s not until years later that you come to learn that you might hate this person.
Why does this happen to us? What changed, or what happened?
Well, for starters it’s, TIME.
Time changes all things. You both were different people with different circumstances.
I see this happen a lot with marriages. 5-7 years later the two people who were once so in love with each other now despise each other.
They can’t even physically be in the same room as one another. You start to notice little discrepancies. You hate the way they sound when they laugh, how they eat, or the noises they make when they breathe.
First, it starts with the small things like the ones just mentioned then you start to notice the bigger things like how they complain too much or how they act so fake around other people.
You feel disgusted in them, then eventually in yourself for even having fallen in love with this person.
When we quickly and passionately get attached to another person we don’t often see the little traits (red flags) that might later annoy us down the line.
Only after having been through so many trials and tribulations with another person and being chronically exposed to their ugly side do you start to realize, goodness, you really can’t stand this person.
With friendships where the connection can be strong enough to hurt when you have to leave but it is still easier to disconnect, what about a marriage that has children, a mortgage, and car payments?
Bound to your responsibilities
With a marriage, you are not only financially bound but mentally and physically too.
We cannot sit there and just blame the other person. Accusing them of their changing or hiding who they are… The truth is that everyone involved has a little fault.
Many times if you really think back to when the relationship started you can already see little flags, you just chose not to acknowledge them because of the high of it all.
The feelings of a new and exciting relationship block our reasoning and judgment.
I have seen too many people date where they see each other every day, if they are not physically together, they talk on the phone for hours on end.
They have a desperate need to be in one another’s energy. Not too long after they move in together, they start forming other physical and financial bonds that could later cause them more trouble.
You have never really gotten a chance to know the other person on a mental and spiritual level.
You don’t even know what they are looking for in a partner, how they want to raise their children, how they view money, how well do they get along with their family.
The ‘’Honeymoon’’ stage blinds us all
When you are in the ‘’honeymoon’’ stage it’s like an addict getting their next fix, and if you add sex in the mix you are now running on all of your emotional sense, and all reasoning and logic have been thrown out the window.
With any kind of relationship, you need to take your time to really get to know the other person.
Even then you have to realize that in life there are no guarantees. Always take your time to where even later down the road when your relationship hits bumps and pitfalls you have already formed a strong foundation to be able to resolve things in a decent manner where you don’t compromise the relationship.
