As the saying goes, when you look at someone through rose tinted glasses, all the red flags just look like flags. When you’re close to someone it’s easy to allow yourself to make excuses for behaviour which, if it came from anyone else, would be completely unacceptable to you. You find yourself trying to justify their actions; perhaps they’re lazy, they don’t think like you, or they didn’t mean it to come across like that. When you bring it up in conversation with them, as you have done many times before, they apolgise profusely, adamant that they’re not doing it on purpose and vehemently promising that they’ll make up for it in the future, which is usually enough to satisfy you as you come away thinking that you’ve finally got through to them.
If you’re not in a good place mentally it’s easy to ascribe some of the blame, rightly or wrongly, to yourself. After discussing it with them and once again coming away satisfied that they’re doing nothing wrong, you can go as far as to become angry with yourself for annoying them with your incessant questioning, even blaming yourself for driving them away despite the fact that, before speaking to them, you were one hundred percent certain that their behaviour was the problem. You feel so dependent on them that, regardless of whether you’re doing it consciously, you actually begin to blame yourself for the problems that they are causing, perhaps because it’s easier to blame yourself than admit that you’re so reliant on them that there’s nothing they could do that would be dreadful enough to push you away.
After a while you become so accustomed to the repetitiveness of the arguments and fall outs that it starts to seem normal and you no longer even recognise that something is seriously wrong. Whenever they do something nice or show some affection, no matter how little or trivial it is, you seize on it as proof that you’re correct to stick with them and use it to justify the many disadvantages that should be enough for you to realise it’s not worth it. Despite every rational part of you being fully aware that the toxicity is nothing but bad for you, and even your friends repeatedly telling you the same thing, you continue to cling to your naive belief that this is just how things are and there’s not really a lot you can do.
Eventually, however, the time will come when you come to your senses. It will likely happen one of two ways – either you will grow enough to realise that you don’t need the negativity in your life and finally do the right thing, or they will find a way to achieve the impossible and do something so reprehensible that you recognise that it’s not worth it. It might even be a mixture of the two, the point is that, sooner or later, the day will come when you get so close to the edge that you’re forced to reckon with the cold, hard truth of reality, which is that, despite everything you’d convinced yourself to be true, the entire thing is a complete waste of your time and it’s achieved nothing other than to hold you back and damage you emotionally.
You will miss them. You’ll miss the inside jokes you had, the little things they did that made you smile and the times you had together that were actually good. You’ll find it hard to watch the shows you both liked, you’ll see tweets that you wish you could send to them and you’ll even find yourself, undeterred by everything they did, wishing you could just text them and go back to how things were. You will also, however, feel an immense sense of relief that you’ve finally done the right thing. Whenever you’re tempted to text them or check their Instagram, you’ll remind yourself of the reason it all came crashing down in the first place, and you’ll leave their number blocked. As time goes by you’ll become ever more confident that you made the right decision, perhaps even questioning why it took you so long to do so, and you will promise yourself that you’ll never let anything like that happen ever again. You will learn from the situation, you will grow as a person and, most importantly, you will be happy.
