If a relationship requires lots of analysis, is that a red flag?

[Before you can make things better, you have to stop making them worse...]

Having been in relationships, from my teens to early 30s, I never had to do research and seek a bunch of outside advice about a relationship.  I did for grieving breakups, but never for trying to maintain a relationship or figure out how to make it work.

Is having to do this a red flag?  Or not necessarily?

[struggli]

Having been in relationships, from my teens to early 30s, I never had to do research and seek a bunch of outside advice about a relationship.  I did for grieving breakups, but never for trying to maintain a relationship or figure out how to make it work.

Is having to do this a red flag?  Or not necessarily?

[HowPredictable]

I think it is a red flag, for sure.

While I'm not of the school of thought that there is a "perfect" relationship or "The One" out there for everybody, I believe that a good relationship by definition should be relatively effortless.   Sure, there will always be problems to surmount -- but staying together should not involve Herculean efforts.   Personally, I talked endlessly to my (very patient) friends about my relationship issues, read plenty of self-help relationship books, scoured the internet, and journalled like crazy.   All to try to keep the connection with exBPD afloat; in truth, at the first sign of a leak I should have simply let it sink to the murky bottom of the pond, where it belonged.

I also genuinely believe that for those of us who toiled in dysfunctional relationships for far too long, and who worked our fingers to the bone to make a square relationship peg fit into a round hole, it was mainly to fix the unfixable and prove our own specialness through validation.

It's an excellent point, Struggli, and one I haven't seen made before.

[turtle]

Is having to do this a red flag?  Or not necessarily?

Absolutely!


turtle

[MaybeSo]

Its a big red flag that I'm abdicating my own self care in exchange for trying to solve the mystery of another person's behavior, in an effort to control or change it.

Yes, it is  a big red flag... .  that I need to get centered and refocused on my own life and my own choices.