The difference between healthy and unhealthy love Katie Hood
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 front line,
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: 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?
Orange 1: Me and my boyfriend
always have Monday Funday.
Orange 2: Want to hang out?
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.
KH: If you ask me, isolation
is one of the most frequently missed
and misunderstood signs of unhealthy love.
Why?
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 prerelationship 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!
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.
(Video) Blue: Wanna hang out?
Orange: I gotta study.
Blue: You’ll get an A anyway,
A for amazing. (#thatslove)
Blue: Wanna hang out?
Orange: I gotta study.
Blue: You’ll get an F anyway,
F for, F for… stupid. (#thatsnotlove)
KH: Yeah, hmm.
In unhealthy love,
words are used as weapons.
Conversations that used to be
fun and lighthearted
turn mean and embarrassing.
Maybe your partner makes fun of you
in a way that hurts,
or maybe they tell stories and jokes
for laughs at your expense.
When you try to explain
that your feelings have been hurt,
they shut you down
and accuse you of overreacting.
“Why are you so sensitive?
What’s your problem. Give me a break.”
You are silenced by these words.
It seems pretty obvious,
but your partner should have your back.
Their words should build you up,
not break you down.
They should keep
your secrets and be loyal.
They should make you feel more confident,
not less.
Finally, a fifth marker: volatility.
(Video) Orange 1:
I’d be sad if we broke up.
Orange 2: I’d be sad too. (#thatslove)
Orange 1: I’d so depressed
if we ever broke up.
I’d throw myself off this step.
I would! Don’t try to stop me!
(#thatsnotlove)
KH: Frequent breakups and makeups,
high highs and low lows:
as tension rises, so does volatility.
Tearful, frustrated fights
followed by emotional makeups,
hateful and hurtful comments like,
“You’re worthless,
I’m not even sure why I’m with you!”
followed quickly by apologies
and promises it will never happen again.
By this point, you’ve been so conditioned
to this relationship roller coaster
that you may not realize how unhealthy
and maybe even dangerous
your relationship has become.
It can be really hard to see
when unhealthy love turns towards abuse,
but it’s fair to say
that the more of these markers
your relationship might have,
the more unhealthy and maybe dangerous
your relationship could be.
And if your instinct is
to break up and leave,
which is advice
so many of us give our friends
when they’re in unhealthy relationships,
that’s not always the best advice.
Time of breakup can be
a real trigger for violence.
If you fear you might be
headed towards abuse or in abuse,
you need to consult with experts
to get the advice on how to leave safely.
But it’s not just
about romantic relationships
and it’s not just about violence.
Understanding the signs of unhealthy love
can help you audit and understand
nearly every relationship in your life.
For the first time, you might understand
why you’re disappointed in a friendship
or why every interaction
with a certain family member
leaves you discouraged and anxious.
You might even begin to see
how your own intensity and jealousy
is causing problems
with colleagues at work.
Understanding is
the first step to improving,
and while you can’t make
every unhealthy relationship healthy –
some you’re going
to have to leave behind –
you can do your part every day
to do relationships better.
And here’s the exciting news:
it’s actually not rocket science.
Open communication, mutual respect,
kindness, patience –
we can practice these things every day.
And while practice
will definitely make you better,
I have to promise you
it’s also not going to make you perfect.
I do this for a living
and every day I think and talk
about healthy relationships,
and still I do unhealthy things.
Just the other day as I was trying
to shuttle my four kids out the door
amidst quarreling, squabbling
and complaints about breakfast,
I completely lost it.
With an intentionally angry edge,
I screamed,
“Everybody just shut up and do what I say!
You are the worst!
I am going to take away
screen time and dessert
and anything else you could possibly
ever enjoy in life!”
(Laughter)
Anybody been there?
(Applause)
Volatility, belittling.
My oldest son turned around
and looked at me, and said,
“Mom, that’s not love.”
(Laughter)
For a minute, I really wanted
to kill him for calling me out.
Trust me.
But then I gathered myself
and I thought, you know what,
I’m actually proud.
I’m proud that he has a language
to make me pause.
I want all of my kids to understand
what the bar should be
for how they’re treated
and to have a language and a voice
to use when that bar is not met
versus just accepting it.
For too long, we’ve treated
relationships as a soft topic,
when relationship skills
are one of the most important
and hard to build things in life.
Not only can understanding unhealthy signs
help you avoid the rabbit hole
that leads to unhealthy love,
but understanding and practicing
the art of being healthy
can improve nearly
every aspect of your life.
I’m completely convinced
that while love is
an instinct and an emotion,
the ability to love better
is a skill we can all build
and improve on over time.
Thank you.
(Applause)