9 Toxic Beliefs That Could Potentially Ruin Your Relationship

1. It’s all the same. Once you’ve been hurt, it is easy to think that it’s all going to be downhill from there and that every relationship will be the same. When you get into a relationship with that mentality, you run the risk of sabotaging it while it’s still fresh and exciting. People can usually pick up on these vibes, they can sense that you are not fully trusting them which could push them away early on.

2. I’m damaged goods and no one will want me. Everyone comes with baggage, but to let your baggage define you or your relationship is not the best way to overcome your baggage. The beauty of connections is that they sometimes give us an outlet to vent and in a way heal ourselves. Talking to people especially loved ones about our scars should only bring us closer and help us get over our troubles.

3. Keeping score. Nothing suffocates you or the relationship more than keeping track of who did what and whose turn it is to return the favor. The healthiest relationships are the ones that flow freely without counting compromises. This doesn’t mean that you let someone take advantage of you but it means you set yourself free by expressing the right amount of love and gratitude to your partner even if they don’t exactly meet you at your level on the score sheet.

4. Assuming your partner understands. Sometimes we don’t say the things we truly want to say and we repress what we truly want to express because we think that our partners should just know what we’re thinking. Unless your partner is highly intuitive, it is best to drop all assumptions and actually communicate how you really feel about something. Creating assumptions triggers certain stories in our heads that are totally made up by us. The truth is, we can never know why other people do the things they do unless we ask and then trust their answer.

5. Love always leads to heartbreak. The wrong kind of love always leads to heartbreak, but the right kind will lead to fulfillment and happiness and sharing our small world with someone else. In order to find the right kind of love, we will have to go through a few wrong ones to appreciate it but we can’t generalize and treat every relationship as such.

6. I’m cursed. We all have believed at one point that we are cursed or jinxed when it comes to love especially after a few bad consecutive relationships, so we give up on trying to fix ourselves and our situations and surrender to the absurd myth of being cursed in love. Love is not a curse, love sets us free, the curse is to believe that we are doomed forever because our hearts made a few wrong choices.

7. It’s better to be alone. It’s better to know that you can be fine on your own, but nobody wants to be alone without someone in their lives no matter what anyone says. We thrive on relationships, loving someone or being loved. Sometimes when we isolate ourselves, we deny ourselves to live and feel something extraordinary.

8. Your partner should make up for someone else’s mistakes. You can’t let someone pay the price of someone else’s mistakes. We unknowingly expect certain things from our partner–things that they shouldn’t even be held accountable for. Sometimes you have a mental checklist of all the things your partner should be doing way too soon that you feel disappointed if they don’t. We have to ask ourselves if what we are expecting is reasonable or is it related to our own insecurities.

9. I will never find what I am looking for. We sometimes reach a state of despair when we get heartbroken a few times. But if you look around you, you will see that the world is full of love as much as it is full of struggle. If you focus on the good things in your life and the good things around you that exudes love, you will be in a much better place to invite and embrace a new idea of love into your life. Become the kind of person you desire to have a relationship with and you will soon explore new horizons of love that you never even knew existed.

I’ve come to learn that relationships can be our greatest teachers, even the wrong ones, you will always grow as a person and become more resilient. It’s not too late to change the way you look at yourself or at love and find someone who emphasizes that.