Most of us go into relationships with good intentions. We want closeness, loyalty, passion, and someone who truly gets us. The trouble is that some of the habits we develop along the way – habits that feel perfectly normal, even romantic – are quietly doing damage. They slip into the routine without fanfare, often mistaken for signs of love or commitment.
Unhealthy relationships are often marked by repeated behaviors, habits, and communication that make the relationship feel negative and almost unbearable for one or both parties involved. These patterns can have a significant detrimental impact on a person’s mental health and well-being. While in some types of relationships, the presence of toxic or abusive behaviors is evident, unhealthy patterns can be subtle and more difficult to recognize. The nine habits below are some of the most common – and most commonly excused.
1. Using Contempt During Conflict
1. Using Contempt During Conflict (Image Credits: Pexels)
Contempt is fueled by long-simmering negative thoughts about a partner, and it comes to a head when one person attacks the other from a position of relative superiority. Importantly, contempt is the single greatest predictor of divorce. It shows up as eye-rolling, sarcasm, mocking tones, name-calling, or dismissive body language – things many couples brush off as “just venting” or “just being honest.”
Research even shows that couples who are contemptuous of each other are more likely to suffer from infectious illness, such as colds and the flu, than others due to weakened immune systems. That detail alone makes the emotional cost feel very physical. Recognizing contempt for what it is – not passion or frustration, but a fundamental signal of disrespect – is the first step toward stopping it.
2. Persistent Criticism of Your Partner's Character
2. Persistent Criticism of Your Partner's Character (Image Credits: Pexels)
Criticizing your partner is different from offering a critique or voicing a complaint. The latter two are about specific issues, whereas criticism is an ad hominem attack. It is an attack on your partner at the core of their character. In effect, you are dismantling their whole being when you criticize. It might sound like “you never think about me” or “you’re so selfish” – phrases that feel expressive in the moment but land like verdicts.
The problem with criticism is that when it becomes pervasive, it paves the way for far deadlier behaviors to follow. It makes the partner feel assaulted, rejected, and hurt, and often causes both people to fall into an escalating pattern where criticism reappears with greater and greater frequency and intensity, which eventually leads to contempt. There is a meaningful difference between saying “I felt ignored last night” and “you’re always ignoring me.” One describes an experience. The other assigns an identity.
3. Stonewalling Instead of Taking a Break
3. Stonewalling Instead of Taking a Break (Image Credits: Pexels)
Stonewalling is usually a response to contempt. It occurs when the listener withdraws from the interaction, shuts down, and simply stops responding to their partner. Rather than confronting the issues, people who stonewall can make evasive maneuvers such as tuning out, turning away, acting busy, or engaging in obsessive or distracting behaviors. It feels like self-protection. To the partner on the receiving end, it feels like abandonment.
Studies show that men substantially tend to stonewall more, with roughly four out of five stonewallers in Gottman’s research being male. This behavior emerges after years of criticism, contempt, and defensiveness in relationships. Partners experience physiological flooding during stonewalling, including increased heart rate, stress hormones release, and fight-or-flight responses. The antidote is not avoidance – it is explicitly requesting a pause, with an agreed-upon time to return to the conversation.
4. Defensiveness That Blocks Accountability
4. Defensiveness That Blocks Accountability (Image Credits: Pexels)
Defensiveness involves responding to a complaint with counter-complaints, excuses, or righteous indignation instead of taking responsibility. It is so common in struggling relationships that most couples barely notice when it happens. One partner raises an issue. The other immediately explains why they are actually the victim. Communication stalls completely.
Defensiveness destroys the ability to fix problems in relationships. That is because if the problem is real to your partner, then it is real, regardless of how you feel about it. Defensive people systematically disregard the needs of their partners. This habit is easy to rationalize – nobody wants to feel falsely accused – but the pattern of never accepting any responsibility gradually erodes trust and makes genuine repair nearly impossible.
5. Treating Jealousy as Proof of Love
5. Treating Jealousy as Proof of Love (Image Credits: Unsplash)
Because jealousy and controlling behaviors may be confused for investment in a relationship, it may be especially difficult to recognize these attributes as unhealthy. In support of this, roughly one out of four young people report that it is okay for a significant other to be “really jealous” at times. The idea that jealousy signals love is culturally widespread, showing up in songs, films, and everyday conversations between couples.
Jealousy is possessive behavior in a toxic form. It is healthy to have a small level of jealousy as it is a natural human emotion. However, having the ability to keep this in perspective is critical. When this emotion turns poisonous, it is often accompanied by other forms of manipulation or abusive actions. Controlling who a partner spends time with, demanding constant location updates, or punishing them for friendships is not devotion. It is control dressed up as caring.
6. Gaslighting and Blame-Shifting
6. Gaslighting and Blame-Shifting (Image Credits: Pexels)
When someone can control how a partner views a situation, they are manipulating them. It is abusive to make someone believe something that is not true. At its core, this behavior is about self-preservation and power. The toxic individual creates a storyline that keeps them as the one in the right and their partner in the wrong. Classic examples include telling a partner they are “overreacting,” “too sensitive,” or “imagining things” when they raise a legitimate concern.
Signs of toxicity include persistent criticism, blame-shifting, belittling, and emotional threats, creating an environment where trust and safety are compromised. Online interactions can reinforce manipulative dynamics, such as gaslighting, which deepen psychological damage. Many people who experience habitual gaslighting start to genuinely question their own memory and perceptions, which is precisely what makes this habit so damaging over time.
7. Bringing Up the Past During Arguments
7. Bringing Up the Past During Arguments (Image Credits: Pexels)
Dredging up old grievances during a current disagreement is one of those habits that almost every couple has engaged in at some point. It feels justified in the moment – the pattern finally seems clear, the evidence feels undeniable. In practice, it turns a resolvable conflict into an indictment of a person’s entire history, making real resolution nearly impossible.
Toxic relationships can have devastating psychological effects on mental health. Individuals often find themselves trapped in a cycle of emotional manipulation, criticism, and instability, which can result in persistent feelings of worthlessness and self-doubt. Habitually reopening closed wounds instead of addressing the present issue signals that grievances were never genuinely processed. Healthy relationships know how to repair and resolve ruptures when they occur. They strive for improvement, are committed to growth, and actively work towards these things.
8. Losing Individual Identity Through Enmeshment
8. Losing Individual Identity Through Enmeshment (Image Credits: Pexels)
Enmeshment can be defined as the experience of confusion about one’s separateness from others and a reduced sense of self and autonomy in relationships. It also suggests an inability to fully experience, understand, and value one’s own thoughts, feelings, and needs in the context of a relationship. Couples often interpret this level of fusion as deep love or ultimate commitment. Over time, though, it hollows out individual identity in ways that eventually create resentment.
Enmeshment can hinder personal growth and prevent individuals from developing a sense of self outside of the relationship. Research in social psychology suggests that enmeshment is associated with higher levels of relationship dissatisfaction, anxiety, and depression. Furthermore, studies have found that individuals in enmeshed relationships may experience difficulty in forming and maintaining healthy connections with friends and family members. Two people who genuinely love each other still need to remain two separate people.
9. Keeping Score Instead of Keeping Connection
9. Keeping Score Instead of Keeping Connection (Image Credits: Unsplash)
Scorekeeping is the quiet habit of mentally tallying who did what, who gave more, who apologized last, who owes whom. It might start as a simple awareness of imbalance, but it quickly becomes a lens that colors every interaction. In unhealthy relationships, partners may feel uncomfortable sharing their true thoughts and emotions, either due to fear of the other’s reaction or a lack of psychological security. They might also feel like they need to walk on eggshells due to frequent mood swings or unpredictable behaviors. Consequently, they might not voice their personal needs, trying to overcompensate instead. This can result in an imbalanced, one-sided relationship that leaves both parties unsatisfied and emotionally drained.
Through over 30 years of research and observing couples, Dr. Gottman identified what he calls the “magic ratio” of 5 positive interactions to 1 negative interaction during a conflict. Scorekeeping destroys that balance by converting every positive gesture into a transaction rather than a genuine act of care. Toxic relationships can profoundly impact an individual’s mental health, and the constant stress and emotional turmoil associated with such relationships can result in anxiety, depression, and low self-esteem. When partners start competing with each other rather than collaborating, both people lose.
Recognizing these habits is genuinely difficult, partly because so many of them are normalized by culture and partly because they often develop gradually from behaviors that once felt manageable or even affectionate. It should be noted that any of these behaviors may sometimes occur in a healthy relationship. People have bad days and act in unkind or inappropriate ways. What defines a relationship as toxic is when these behaviors occur consistently and are the person’s usual method of interaction. The distinction between an occasional misstep and an entrenched pattern matters enormously, and that distinction is usually where the real work begins.