There’s often a misconception that the intensity of someone’s feelings or actions equates to how much they love you. You’re running into this person more frequently than usual, they are calling you all the time, and the attention can be quite flattering. You shrug it off and are content with the simple explanation that it’s a coincidence.
The internal battle begins with racing thoughts of “Could this be fate?” and “One date won’t hurt.” You finally give in to their romantic advances, you’re on the first date, and things are going extremely well. As the conversation develops, it turns out you have similar tastes in music, go to the same gym, and even like the same movies.
You are now intrigued, excited… you can’t help but start to blush. They profess their feelings for you and admit they have been developing feelings for quite some time. At the end of the date, they lean in for a kiss and you go to bed writing it off as a good night gesture.
As the relationship develops, you enter the honeymoon phase and introduce them to your inner circle of friends. After some time, your friends start to express that you’ve been becoming increasingly distant from them, and one even shared their disapproval of your new partner. Little do they know that every time you agreed to hang out but canceled at the last minute, it was because your partner got extremely jealous.
You don’t want to tell your friends that you were guilt tripped into cancelling on them after your partner begged you not to leave because they missed you and wanted to spend time with you. When you tell your partner you’re not going out anymore they tell you “Baby, you’re my whole world, I can’t help but keep you to myself.” All this aggressive attention makes you feel good; it makes you feel loved.
Your friends invite you out for a Sunday brunch and you agree to go because you want to give your partner the benefit of the doubt and not assume that they want you to have a social life deep down.
Turns out, they deserved the doubt because if you had trusted your gut, maybe you would have made it out of that relationship sooner than later. You were 24 years old, with your whole life ahead of you, and all of that was cut short because if your partner couldn’t be with you, then nobody could—they were crazy in love.