The Heartbreaking Reason Why We Hold Onto Toxic Relationships

Julia Caesar

When you finally gather enough strength to leave a toxic relationship, no one really tells you what to expect. They tell you to stay strong and they tell you to stay positive.What they don’t tell you how much it hurts- and, it will hurt like hell. It seems illogical to stay with someone who you know is wrong all for you. Ironically, it’s the most destructive relationships that are the hardest ones to let go of. It’s a crazy concept that I still cannot wrap my brain around.

These relationships are the ones that have the highest of highs and and the lowest of lows. You continue to suffer through all of the lows because you cling onto the thought of the highs. You begin to confuse destruction for passion, and passion is supposed to be what loves is all about. It become addicting, and anything else appears to be boring in comparison. We fight to keep one another in a game that in the end, no one will ever win. It leaves you constantly on the edge, always worrying about the possibility of the ending. Always sick of the push-and-pull while at the same time you’re craving the madness when it isn’t there anymore.

Leaving a toxic relationship will undoubtedly make you question every little thing. When you leave a toxic relationship you realize that you don’t always need to apologize for everything. You’re so used to apologizing for all sorts of silly things, especially things that weren’t worthy of an apology, that it started to feel normal to you. You will finally realize that you should never be sorry for someone else’s inability to love you. We spend so much time trying to make that person happy that we forget how to make ourselves happy in the process. We dread the thought of what we’ll be left with to fill that void when they’re gone. We associate emptiness with unhappiness, because when we rely on someone else to make us happy, our biggest fear is losing that person all together.

We forget that love isn’t always going to be enough.

And sometimes two people will love each other so deeply but won’t be able to work together. They bring out the worst in one another, and it is passion in all the wrong ways. It’s destructive, toxic, and chaotic. When you’re blinded by this kind of passion, you fight like hell for it, because that’s what love is supposed to be all about- the passion and the madness. There’s just something about a toxic relationship that draws us in, and I think a longing for passion that comes with it all is the most captivating part of it.

Leaving a toxic relationship is really about the journey we navigate through in order to reach a better understanding of ourselves. It’s about the very moment you realize that the only option left is to walk away. And you never look back. Thought Catalog Logo Mark

Writer, photographer, adventurer.

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