While most people would agree that the energy investment in a relationship should be split 50/50, we all know life is often more complicated than that. There are one million and one reasons somebody might not be able to carry as much of a load as they otherwise could, and if you love them, you accept that as part of the journey and hope the balance is restored somewhere down the line.
Relationships shouldn’t be transactional, but your physical and emotional bandwidth is limited, and having a partner is meant to ease both of your stresses, not cause them to fester. What are the signs of an uneven love dynamic, and can anything be done to fix them short of breaking up? Is somebody going to be told to get therapy? Probably, is the answer to that last one.
You’re making all the plans
At the very latest, your first time seeing into another high school student’s backpack should be enough to teach you that not everybody is good at organization. One perk of a relationship is that you can lean on each other’s strengths, so it’s not uncommon for one partner to pick up the slack when it comes to keeping the calendar organized.
When it comes to spending time with each other, true quality bonding time, a lack of attention to detail goes from a quirk to a deeper issue. It takes a lot of mutual effort to maintain a romantic connection, and without consistent fanning, you run into the all-too-common issue of a dead spark. Love gets easily taken for granted during times of individual hardship.
You shoulder all the responsibility
The foundational truth behind partnering up is that very few of us can get very far in life alone. The effects of loneliness on the psyche are so dire, that many people stay in relationships that are abusive, toxic, and draining, fearing the choice of perceived isolation. Responsibility comes in many forms, but we all owe and expect basic consideration from those around us.
If you feel you’re constantly on the hook for something, which could be a micro-issue that ultimately doesn’t matter, or something as big as holding the relationship together with your own hands, there is an unfair energy distribution at play. A partner who doesn’t accept accountability even shared accountability, will push the burdens of the entire relationship onto their partner.
You keep the house in order
For the clearest, most literal example of an energy-draining task that’s often unfairly shared in relationships, look no further than the very surfaces in front of you and how dusty they are. Maintaining a household, or a rented apartment hold if you’re a millennial, is an incredibly draining task, often piled on top of whatever else had to be done that day.
Cooking, cleaning, vacuuming, shopping, keeping track of ingoing and outgoing expenses, and preventing space from regressing into a primal den of anarchy is a pretty hefty job. When put like that, it’s clearly something that just one partner shouldn’t be saddled with. Everybody should know how to cook something, wash clothes, and sweep a floor by the time they expect somebody to seriously commit to them, or this problem is bound to emerge.
What can you do about the issue?
The silver lining here is that all of these signs can be addressed, within reason. The reason therapy is so effective is that people aren’t that conscious of their own biases and the shortcomings they cause, meaning that it often takes an outside perspective to really get through to the issue. You can learn to take better care of your home and how to make food without too much hassle, but when it comes to confronting emotional or intellectual laziness, the issue becomes harder to mend.
You should always communicate with your partner, especially when something is bothering you regarding the relationship, that’s just common sense. When it comes to how to execute this kindly and effectively, try to lead with your feelings and expand from there. If it takes too much energy for them to remotely care about your feelings, then you know there is nothing there worth trying to salvage…