It’s late. You’re lying next to the person you love and you have never felt lonelier in your life. Their back is turned. Or yours is. Eighteen inches of mattress between you and it may as well be a state line. You reached for your phone and typed “unhealthy relationships” into the search bar because something in you needs language for what is happening in this bed. You want a checklist. A verdict. Something that tells you whether to keep going or walk away.
Slow down before you scroll another listicle.
I have been a couples therapist for over seventeen years. Thousands of hours across from real couples in real pain. And I can tell you, with the confidence that comes from that many miles, that the specific loneliness sitting on your chest right now is not proof your relationship is toxic. It is proof your nervous system is doing precisely what it was engineered to do. It is asking a question it has been asking since you were an infant, and no one is answering.
The trouble is that the internet has taught you to read that question as pathology. It isn’t. Almost everything you’ll read tonight will hand you a diagnosis for your partner and cast you as the prosecutor. That frame is exactly what keeps you stuck.
The Frame Almost Every “Unhealthy Relationships” Article Gets Wrong
Google the phrase and you find the same page written a thousand different ways. Contempt. Stonewalling. Gaslighting. Narcissism. Same tone every time. Your partner is broken. You are the victim. Get out.
There is a small slice of relationships where genuine coercion, control, or violence is happening, and in those, you leave and you get help. I will not soften that. But it is not what most people mean when they type these words in at midnight. What most people mean is: we keep looping through the same fight, we can’t seem to find each other, and I don’t know if any of this is fixable.
Different problem. Different answer.
Rooted in attachment theory, adult romantic partners are each other’s primary regulators. Your brain relates to the body beside you the way a baby relates to a caregiver. When the bond wobbles, your amygdala trips the fire alarm before your thinking brain gets to weigh in. Cortisol pours in. Logic exits the room. Both bodies light up at the same second and neither of you can see it.
That is not a defect in either of you. That is biology. Distress inside a bond you care about is a feature, not a bug. Two people connected tightly enough to matter to each other will absolutely scare the daylights out of one another. That is evidence the bond is real. It is not evidence the relationship is over.
Recognize yourself in this?
Talk to Figlet about the loop you and your partner keep repeating. AI relationship coaching grounded in Figs O’Sullivan’s work, LMFT. Free to start, no credit card.
From Empathi’s own research: in 58,221 completed relationship assessments, shut down and withdraw were the top two reactive behaviours for withdrawers (8,653 and 7,743) and the second and third for pursuers (8,007 and 7,700).
The Two Questions Running Underneath Everything
In session, I tell couples the bonded body only ever asks two questions. Never in words.
Do I matter to you.
Am I enough for you.
Every fight about the phone, the dishes, the in-laws, the money, the tone of a text, who said what at dinner, is a proxy war for one of those two questions. When your partner goes silent for four hours, your body is not really preoccupied with the text. It is asking, will I be left. When your partner sighs walking through the door, your body is not analyzing the sigh. It is asking, am I letting them down again.
One of those probably lands louder in your body. The other probably lands louder in theirs. And here is what almost no one names for you. Both of you are answering the same threat with opposite moves.
One partner reaches. Wants more contact, more talking, more assurance. Wants to close the gap because the gap feels like the beginning of losing them. That reaching is a protest for closeness. Love with the alarm going off.
The other partner pulls back. Not because closeness is unwanted, but because the possibility that they are the cause of your pain is unbearable. For them, the question underneath the fight arrives with the answer already written on the back. Am I enough. No. And that no is so unsurvivable that the body does the only move it has. Quiet. Flat. Vanished. Present in the room and gone at the same time.
This is the Waltz of Pain. In my work the reaching one is the Relentless Lover and the retreating one is the Reluctant Lover. Seventy to eighty percent of the couples who walk into my office are living inside this dance. Neither of them is toxic. Both are protectors doing what protectors do. And they are wounding each other while trying to stay alive inside their own hurt.
Why “Unhealthy” Is the Wrong Word
The word toxic has been used so loosely it has almost stopped meaning anything. Your coworker labels her boyfriend toxic because he took three hours to respond. TikTok therapists slap the word on any friction. Meanwhile, someone actually being controlled or hurt quietly decides their experience must not be that bad, because the word has been drained of weight.
Let me tell you what unhealthy actually looks like clinically, after all this time in the room.
Unhealthy is a loop where both partners are in pain, and each partner’s attempt to make the pain stop only feeds it. The protest grows sharper. The withdrawal grows colder. Two bodies climbing up each other’s alarm. No door out. Not one perpetrator and one victim. Two bonded systems in an escalation with no repair on the far side.
The true tell of an unhealthy dynamic is not how loud the fight gets. It is what is missing afterward. Couples who go at it hard and then find their way back to tenderness are not sick. They are alive. The ones who worry me are the pairs who disconnect for days, weeks, months, and never make it back to the softness before the next fight starts.
Read that sentence again. The fight is not the problem. What does or does not happen in the hours and days after the fight is the problem.
I’ve written more on the difference between real damage and normal loop-pain in how attachment styles show up in toxic relationships. The short version. Calling your partner borderline is another way of saying they are too much. Calling them a narcissist is another way of saying they are not enough. Too much. Not enough. The two oldest wounds in the human body, dressed in clinical vocabulary.
The Weaponization of Attachment Theory
Here is the part I have to be honest about. Attachment theory is one of the most compassionate frameworks in all of psychology. And the internet has turned that gift into a courtroom exhibit you now hold up against your partner and against yourself.
I watch it every week. A couple sits down on my couch. One partner has been up late reading about narcissists. The other has been quietly reading about walking on eggshells with someone borderline. They arrive with dueling case files. And I have to tell them what they came in specifically not wanting to hear.
Neither of you is disordered. You are behaving exactly the way any bonded nervous system would behave when the person it depends on for regulation has started looking at it like a patient chart.
The labels feel like clarity. They aren’t. They are the last-ditch move of a protector. If I can pin down what is wrong with you, I don’t have to feel how scared I am underneath. If I can build the case, I don’t have to admit I still want you to turn toward me.
More on why individual attachment labels only ever tell half the story in what secure functioning in relationships actually looks like. What each of you carries in is half the picture. What the two of you construct together, or fail to, is the rest.
If you’d like to name your own pattern first, you can take the free Figs Quiz before you go further.
Why Communication Hacks Don’t Fix This
Here is what almost no one online will say out loud. The standard playbook (communicate better, use I-statements, name your needs, ask open-ended questions) doesn’t just fall short. In my experience it often deepens the very problem it is aimed at.
Why. Because when your partner is sitting across from you, however carefully you say it, and hears you ask for more, the body on the other side is not receiving a request. It is receiving a sentence. I have failed you. I am failing you now. I will fail you again.
I am not making that up. That is what withdrawing partners tell me, over and over, once the shell cracks enough for them to speak from inside it.
Trying to solve a lit-up attachment moment with logic is like trying to teach someone the chemistry of water while they are drowning. The limbic system has the wheel. The part of the brain that could take in an I-statement is offline. You cannot reason your way back into safety.
This is why I teach couples what I call Connection First, Problem Solving Later. When both bodies are lit, you do not go near the content. Not the dishes, not the in-laws, not the money. You settle the two bodies first. You come back to the topic once the alarm has stopped ringing. Reverse that order and you are pouring gasoline on a fire and calling it a conversation.
What The Withdrawing Partner Is Actually Doing
In seventeen years, I have not once sat across from a withdrawing partner who withdrew because they didn’t care. Not one.
I have, however, sat with hundreds of them who went quiet because staying present hurt too much. Because feeling like a chronic disappointment was unbearable. Because they had come to believe that simply being who they are wasn’t enough for the person they most love. The shutdown is not the absence of emotion. It’s a body flooded with more emotion than it can hold, choosing numbness as the only exit it can find.
Let that picture land. The partner you have decided doesn’t care is often folded up in the next room, drowning in how much they do care and how badly they think they are failing you.
If this is your partner, I have a fuller piece on how to cope with an avoidant partner that walks through the specific choreography.
Ready to work on this?
Figlet is AI relationship coaching grounded in attachment science and Figs O’Sullivan’s clinical work, LMFT. First messages free, no signup.
What The Reaching Partner Is Actually Doing
The reaching partner tends to get cast, by themselves and by their partner, as the difficult one. Too much. Too intense. Too needy. Some variation on the theme of I am the problem here.
They are not the problem. They are the smoke alarm.
Their nervous system learned early, somewhere in that first family, that disconnection was dangerous, that love was uncertain, that you had to protest to be noticed. So when the bond shakes in adult life, the body does the exact move it rehearsed as a child. It reaches. It pursues. It escalates. Not because they want to run anyone. Because it is the only phrase their body knows for please come back to me.
And when the partner they are reaching for retreats in response, the reach gets sharper. Now it lands as criticism. Sounds like criticism. Feels like criticism. The withdrawer withdraws harder. The reacher reaches harder. Around and around.
Both of them, if you actually got underneath it, would tell you the same thing. I just want to feel like we are okay again.
That is not an unhealthy relationship. That is two nervous systems trapped in a choreography nobody taught them how to leave. My own marriage has been through this loop many times. Both of us wired hot, both quick to protest, what I sometimes call the Dueling Geminis. What has kept the marriage is not the absence of the loop. It is our stubbornness about repair on the other side. Every time.
The Shift That Actually Changes Everything
Here is the shift. It is not a technique.
Stop asking, is this relationship unhealthy. Start asking, can we look at this pattern together.
The moment two partners stop being on opposite sides of the pattern and start sitting on the same side of the table looking at it together, everything moves. The pattern is the enemy. Not each other. Once you can name the dance between you (the reach, the retreat, the story each of you spins about the other) something in both bodies can finally exhale.
You are not at war with each other. You are at war with a choreography neither of you chose and both of you keep performing.
Real security inside a relationship is not the absence of that dance. It is the shared ability to notice it starting and to reach across it. Not perfectly. Not every time. But often enough that both bodies learn, across hundreds of repetitions, that the bond will hold even when the weather is bad.
That kind of security can be built. It’s not a fixed inheritance from childhood. More on that in whether you can actually change your attachment pattern. The short answer is yes, but not through willpower and not through insight alone. Through felt, embodied experience. When a withdrawer opens their tender truth and the reacher stays soft. When the reacher stays with their own fear and the withdrawer stays present. Repeated enough times. In real moments. With real stakes.
That is how the body updates. That is what I call Sovereign Us. Two people who have done enough of this work to be their own ground and each other’s ground at the same time. Boundaries with connection. Autonomy without exile. A drawbridge, not a wall.
What This Means For You Tonight
If you are reading this at 1 a.m. with your partner asleep beside you, here is what I would say to you if you were on my couch.
The fact that you are searching does not mean you should leave. It also does not mean you should stay. It means your body is telling you something real, and the real question is whether the two of you can turn toward what your body is trying to say, together.
Look at the pattern before you look at the partner. Notice which side of the dance you are standing on. Notice which side they are standing on. Notice how every move you make cues the next move in them. Notice how tired both of you are.
Then ask yourself the honest question. Not, is this relationship unhealthy. Ask, are we willing to see the loop together and try something different.
If both of you answer yes, real change is on the table. I have watched it happen more times than I can count. If one of you answers no, you have different information to work with. Either way, the first move is the same. Stop diagnosing. Start looking.
Related and more specific: am I the toxic one?
Common Questions
What is the difference between an unhealthy relationship and an abusive one?
An unhealthy relationship is two nervous systems stuck in a painful loop where both people are hurting and both are inadvertently making it worse. An abusive relationship involves coercion, threat, control, or violence, where one person is systematically making the other smaller or unsafe. If you’re afraid of your partner’s reactions, or being controlled financially, physically, or psychologically, that is not a loop to work with. That needs safety planning and outside help.
Can an unhealthy relationship become healthy again?
Yes, in most cases where both partners are willing to look at the pattern together instead of continuing to look at each other as the problem. What predicts recovery is not the absence of conflict, but the presence of repair after it. Couples who fight hard and reach for each other afterward are alive. Couples who disconnect and never make it back to softness are the ones I worry about.
Why do I keep ending up in the same painful relationship dynamic?
Because your nervous system is running a survival strategy it learned decades before you had words. It is not a personality flaw or a bad picker. It is a pattern that made sense given the emotional world you grew up in. The way out is not choosing better partners. It is learning to catch the dance in real time and building the capacity to stay soft when the body wants to reach or retreat.
How do I know if I should stay or leave?
Stop asking that question in isolation. Ask instead whether your partner is willing to look at the pattern with you. If both of you can move from prosecutor to shared observer of the loop between you, the relationship is workable. If one of you refuses to see anything but the other’s faults, that is different information. Willingness to see is the variable that matters. Not the intensity of the current pain.
Is it my attachment style that’s making my relationship unhealthy?
No single attachment style makes a relationship unhealthy. What creates the pain is the collision between two styles neither person understands, and the labels each of you starts using to make sense of the other. Your style is not a life sentence. It is an old strategy that got promoted to a relationship habit. It can shift, but only through felt experience with someone who stays.
This is not a you problem or a them problem
“When two insecurely attached people interact, their protector strategies collide to form a negative feedback loop I call the Waltz of Pain. Your protector meets your partner’s protector. Their protector meets yours. Two childhood strategies collide, and the relationship becomes a reenactment of wounds neither partner caused.”
“Neither partner is the villain. They are two younger selves inside adult bodies trying to stay safe in the only ways they once knew.”
Figs O’Sullivan, LMFT
What To Do Next
Do not just close the tab on this.
Bring what surfaced here into a real conversation. Figlet coaches you through the exact loop you and your partner keep repeating, grounded in Figs O’Sullivan’s work, LMFT. Free to start.
Stop diagnosing your partner tonight. Look at the dance instead. That is where the work actually starts.
