Love is meant to inspire you to be a better version of yourself, not make you give up hobbies, friends, or your basic identity.
Shrinking
You should never have to diminish your smarts, career accomplishments, or successes in life to make a man feel better about himself.
If he’s intimidated by your brilliance or wants you to be small so he can feel bigger than you, then that’s his problem and has nothing to do with you or your value.
The right man will want to celebrate your victories with you and cheer you on to achieve more.
Isolation
Cutting off your friends or family to make someone happy is a huge red flag that is usually followed by intense loneliness. Your support system keeps you grounded by offering perspective, history, and unconditional emotional safety.
You should never have to choose between that and a relationship. A good man will be glad you had a life before him, and that you have so much more to do when you’re not with him.
Appearance
You should never change or drastically alter your look (haircut, style of dress, fitness goals, etc.) just to meet his ideal or type. Decisions you make about your appearance should be your choice alone.
Changing your outside to please someone else will only cause you to lose your identity and gives his shallow wants more power than your comfort.
Financing
Taking care of one another in times of temporary need is healthy in a relationship. However, enabling his lifestyle or debts is not. It creates a parent-child relationship that destroys attraction and leaves you with an unbalanced power dynamic where your financial stability is compromised.
When you are financially independent you can stay with a man because you choose to, not because you’re chained to him through a million bills or perpetual enabling.
Hobbies
Letting go of doing the things that you love to do (painting, hiking or maybe playing a certain sport) because your partner doesn’t like to do those things is a one-way ticket to resentment city. Your hobbies are what fuel you and make you the person your significant other fell in love with.
Relationships should allow for parallel play, where each person can do their own thing and then reunite and share about their day.
Dreams
Giving up on your dreams of living in a certain city, having a certain career, or even whether or not you want kids just to stay together will almost never work out. Yes, relationships are about compromise, but there is a huge difference between compromising and throwing your dreams out the window.
If you let a man take away your dreams, you will eventually hate yourself for it in a way that love will not fix.
Personality
You shouldn’t ever feel like you need to censor your personality, mute your sarcasm or withhold your opinions in order to avoid conflict. If you find yourself watching your tone all the time or toning down your loud personality because he finds it annoying or aggressive, then he isn’t loving the real you.
Intimacy cannot exist when you don’t feel you can be 100% yourself, and the right man will fall in love with your quirks and your candidness.
Disrespect
Accepting negging, insults or continual put downs as “being patient” is giving someone permission to chip away at your self-worth little by little until you don’t even know yourself anymore.
Letting someone disrespect that basic boundary of kindness will make it nearly impossible to draw that line again and feel equal in the relationship.
Fixing
You are not his therapist, career counselor or personal life manager. It’s great to be supportive, but there’s a fine line between that and trying to fix him for his core issues of low drive or emotional immaturity.
He is ultimately responsible for his own mental health and life path. If you pour all your efforts into trying to fix his life, you’ll have nothing left for yourself and you’ll feel lonely and neglected.
Labor
Doing all of the heavy lifting when it comes to the relationship, whether it’s planning every date night, remembering every special occasion, or always being the one to initiate the tough conversations, will leave you completely burnt out.
A relationship should be 50/50, with both partners contributing and really putting in the work to keep things healthy.