How to Tell if That Feeling Is True Love or Dysfunction
Tortured romance isn’t actually romantic
The oft-covered Persuaders’ classic “It’s a Thin Line Between Love and Hate,” tells the story of a woman driven to violence by her partner’s cheating. The entire premise of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights is the agonizing relationship between Catherine and Heathcliff — a dysfunctional, torturous codependence that lingers for decades and ripples through generations. High-drama dynamics produce compelling art, but can be confusing, painful, difficult to understand, and sometimes hard to fully recognize in real life. If it hurts this much, the thinking goes, it must be the real thing — a thought pattern that’s especially likely to make sense if you learned it young.
“The reason we might be drawn into a relationship that also causes discomfort is because that’s what love looks and feels like to us,” says Monica O’Neal, a Boston-based, licensed clinical psychologist in private practice. “We have this unconscious impetus to repeat patterns and behaviors.” When all you know is dysfunction, it can seem normal. If you worry that your perspective is skewed, there are a few signs you can rely on to help you figure out whether your relationship falls on the right side of the line.
