People in toxic relationships don't love each other
Most of us have been so inundated by these messages throughout our entire lives that we have come to mistake the excitement and drama of romance for the whole relationship itself. When we're swept up by romance, we can't imagine that anything could possibly go wrong between us and our partner. We can't see their faults or failures, all we see is their limitless potential and possibility.
It's possible to fall in love with somebody who doesn't treat us well, who makes us feel worse about ourselves, who doesn't hold the same respect for us as we do for them, or who has such a dysfunctional life themselves that they threaten to pull us underwater until we drown in their loving arms.
It's possible to fall in love with somebody who has different ambitions or life goals that are contradictory to our own, who holds different philosophical beliefs or worldviews or whose life path merely weaves in the opposite direction at an inopportune time.
This is why throughout most of human history, marriage was arranged by the parents. Because they were the ones with some objective perspective on whether their kid was marrying a fuckface or not.
But in the past few centuries, since young people were able to choose their partners themselves (which is a good thing), they instinctively overestimated love's ability to overcome whatever issues or problems were present in their relationships (which is a bad thing).
