The psychological cost of giving too much for a relationship

When asked to describe what it feels like to experience love, most of us say, not unreasonably, that it is something far beyond words.

Falling in love comes accompanied by a hormonal rush, and in a way, our brain reacts as if we were taking a drug every time that designated person is around.

But in the fundamentals of couple relationships there is not only a cascade of hormones: there are also expectations. It is a component of affective life that can be expressed in words, since they are simple ideas, about what courtship is like or how it should be.

However, despite being in the realm of words, many times we ignore our own expectations, and that is precisely what can make them become a mental trap. And it is that expectations can transform us into slaves of our own relationship, to the point where we the person who gives without receiving is always us.

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Asymmetric relationships and their effects

Before we understand the role that expectations play in all of this, we can stop to see what makes

trying too hard for a relationship cause so much discomfort.

If something characterizes asymmetric relationships, that is, those in which it is always the same person who makes an effort and sacrifices, it is a mixture of fatigue, stress and impotence. Fatigue is due to the fact that, materially and psychologically, making the relationship "work" always depends only on us. There is no one by our side in an experience that, paradoxically, has its raison d'être in the fact of sharing something exciting.

This means not only that we will make efforts to face difficult situations, but also that it will be up to us to decide at all times what decision to make, to choose the least bad option so that this courtship takes one more step forward without having solved the underlying problem and knowing that it will reappear sooner or later. It is the latter that generates stress: the anticipatory anxiety to know that we have only achieved a momentary relief.

Helplessness goes hand in hand with hopelessness, and in them there is a paradox: the expectations that cause these sensations are, at the same time, the lens through which we examine our love problem to see if we can find a way out.

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Why expectations can create an emotional quagmire

To understand the psychological impact of giving everything for a relationship, you have to understand that expectations about a courtship will always be there. Having beliefs about how a commitment of this type will be or how it should be allows us to make it gain meaning, to point in a direction. This means that asymmetrical relationships in which someone is constantly sacrificing for the other person do not arise simply because of the existence of those expectations.

How does the problem arise then? People who invest too much in a relationship do so in part because they have a value system in which pure sacrifice is seen as something good, dignifying. From this perspective, situations of constant use and abuse of power by our partner not only do not warn us that we are in a toxic relationship, but they give more reasons to continue sacrificing for her, to continue testing that capacity for sacrifice without giving in due to adversity.

In these cheat relationships, the problem is that the long history of personal sacrifices made to make the relationship work is a reason to keep doing it indefinitely. It is a loop, a phenomenon in which the causes of this constant betting on the relationship are, at the same time, the effect of continuing to do so at the expense of our health.

Why do we sacrifice ourselves in this way for the relationship?

We have already seen that asymmetrical relationships in which one person gives everything and the other makes little effort are due in large part to the effect that certain expectations have on us: specifically, the expectation of keep going despite adversity that may arise, whatever they may be and without thinking too much about their anticipation.

But... What psychological mechanisms explain why we can behave in such an absurd way in one of the most important areas of our lives? Fundamentally it is one that is called "cognitive dissonance".

Cognitive dissonance and endless sacrifices

Cognitive dissonance is a feeling of discomfort that appears when we have in mind two ideas or beliefs that contradict each other and to whom we give importance. To make that unpleasant feeling (and that can become an obsession that constantly occupies our attention), one of the ideas must "win" over the other.

Yet this battle of beliefs almost never comes to an end through the use of reason. In fact, we often do "botch jobs" to make the cognitive dissonance go away.

For example, in the case of asymmetric relationships, these ideas are usually the following:

• True partner relationships do not end, and you have to sacrifice for them.
• That discomfort that the relationship produces in me is avoidable.

In this battle of beliefs, the second option is arguably more attractive, as it offers a way out and is linked to a sense of well-being. And yet, many people opt for the former. Because? because it is what it does that our beliefs and our vision of things wobble less.

In case of assuming that a relationship in which another person does not do their part is not a relationship that suits us, we would have to face many other cognitive dissonances, because our self-image would have been very touched: it would be shown that this sacrifice for something that has formed part of one's identity has not made sense and we would have to build a new vision of things that allows us to feel good about ourselves and our decisions.

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The sooner it is cut, the better.

That is why it is important to detect situations in which our expectations act as a prison for our affective life.

Despite the fact that relationships are a matter of more than one person, cognitive dissonance makes that we ourselves be the ones to boycott ourselves, transforming the discomfort caused by unhealthy expectations into a reason to continue betting on that source of discomfort.