What Are Absorbing Relationships?
Spending a lot of time with your partner, always making plans that one of the two wants, even invading his personal space. These are some of the defining characteristics of absorbing relationships.
These types of relationships can be defined as absorbing, toxic or negative, but they always focus on the same goal: the loss of autonomy and the emotional dependence of one of the two towards the other.
The absorbing relationships do not follow a linear path, in which each one has the same weight, but quite the opposite. In this type of relationship, one of the people in the couple has much more imposition and value than the other.
Characteristics
There are a number of factors and particularities that help to detect absorbing relationships:
Loss of social life
The main defining characteristic of absorbing relationships is the loss of social life. This is given by the loss of autonomy as well. The Dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy of the language defines autonomy as: “The condition of who, for certain things, does not depend on anyone” .
This means that, the moment one person begins to depend on the other, and more importantly, puts aside his interests to focus on those of another, he is losing his personality.
This loss is also linked to social life. In this type of relationship, a member of the couple completely leaves his life, both social and family, to dedicate himself entirely to the other person.
It is true that this autonomy is normal to decrease to a greater extent at the beginning of relationships, since it is in the phase of falling in love, but after this phase, it must be fully recovered. If this does not happen, an isolation stage is entered. This stage is a complicated time, because in the vast majority of cases the person who is suffering is not aware of it, no matter how much their family and friends transmit their opinions about it.
Emotional dependence on the other person
As we said before, a relationship must be asymmetric, that is, in which both members of the couple have the same value.
However, in this type of absorbing relationship, one of the characteristics that stands out the most is that one of the members always imposes his ideas, actions and thoughts on the other, without caring about the opinion of the other person.
When you begin to obey these types of orders, a total emotional dependence on the other person arises, and what happens is that everything that the couple orders is done so that conflicts, problems or negative aspects that lead to arguments do not arise.
It is in this type of discussion where situations of abuse can arise, which does not always have to be physical. There are also manipulative situations and psychological strategies to hurt the other person.
Fear of abandonment
The fear of being left alone without a partner in absorbing relationships is much more common than it should be. The fear of feeling alone and without anyone is the feeling that can generate the emotional dependence and loss of autonomy that we talked about previously.
This happens because the person has totally given his life to the couple and the thought that this relationship could end produces emptiness and loneliness. At this point, the most important thing is that family or friends use communication with the other person to give their opinion about the relationship and, ultimately, open their eyes.
What to do in these absorbing relationships?
Communication and understanding. Communication and understanding are the two key aspects of making a relationship work. You should always listen to what the other person wants to convey, regardless of whether you agree with it or not. Being able to express feelings and thoughts and have the other understand them is essential for a good functioning of the couple.
If this is not taken into account, more things are no longer respected and a negative or toxic relationship loop is entered, it is at that moment when we must think if the relationship is worth it, both sentimentally and emotionally speaking for each of the two.
On many occasions, these types of relationships must lead to professional help, sometimes for both of them and in most cases for the person who has completely annulled their life.
