When you’re in love, your heart feels like it's windsurfing, and everything is magical and tinted whatever color is the opposite of regret (beige?). But that whole love-blindness business that helps you fall in the first place also makes it really difficult to figure out when your relationship has taken a turn for the DUMP THEM NOW. With that in mind, we made you a list of red-flaggies to keep in mind as you wade through the relationship muck, wondering if you’re going to make it out alive or sink like a straight-to-DVD Olsen twins adventure.
1. You fight more than you have sex.
We’re not going to get all prescriptive and tell you how much sex you should be having in your relationship, but we will say that if you are yelling a lot more than you’re getting it on, your relationship is off-kilter and you need to shift priorities and/or communication strategies ASAP. If you’re fighting in equal measure to having sex, you are probably just going through a rough patch, or are merely kinky, so play on.
2. You stop fighting and having sex altogether.
Worse than the above scenario (in our opinion) is when you stop both fighting and having sex, aka your spark has been replaced with complacency and apathy. You become roommates who passive-aggressively bicker at Whole Foods because you don’t even have enough fire left to start a real argument or take some aggression out in the bedroom. This is a bad sign. Alternately, though, too much volatility also isn’t helpful—if you are screaming at each other over what salt-and-pepper shakers to purchase at IKEA, for instance. Too much fire and your house burns down, as our friends the three little pigs taught us about divorce all those years ago.
3. You exhibit criticism, contempt, defensiveness, or stonewalling.
According to John Gottman, who has studied hundreds of married couples and can scarily predict who will stay together and who will separate, what makes a marriage work is finding ways to resolve conflicts productively. That sounds easy enough! But to do so, you must avoid these four damaging processes: criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling. Do you harbor hefty doses of one or more of these negative feelings toward your partner? Then you might be headed for disaster. Of the four, contempt is probably the biggest predictor of doom, and is defined as “the intention to insult and psychologically abuse your partner." Signs of contempt can include eye-rolling, insults, hostility, name-calling, and mocking her Jewel holiday album (it’s nostalgic, OK?).
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