When Love Hurts: What a Toxic Relationship Really Is
Maybe you didn’t have a word for it.
You just knew that something felt off, that you walked on eggshells more days than not. Constant apologizing and adjusting became your way of life as you tried to keep life calm and frictionless. If being quieter and less visible was what it took to make this happen, you would do what was necessary to be invisible but…
You knew that love wasn’t supposed to feel like this. Unfortunately, you also couldn’t point to one dramatic moment that would make anyone understand why you were so tired.
Millions of women have lived inside a relationship exactly like that, a relationship that felt deeply wrong but came with no clear label. These relationships didn’t come with black eyes or an obvious reason to leave. Instead, they contributed to a slow, steady erosion of who the women thought they were were, and a growing sense that they were the problem.
If you were or are this woman, this article is for you, because before healing can begin, something else has to happen first… You need language for what you lived through.
You need to be able to name it.
Defining Toxicity: It’s About Pattern, Not Perfection
A toxic relationship is a recurring pattern of harm, control, or diminishment that leaves you feeling smaller over time. It is the difference between friction and damage, and that difference is everything.
All relationships have friction. Two people with their own histories, fears, habits, and wounds will inevitably bump up against each other. That is not toxicity. That is humanity. Healthy relationships have conflict, miscommunication, and hard conversations. What they do not have is a persistent undercurrent of fear, contempt, or control.
Toxicity is not measured by the intensity of one moment. It is measured by the pattern over time. And the painful truth is that patterns are slow. They are quiet and they are often invisible to the woman living inside them, because they did not begin all at once. Like a frog put into room temperature water (versus the frog dropped into boiling water), these patterns slid in, gradually and almost imperceptibly, until one day she woke up and barely recognized herself or her relationship.
What God Designed Relationships to Be
Before we can fully understand what a toxic relationship is, we need to hold it up against what God actually designed relationships to be.
1 Corinthians 13:4–7 gives us one of the most beautiful and clear definitions of love in all of Scripture: “Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth.”
Read that slowly, friend…
Love does not dishonor.
It is not self-seeking.
And love rejoices in truth.
A relationship that consistently dishonors, that uses you for its own needs, that punishes you for telling the truth, that relationship does not reflect the love God designed. Full stop.
God designed covenant relationships to be a reflection of His own character: a safe place where both people are honored, where truth can be spoken, where both people can flourish. He designed it to be a place of mutual care, not a place where one person shrinks so the other can feel powerful.
When you measure your relationship against God’s design and find a chasm, when safety was absent, when your voice was not welcome, when you constantly felt like you were earning love rather than living inside it, that gap matters. It tells you something true.
What Toxic Relationships Often Look Like
There is no single face of toxicity, but there are patterns that show up again and again in the stories of women who have lived through these relationships. You may recognize some of these. You may recognize all of them.
Chronic criticism.
This criticism isn’t the kind that helps you grow, but is the kind that chips away at your sense of self. Nothing you do is ever quite right. The way you cook, parent, dress, speak, laugh, all of it becomes evidence of your inadequacy, and you are minded of your inadequacy constantly.
Emotional dismissal.
Your feelings are too big, too sensitive, or too much. Maybe you are told you are overreacting when you express pain, or it is suggested that you have a joint session with YOUR therapist for the (calm and peaceful) way in which you called out your partner for lying. Yes, that happened to me. You learn, over time, to swallow your emotions before they become a problem, but not before you begin to think you really ARE the problem.
Control over decisions.
Where you go and who you see. What you spend and what you wear. Control does not always look like aggression. Sometimes it looks like “concern” or “just wanting what’s best for you.” But control is control, regardless of how it is dressed.
I was in a relationship once where I was expected to ask for permission before getting my hair cut. He liked my hair long so I needed to let him know if I was even considering a trim. Ummmm… No. Control is control.
Fear of honest communication.
You rehearse conversations before you have them, calculating which words are safe and which will cause an explosion. You have stopped telling the truth because the consequences are not worth it.
A safe partner won’t make you think about every single word. I dated someone who let me know two sentences was too long. He didn’t want to know my feelings. But even when I was drafting every text in Notes before sending, I was still worried that there was something wrong with me.
Um, no.
A safe partner, one who truly wants to be with you, will be excited to read your messages, whether they be one word or multiple paragraphs. And they will appreciate your honesty, happy that you felt safe enough with them to actually be honest. Find the person with whom you feel safe to be honest.
Constant tension.
Even on the good days, there is a low hum of anxiety. You wait for the other shoe to drop. You cannot fully relax because you have learned that calm does not last. For me, I began to dread the next text message I would receive. I never knew what it would say, but I could (almost) always guarantee that, no matter how I responded, I would be left on read. I was constantly in a “hurry up and wait” state, rushing to satisfy his needs while I knew mine would always be at the bottom of the priority pile, if not buried six feet below.
These patterns are rarely dramatic in the beginning. They tend to be subtle, easy to rationalize, easy to dismiss. And they intensify over time — which is exactly why they are so difficult to name from the inside. When you are inside a pattern, it feels like your normal. It feels like you.
Why These Relationships Are So Hard to Name
If you are reading this and thinking, “But I stayed. I didn’t leave. I kept trying to make it work,” I need to say something and I need you to listen to me: staying does not mean you did not know something was wrong. Staying often means you were doing exactly what you were taught to do.
Women are often told, by well-meaning friends, church communities, or cultural messaging, that all marriages are hard, that you just need to work harder, pray more, submit more, or be more patient.
This messaging is not wrong as far as all marriages being hard. They are hard. And the messaging isn’t wrong about the value of commitment, either. But it can blur a critical line: the line between normal difficulty and that of toxic tension which causes ongoing damage.
Inconsistency and Unpredictability
There is also something about the person themselves that makes naming this so difficult. Abusers are not always frightening. Sometimes they are the most magnetic, loving, attentive person you have ever met. Any they are often (or often pretend to be) deeply remorseful after hard moments, full of apologies and promises, a practice we will explore in a future blog called “future faking.”
Abusers can be inconsistent in ways that create profound confusion, and the person who terrifies you on Thursday can be the person who held you tenderly on Tuesday. That inconsistency does not make the harm less real. It makes it harder to name until you know what to name it. This hot and cold practice can lead to trauma bonding, another topic we will explore in a future article.
When you cannot predict who is going to walk through the door or who is going to wake up next to you, your brain stops looking for danger and starts looking for safety clues. You become an expert at reading moods, managing emotions, and keeping the peace. And that very skill, born of survival, can make naming what is happening feel extreme. Even disloyal.
Journaling Unpredictability. Journaling for Peace.
I fell asleep journaling one night, writing, as I often did and still do, a letter to God. This letter prayed for God to help my husband wake the next morning in a good mood, seeing the blessings surrounding us instead of being in a bad mood.
The safest of all partners would have moved my journal without reading it, set it aside and tucked me in. A less safe may have read it and then felt bad for the actions which had led me to write a prayer like that. But my husband? My husband got mad. He read my journal and didn’t feel bad about his words or actions (that I know of) but was mad that I would have the nerve to “keep a record of his wrong-doings,” because, to him, that’s what I was doing.
In reality, I was journaling for peace, peace through God, and peace from keeping my mouth shut. When I journaled about my experiences, I was less tempted to talk to him about the hard times and, because I usually kept my journal hidden, I didn’t need to fear reactions like this, the type of reaction I was trying to avoid.
Unfortunately, his reaction magnified my confusion, and confusion is an emotion many women in relationships like these experience. It’s confusing to not know what to do, 100% of the time, because we never know what the reaction will be. And this confusion isn’t because we are weak. We are confused because confusion is one of the most reliable tools of a toxic dynamic.
God Is Not the Author of Your Suffering
There is something I need to say to you before we close, and I need you to hear me as if someone who loves you deeply is sitting across from you, speaking it to you intently:
God is not the author of your suffering and He did not cause these hurtful things to happen to you. And just because you experienced them doesn’t mean He doesn’t love you. On the contrary, He loves you more than my words can express and He’s happy to comfort you any time you go to Him.
It took me far too long to go to Him consistently and constantly, instead of turning to worldly coping mechanisms. With Him I don’t need the worldly coping mechanisms. Everybody’s different, but for me, that is what I found. With Him I don’t need anything else.
And here’s something else:
Naming What Happened is Not Disloyalty.
Naming what happened is not disloyalty. It is not bitterness or giving up on love. Naming what happened is the beginning of truth, and truth is exactly where healing starts.
Jesus said it plainly in John 8:32: “You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” Not comfortable, not easy, but free.
What you experienced was not God’s design for your life. It was not a test to prove your faithfulness. It was not something you deserved. God did not ordain your suffering, but He has been present in every moment of it.
Psalm 34:18 tells us, “The Lord is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit.”
He has not forgotten you. He has not looked away. And you are not broken for not seeing it sooner. Toxic dynamics are designed to keep you from seeing clearly. The confusion was not a flaw in your character. It was a consequence of the environment you were in. Please give yourself the grace to understand that.
You are still here. You are reading these words. That means something. It means a part of you is ready to step toward truth, toward healing, and toward the life God designed for you.
And taking that step is exactly the right way to begin.
Anchor Scriptures
“The Lord is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit.” — Psalm 34:18
“Love is patient, love is kind. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs… it rejoices with the truth.” — 1 Corinthians 13:4–7
“You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” — John 8:32
If this article resonated with you, you are not alone and you are not broken. I’m praying for you.
The Safe Again Workbook is a free, faith-based guide designed as your first gentle step forward. It will help you understand what you experienced, begin to feel safe in your own body again, and reconnect with the God who has been close to you all along.
Download your free copy at thekimsutton.com/safeagain.
If you or someone you know is experiencing an unsafe relationship, please reach out to the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-7233. Help is available 24/7.
