February 28, 2018
12 Relationship Red Flags You’ve Been Overlooking All This Time 0
When you really want a romantic relationship to work, it’s easy to ignore your partner’s less-than-redeeming qualities.
You may find yourself justifying his or her bad behavior or totally overlooking signs that this person may not make a loving, supportive long-term partner.
We asked relationship experts to share some of the less obvious red flags that people in relationships should pay more attention to. Not everything listed below is an automatic dealbreaker, but at the very least, these things are worth considering and discussing with your partner or therapist.
1. Your partner badmouths their exes ― all of them.
“If your partner talks badly about all of their exes, this is a red flag that they haven’t done any introspection about what their behavior contributed to the deterioration of these previous relationships. No relationship ends only because of one person’s behavior, and if your partner acts victimized by their exes, one day they will likely play the victim card in their relationship with you.” ― Samantha Rodman, psychologist and dating coach
2. Your partner gaslights you, causing you to doubt yourself and your perception of reality.
“Gaslighting is when your partner knows that your intuition is correct, but tries to muddy the waters by causing you to second-guess yourself ― like suggesting that you are overreacting or completely off-base. A master gaslighter facilitates this process in nuanced and subtle ways so it is not obvious what is happening. For example: You hear a woman’s voice in the background when your husband calls you from his business trip, but when you question him, he convinces you it was your imagination or that it was the TV, even though you could have sworn the voice called your husband by name.
Gaslighting is damaging because not only is a partner lying, but they are messing with your reality, which adds an extra layer of betrayal and jeopardizes your mental health. Learn to trust your gut; if you feel strongly that something is amiss, you are probably right!” ― Kimberly Resnick Anderson, sex therapist and associate professor of psychiatry at UCLA School of Medicine
3. Your partner refuses to make an effort to spend time with your family and friends.
“A less noticeable but meaningful concern is when your significant other welcomes you into their friendship and family circles, but refuses to attend events and social functions in your social, family and professional life. Ideally, it should flow both ways — with invitations to join your significant other’s life milestones and occasions and also with demonstrations of interest and enthusiasm about your friendships, family and life events. If you notice that you are always making excuses for why your partner is never free to join you in social settings, this may be cause for an honest conversation.” ― Elisabeth LaMotte, therapist and founder of the DC Counseling & Psychotherapy Center
4. Your partner is rude or mean to strangers.
“Pay attention to the small things: how they interact with the server at the restaurant, the Lyft driver, or the stranger at Trader Joe’s. Harsh treatment of strangers can say a lot about how they view others. Note that bad behavior toward strangers typically evolves into how they’ll eventually treat you. ― Ryan Howes, clinical psychologist
5. Your partner has trouble apologizing.
“I’ve often heard people say, ‘She doesn’t like to apologize, but I know that she’s sorry.’ Or, ‘He doesn’t apologize much, but he makes up for it by being nice after we fight.’ Being able to apologize is a sign of maturity. It says, ‘I’m willing to be accountable. I can admit my mistakes.’ The red flag here is that over time, your relationship will suffer if the only person owning up to misdeeds is you.” ― Winifred M. Reilly, marriage and family therapist and author of It Takes One to Tango
6. Your partner is weirdly possessive or secretive about their cell phone.
“If you are in a relationship with someone who is always on a cell phone or glued to a screen, this is an obvious relationship red flag. But another more subtle cause for concern is a partner who is overly possessive of their phone. For example, if your battery dies and you want to borrow their phone to make a call, but they won’t hand you the phone without first looking at the screen, it’s quite likely they have something to hide.” ― Elisabeth LaMotte
7. Your partner’s time and money are often unaccounted for.
“The key here is ‘unaccounted for.’ When time and money goes missing, that’s generally a sign that something is off base. It may not signal anything nefarious, but it does signal a disconnect in the relationship. You don’t need to know everything all the time, but your committed partner should never wonder whether or not you’ve been in an accident, or why your shared account is lower than expected.” ― Zach Brittle, therapist and founder of the online couples therapy series forBetter
8. Your partner stops going out of their way to do nice things for you — or never did them in the first place.
“We all know that in the beginning of a relationship, we put our best foot forward and are attentive to our partner’s needs. As time progresses, we sometimes lose the motivation to go out of our way to do little things to please our partner. Positive regard is when you are happy to make your partner happy, when it is your pleasure to make your partner’s life a bit easier. Constant positive regard increases relationship satisfaction and reinforces good will.
One example: I treated a woman who developed painful blisters on her skin if she peeled her own oranges. When I first met her, she was dating a man who, if she asked him to peel her an orange, would either do it in an angry manner or refuse to do it at all. She eventually broke up with him and stopped treatment. Seven months later, she called me and told me she was engaged to someone new. She told me that she reluctantly asked him to peel her an orange, assuming he would get annoyed. He said, ‘It would be my pleasure to peel you an orange, and I hope to peel you an orange every day for the rest of your life.’ She knew wanted to marry him in that moment. ― Kimberly Resnick Anderson
9. Your partner doesn’t respect your boundaries.
“Does your partner respect your time, your physical boundaries, and the important people in your life? Does this relationship cause you to miss work, diss friends and family, or feel uncomfortable where sexuality is involved? Many chalk up boundary violations to passion early in relationships, but repeated overstepping may show a pattern of disrespect. Decide early on where your boundaries are and what you’re comfortable compromising, and stick to it. Repeated violations are a bad sign.” ― Ryan Howes
10. Your partner makes fun of you in front of other people, even after you asked him or her not to.
“Public teasing is not a good sign in a relationship, particularly if you have already told your partner that you feel upset when they make fun of you in front of others. A loving partner doesn’t try to humiliate you in front of people, or at all, for that matter. While your partner may insist that they were ‘just kidding’ and call you ‘oversensitive,’ the fact remains that if you ask your partner to be more kind or tactful in public and they resist, this is a red flag that indicates that you may never feel fully emotionally safe within the relationship.” ― Samantha Rodman
11. Your partner is in a bad mood more often than not.
“We all wake up on the wrong side of the bed now and again. And after a long hard day, we might not be our sparkly best. For many of us, being hungry can look a lot like being angry until we get some fuel in our tank. When irritability is the default, if your partner is rude or unkind or disrespectful, don’t kid yourself into thinking it’s not a big deal.” ― Winifred Reilly
12. Your partner constantly talks about themselves and rarely shows interest in your life.
“At the beginning of a relationship, we can feel so enamored with the other that we want to soak in their stories and play the part of the good listener. Maybe you don’t really want to talk about yourself anyway, so their filling the airtime is welcomed. But as you feel more safe and willing to disclose, you realize that your partner doesn’t really care about your stories and either shows disinterest or turns the conversation back to themselves. This red flag is partially about their self-centeredness and partially about your teaching them that only their stories are important. Are your thoughts and opinions valued? Do you feel heard and understood? If not, maybe it’s time to keep looking.” ― Ryan Howes
February 28, 2018
Breaking the cycle: women are learning to love their hormones 0
by MeDaryl • Cars • Tags: Life and style, Menopause, Menstruation, Society, women
To be labelled hormonal used to be an insult. Now women are reclaiming the role of oestrogen in their lives. Eva Wiseman reveals how a new generation is being empowered by their hormones
The grand plan, the plan to end the Second World War, was inspired by the docility of Paula Hitler. You dont hear much about Paula, do you, the lesser-known Hitler, who worked as a secretary while big brother Adolf was upstairs doing the Holocaust? But yes, inspired by Paula, British spies planned to end the war by making Adolf less aggressive. They intended to do this by smuggling oestrogen into his food, thereby turning him into a woman. Hitler had tasters, said Professor Brian Ford of Cardiff University, who discovered the plot, so there was no mileage to putting poison in his food because they would immediately fall victim to it. But, Sex hormones were a different matter.
Though the word hormone was first used in 1905, derived from the Greek meaning to arouse or excite, it was during that period leading into the war that the science of endocrinology developed. Hormones are the bodys chemical messengers; they trigger activity in the body and regulate the function of organs. But with knowledge of their effects came creeping politics. If hormones meant women were less inclined to start wars, did it also mean they were less capable of ambition? Less capable of being leaders? If hormones meant men were more aggressive, less nurturing, was equality an impossible dream?
Womens hormones sneak into our culture with a period-like regularity. In 1978 Gloria Steinem wrote in If Men Could Menstruate: Doctors would research little about heart attacks, from which men would be hormonally protected, but everything about cramps. The news, too, is littered with commentary. In 2012, CNN argued womens hormones play a significant role in their voting decisions, with single women more likely to vote for Obama and married women more likely to vote for Romney; it was removed after complaints. In 2015, a business survey confirmed that 54% of respondents thought a womans behaviour at work was dictated by her hormones.
A year later Novak Djokovic waded into a debate about equal pay in sport, explaining that women faced more challenges than men to succeed in tennis, including battling against hormones. In the Old Testament, God banters: When she is in heat, who can control her? He was talking about camels. There have been many, many more, all positing versions of the same idea that women are complete nightmares at certain times of the month. And the thing is, despite the outrage that these clumsy stories cause, some researchers would agree there are kernels of truth, or shadows of kernels, or kernels of kernels, buried within them.
Martie Haselton, professor of psychology at UCLA whose book, Hormonal, discusses the hidden intelligence of hormones, argues that, rather than oppressive and damaging, what weve learned about women and hormones is empowering. Rather than a simple story about women losing all rationality around their periods, she sees it as: The story of how our hormones guide us through uniquely female life experiences, from feeling desire and pleasure to choosing a mate, having a child (if we would like to), raising a child and transitioning to our post-reproductive years. Haselton is part of a new conversation that is emerging; she is a pioneering researcher pushing the politics of hormones in a new direction. Where once women were encouraged to combat the effects of hormones with the Pill and HRT, stamping down wobbly moods in order to be in control of their bodies, today their daughters are turning away from hormonal contraceptives in order to reclaim some autonomy over their bodies, with figures dropping by more than 13% between 2005 and 2015. Instead of using the Pill to prevent or plan pregnancy, theyre using their phones.
The period-tracking app, Clue, was conceived by a woman called Ida Tin. It was a struggle to raise investment: men she pitched to were embarrassed discussing an app used to monitor bleeding and breast tenderness. One venture capitalist agreed to invest, but only if his details were kept private. But when she finally launched, in 2013, she attracted millions of users, and went on to raise a further 20m. I use Clue, in part, to remind myself when to expect a headache. Theres an option to share my cycle with friends which is something I muse on, monthly. Who else would care that this is one of my heavy days? Tin explains, over email from Berlin: At Clue, we are committed to getting more people talking about menstrual health, as being transparent about this helps us become better educated and removes antiquated social taboos. Clue Connect allows for this conversation to take place without any awkwardness. As well as sharing your cycle with your partner, she says users share with their friends, to prevent their holidays clashing with periods or PMS. Parents can also benefit from using Clue Connect with their children, as it provides a way to teach them about fertility and menstruation.
What a world! Tin is responsible for providing a window for millions of women into the mysteries of our hormonal cycles. She found it surprising, she says, that weve managed to walk on the Moon, but that most women still dont know on which days they were most fertile. I thought that women would find an app like Clue empowering, as they could take control of their health and educate themselves fully about their bodies. Theres that word again, empowering; one that 10 years ago would have seemed quite out of place when discussing hormones, which women were expected to manage, in order to avoid them managing us.
This September, entrepreneur Amy Thomson, journalist Laura Weir and nutritionist Lola Ross will launch Moody-U, an app to accompany the website they designed to help women understand their cycles. In 2015 my periods stopped due to cortisol stress hormones, explains Thomson. I was 27 and it was a wake-up call. Starting a diary, she began to see patterns linking her bad moods and her hormonal imbalance. I realised it was an algorithm. So I sold my agency, broke up with my boyfriend and set out on a mission to build this technology. Users receive personalised advice based on which Moody tribe theyre placed into. The site offers advice, from lists of books that help you harness the power of your period and natural rhythms to articles on period poverty and superfood tips. Theres an online shop, too, with Rhodiola rosea root extract sold alongside Moody merch. What Ive learned, Thomson adds, is that the biggest asset we have in the space of moods, hormones and women is [our ability to] share experiences to create fewer taboos, and empower people to understand and reconnect with their bodies rhythms.
Theres understanding, and theres understanding theres knowing when your periods due, and theres knowing why you feel murderous towards the bus driver the fourth Tuesday of every month. Does anyone have any questions about hormones? tweeted Eleanor Morgan, who was starting research on her book Hormonal: A Journey into How Our Bodies Affect Our Minds and Why Its Difficult to Talk About It, which will be published by Virago next year. She was bombarded with messages (including a handful from me). The overwhelming theme was: why does our very nature make us feel so bad sometimes? she recalls. Underpinning this is a sense of some cruel sorcery at play, particularly in relation to PMS. I think many women feel like there must be an evolutionary reason for it.
While theres a swell of interest in womens hormones, she points out a need for an interrogation of common myths, assumptions and misinformation. After all, almost every woman will be bamboozled by their reproductive system at some point, whether around fertility, birth or menopause, all of which are underpinned by hormonal changes. She became interested in the continuing stigma attached to discussing feeling, in her words, beaten by our biology. Right from when we have our first periods, the phrase Its just your hormones is wedged into our consciousness. So much of womens emotional experience is waved away with that phrase. And like Amy Thomson, Morgans research had an urgency due to her own biology: the author of a book on anxiety, shed realised how much of an impact her cycle has on her mental health, after, yes, downloading an app to track it. I never wanted to accept this, really, she says, because being female is not a diagnosis. Ive felt, at several moments, like a lost cause; a slave to my biology. Only, that feeling also makes me want to fight.
Where Morgans path seems to veer away from the Moody developers is in her scepticism around the marketing of the emerging hormone conversation. There is money to be made from vulnerable, soul-searching, dissatisfied women when wellness gurus and of-the- minute celebrity authors appear to offer neat, credible-sounding solutions, she says.
She is drawn instead to psychologists theories about rationalising the emotions we have in the PMS phase. We feel we shouldnt judge our decision-making when were pre-menstrual. But some feminist critical psychologists argue that, in those moments, perhaps our usual self-censoring is ruptured and were getting a window into our core issues like some sort of hormonal truth serum. Its fascinating. Martie Haselton writes: It took too long for those of us in the scientific community to admit that human oestrus is real. Now we are making up for lost time as we seek to research and understand its implications.
A change is rumbling. But why now? One answer could be found by considering our quest for wellness, a key part, of course, of todays luxury lifestyle. Hormones feature heavily on Gwyneth Paltrows website Goop (an article last summer claimed: Its important for women to touch certain plants, to balance hormones its not) and form the basis for many self-improvement diets.
A cynic might suggest that todays interest in hormones is only skin deep that we want to manage them in order to look more attractive, and that were discussing them in order to Insta-signal our fabulously conscious lives. They might go further too, analysing the ethical implications of the data shared by period-tracking apps, a necessary concern when weighing up the cost of something one gets for free.
Another answer, and a cheerier one, is in the political shift away from the silencing of women. Discussing hormones was not encouraged in the past, in part because it perpetuated ideas about weakness and volatility, and in part because periods were considered icky. But that idea has been diluted by a sort of period pride. In 2015 Kiran Gandhi ran the London marathon with blood dripping down her legs to raise awareness for women who dont have access to sanitary products. And shored up by the widening of dialogues about mental health, theres a recognition that hormones are tied into its changes. As the stigma around admitting depressive feelings and anxiety falls away, so does the stigma around hormonal health.
Its not just younger women who are changing the conversation: as we learn more about menopause, the taboo there is lifting, too. Last month one of Britains leading womens health experts said workplaces should start catering for the menopause in a comparable way to pregnancy. After all, in the past 15 years the number of working people aged 50 to 64 has increased by 60%. Kathy Abernethy, chair of the British Menopause Society, welcomed the move, saying a social shift was under way, partly driven by celebrities (including Kim Cattrall and Angelina Jolie) who have decided its not something embarrassing to talk about.
And, as Haselton details in her book, charting the way HRT has been marketed since 1942, and its health scares that began in the 1990s, doctors now have a firm handle on oestrogen therapy for instance, during the first six to 10 years of menopause, taking oestrogen can lower your cardiac risks, but after 10 years it can increase them. People are no longer framing menopause as an illness, but something that, with care and knowledge, can be managed.
In 2006, Haselton started publishing research showing that women do alter their behaviour during peak fertility. But she found herself offending two camps: those who rejected the suggestion there is still some animal inside us civilised humans, and those who believe her findings undermine efforts to achieve equality. Tabloids distilled her research into snappy headlines about sex, but today the real news, Haselton believes, is that womens rights are enhanced, not diminished, by an increased understanding of how our bodies and minds work. To learn more, she adds: We need to get more females into the lab as well as more female scientists, more female research participants, more recognition of the cultural bias that treats male bodies and brains as the norm. More education about our bodies rhythms and heats, and then a sense of satisfaction, perhaps, when we say: Im hormonal.
Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2018/feb/25/breaking-the-cycle-women-learning-to-love-their-hormones