Even with something as beautiful as love, we can overdo it. These signals indicate that our love for another person is beyond healthy levels.
Love is a wonderful thing. It gives us support, makes us happy, keeps us healthy and longer in life – in many cases it even survives death. But like almost everything, love can exceed a healthy level. And when that happens, it can harm not only the loving person, but also the loved one. The following seven points can be symptoms of excessive love, which is long-term stressful for the relationship and the people involved.
7 signs that you love someone too much
1. You forgive – again and again and again.
Loving someone makes it easier for us to forgive them when they hurt us and we are sorry. But there are limits. Those who hurt us over and over and over again are obviously unable to respond to us, be considerate of our feelings and / or understand us. Or just don’t want to. To forgive this person over and over again would mean giving them more (love, understanding, consideration …) than they deserve, and at the same time not claiming enough for ourselves (love, understanding, consideration). Therefore, if we let people get away with them hurting us over and over again, it can be a sign that we love them too much – but they and ourselves too little.
2. “Did I do something wrong?” You brood over trifles.
To a healthy extent, love gives us stability and security in life, so it frees our thinking from certain fears and longings. However, if it exceeds this healthy level, it can unsettle us and bind our mental resources excessively. For example, we fear doing or having done something that could diminish the other person’s love for us. Or we relate all of the person’s actions or statements to ourselves and ponder the meaning of little things that have no meaning at all. If our love overstrains our thoughts and repeatedly plunges us into brooding, predominantly caused by fear and fear of loss, it may be too extreme.
3. Your life and your emotions revolve only around the loved one.
When we love someone, we take an interest in their life and we are touched by what happens to them and what they feel. But ideally there is still room for our lives and for what we feel. Excessive love can lead us to make our own happiness dependent on the happiness of the loved one. That we align our lives with what you do well and what you need, and in the process forget to feel what we need – and who we are. For example, someone who is constantly worried about another person and is therefore not receptive to what is happening to him: himself may have developed an exaggerated love.
4. You spend yourself trying to be good enough.
In a healthy relationship that is based on a healthy, balanced and mutual love, we can be ourselves, let go and relax. We want the other person to perceive us positively and therefore try to be a good person and a good: r partner. But in the ideal case our love inspires us – and in the extreme case it drains us. If we think we have to be more beautiful, smarter, harder working, more organized, more sensitive and even more in order to deserve the person we love to return our love, it can be a sign that we are idealizing them and to an unhealthy degree love. Or for the fact that we don’t respect ourselves enough.
5. You give up on your dreams and goals.
Love makes us compromise and certainly shifts some of our priorities. In part, it’s worth it too – a deep, intimate relationship with a person is fundamentally more meaningful than a career jump or a city apartment. However, if we are ready to give up our dreams and goals in life for our love, our beliefs that are linked to the realization of ourselves, this can be a sign that we are giving too much space for this love – and too little for everything else . Healthy love usually helps us pursue our dreams.
6. You neglect other people.
Even if we love people in different ways and to different degrees: Ideally, one love doesn’t get in the way of opening up to other people and cultivating several intimate relationships. Excessive love, for example for a partner, sometimes leads to the fact that we forget and neglect other important people in our life, for example friends and family, or that we close to new acquaintances.
7. You define yourself through your relationship.
Relationships with the people we love are an important and large part of our life and personality. But they are not everything. If we as mothers do something that results in our child having problems as an adult that they have to deal with, it does not mean that we have failed in life and as a person. Yes, maybe we made a mistake in this regard. But we did our best and there was nothing more we could do. We are also not a total failure because our partnership ends or a friendship falls apart. But if we (would) feel like one, it may be because or indicate that we are putting too much of ourselves into this one love and making it too big.
Sources used: inspiringtipps.com, psychologytoday.com