Top Five Ways That We Hurt The Ones We Love. Number Five Will Shock You!

This article describes the top five ways that we hurt the ones we love in increasing order according to our writers.

1. Access to Weaponry

Have you ever told somebody an intimate secret about yourself that they later use to hurt you with? Well that is what we call giving a person access to weaponry. As intimacy develops in a relationship, people tend to disclose more and more information. The theory of social penetration by Altman and Taylor (1973) was used to describe the disclosure level at different stages in the relationship. They go on to say that there are four stages of relationship disclosure; orientation, exploratory affective exchange, affective exchange, and stable exchange. The stable exchange period is when partners know the most about each other because they expect the relationship to continue. This information shared in romantic relationships can often be our more personal details about ourselves that we only share with the people close to us and do not want others knowing about. This is what makes this information the weaponry that our romantic partner has against us. The crazy part about all this is that we share this important information about ourselves willingly, even though we know it can be used against us later.

2. Loss of Illusion

In the case of loss of illusion, love is often times blind. When beginning to have romantic feelings for another person, a person may put that person on a pedestal, meaning that in their eyes that other person is much greater than they actually are. According to Murray, Homes, Bellavia, Griffin, and Dolderman (2002) as love prospers and grows more intense, individuals increasingly exaggerate the similarity with their partners. We often build our partner up in our mind with pleasant fictions, positive illusions, or idealized images. In all reality, this person may not be as great as we think they are. As time goes on, our impression of our partner starts to become more realistic and we can even start to focus on the negative aspects of our partner. These negative behaviors are the ones that later become memorable to us after a relationship has ended. As the old saying goes, when you look at someone with rose-colored glasses, all the red flags look just like flags.

3. Erosion of Novelty

Do you remember when you were a kid and you got a new toy and played with all the time, but then after a while the appeal of the toy began to wear off and you didn’t play with it as much. Well, not to compare people to toys, but this is the idea of erosion of novelty in a romantic partner. The passage of time and experience can lead to the loss of the exciting feelings a person has in the beginning of a relationship. We as people love to fall in love with people, but again we may put people on a pedestal when first developing feelings for them. This is why the novelty of romantic feelings, like milk, has an expiration date. Tucker and Aron (1993) claim that our love for our partners and the frequency of sexual intercourse (Blumstein & Schwarts, 1983) decline over time. This is the period when people have to decide if they want to continue with the relationship or not.

4. Reduced Effort

When the novelty factor of a relationship begins to wear off, the effort being put into the relationship can be reduced as well. Like novelty, the time we spend trying to impress and please our partner has an expiration date. The relationship can fall into a low maintenance routine for some people and the people in the relationship begin to just go through the motions. According to Langer (1989) much of our social behavior is rather mindless. When the level of maintenance in the relationship begins to drop, people are actually more concerned with impressing others. This can lead to our final aspect of hurting the ones we love.

5. Misplaced Expectations and Unwelcomed Surprises

According to our writer the most unpleasant aspect of being hurt by the ones we love are the misplaced expectations and unwelcomed surprises that may come up in a relationship. The problem with learning about another person is that sometimes the information is unanticipated or even undesirable in the situation. Felmlee (1995) gives the instance of a quality of your partner that initially attracted you to them, can later become the source of dissatisfaction in the relationship. This is known as fatal attraction in interpersonal communication. Because of these surprises and misplaced expectations, the relationship can experience a loss of illusion, the erosion of novelty, and then effort may be reduced. It’s not all bad though, the receiver can gain some weaponry to use against the other person.