All relationships regardless of their nature can be toxic, while some experience just a wave of toxicity, others are rooted within toxicity. As cliche as it may sound, toxic relationships are like drugs they’re addicting and provide you with a sense of fulfilment by injecting you with a temporary high. But like most drugs, they ultimately leave you worse off. However, over the last few years, toxic relationships have become glorified particularly among young people.
To quickly define toxic relationships: “A relationship is toxic when your well-being is threatened in some way—emotionally, psychologically, and even physically.” This applies in any context, whether it's family relationships, work, friendships or romantic.
While before the digital age it may have been difficult to even acknowledge that you are in a toxic relationship, nowadays everyone and their mum have become relationship experts. Social media and digital media overall are filled with tips, signs and articles on how to spot a toxic relationship. The issue is even though people are self-aware, they still choose to remain within these unhealthy relationships. Some even go as far as choosing toxic traits over genuine ones, and why?
Who’s Behind It?
Well in order to answer why, you first need to ask who? Who are the people romanticising toxic relationships in the first place? With the rise of the media age came a coinciding rise in the number of people falling victim to toxic relationships. Previous research has shown that 1 in 3 young people will be in at least one toxic relationship in their lives.
Now the main catalyst for this is media, both digital and social media. Our digital media, whether movies, shows, books, songs or podcasts is flooded with toxic relationships made to seem like they’re filled with passion, rawness and the kind of crazy love we all think we want, while only subtly touching on the long term impact these relationships can have on our mental health and in the worst cases even our physical health.
The concept of healthy relationships is rarely ever portrayed across our media and if it is they are rarely glorified in the same manner as the toxic ones. The Eagle Eye conducted a survey amongst some students and found that “96.7% of the students have been exposed to a toxic relationship within a show, movie, or book and 86.7% of them believe that the media is one of the reasons that those toxic relationships are apparent.”
It doesn’t stop there, once the digital media is out there, social media gets a hold of it and dissects it further into content that can again be deemed as harmful. This is in the form of memes, trends on TikTok or just simple tweets like ‘If you’re not obsessed with me like Joe from You, I don’t want it.” Yes, funny but also harmful. Young people, including both teens and young adults, have a tendency to use humour to deal with trauma and although effective, many of us don’t realise the harm it is causing.
Even me, though I’m in my mid-twenties, I still get thrown off when a good guy comes my way, why? Because over time I have become addicted to the adrenaline that toxicity provides and it’s become the thing I’m used to, but I am fully aware it’s wrong.
The same goes for platonic relationships, being toxic and petty amongst friends has become an everyday practice and is excused as mere humour. In reality, these toxic practices lead to us hurting one another, all because of our inability to communicate in a healthy manner. This fight fire with fire approach does nothing for us but burn us, and leave us with long terms scars that later impact our ability to form future relationships.
Toxic Turns to Abusive
Falling into a toxic relationship is not always detrimental, as many of them can be taken as a learning curb, a way to understand yourself and more importantly what you want from your relationships. But that is as long as your experience of toxic relationships is in moderation, rather than an addiction.
Toxic relationships can very easily turn into abusive ones. When we become addicted to toxicity, the lines between love and hate become very blurred, just like in abusive relationships. We try to justify their actions based on things we may have done to ‘trigger’ them and because at the heart of unhealthy relationships is manipulation, we are often led to believe the victim is the assailant.
Victims of toxic relationships are often led to believe one of three things:
They caused this
They deserve this
This is what love is
So as victims begin to adopt these beliefs, they also begin to justify any verbal, mental or physical abuse that may come from the person they fell in love with. This is why the glorification of toxic relationships can lead to us obsessing over abusive relationships instead of just dabbling in something exciting and filled with adrenaline.
yikes more poison !!