5 Habits of Deeply Insecure Partners

Poor Kim feels overwhelmed and just wanted to calm herself with some cheap vodka shots as she sat alone in a bar across the street.

She just had another blood-boiling heated argument with her boyfriend. And it’s not as if she’s battling with deep-seated insecurity. It’s just that she can’t get her hands on why and how her man became this terrible.

She used to think she had found “the one” after what seemed like an endless litany of messy relationships with different iterations of the same assholes.

Of course, at the very beginning, all his kind loving gestures do nothing but make her feel special and deeply appreciated. She never felt so loved like this before in all her past relationships.

But it turns out that things weren’t as great as she thought. He was idolizing her all the while. To him, a relationship with her is a golden price he won despite being undeserving.

The problem is, recently, he’s miles different from the sweet, great guy he used to be. He’s best described as an overbearing possessive boyfriend that’s sucking the life out of her with his overprotective behaviors.

She didn’t sign up for a detective of a partner or one that she’ll have to spend her whole life reassuring him that she loves him.

It’s obvious that his insecurities are inhibiting how happy their relationship could be.

Hence, if you or your partner are behaving in a few or all of the following habits of insecure partners, either or both of you are also insecure partners.

1. They can be manipulative

Being assertive enough to ask for what one wants is never easy, especially for those struggling with self-esteem issues.

The problem is that insecure partners often resort to using manipulation to meet their ends whenever they want something.

They have this deep-seated feeling of inadequacy — they feel like they are not good enough or worthy of the things they want hence, they lack the guts to directly ask for them and resort to cutting corners to meet their most times selfish ends.

For instance, they might resort to making you jealous on purpose to get your attention or use guilt to keep you from seeing your friends or family.

They might sometimes tend to act overly nice and in the process make it seem like you also owe them to be nice in return or even something else. What’s even worse, is when they withdraw purposely to make you dependent on them. In essence, they act excessively needy and even clingy up to the point that they become controlling.

Even though the manipulative clingy and needy behaviors of an insecure partner might not look damaging from the onset, they’ll eventually suffocate you and suck your energy and happiness dry over time.

A relationship will be so much stressful for you when your partner deeply feels they aren’t worthy of the relationship.

And when someone does nothing but put up subtle controlling, clingy, and needy behaviors, it often means they’re insecure.

To them, their actions and inactions might seem like acts of love but in reality, they’re only being manipulative and even controlling.

2. They struggle to accept and respect your boundaries

Instead of seeing boundaries as important elements of healthy connections and respectful relationships, insecure partners end up misjudging their partners’ attempts to create and restate their boundaries.

That’s because they struggle so hard to see boundaries for what they really are.

As a result of their unhealthy insecurities and low self-esteem, they perceive boundaries as rejection or offensive acts where their partners told them off hence, they feel humiliated or ashamed as a result.

And they resort to disrespecting their partners’ boundaries by acting and behaving in ways that make their partners feel guilty for having and even talking about boundaries in the first place. In essence, they aren’t receptive to their partners’ boundaries.

The problem is that staying with such types of partners for a long time will have hugely detrimental effects on your self-worth and value as you’ll gradually give in to their endless pressure to lose your self-respect and watch them trample all over your boundaries little by little until nothing is left of your self-respect.

By reacting to boundaries in ways that communicate how one despises boundaries let alone accept and respect them, they’ll be making the relationship everything but healthy.

If you’re communicating to your partner how to be with you in a relationship via things you like or dislike and they kind of take everything personally, their insecurities are doing your relationship a disservice.

They might love you but perceive your boundaries as barriers to the ‘unconditional love’ they believe they have for you because their flawed self-esteem and insecurities can’t perceive how conditional they’re making love to be.

3. They pull themselves and others down consciously or subconsciously

If someone’s constantly trying to capitalize on every opportunity they have to belittle and make your words, actions, feelings, and achievements or thoughts appear insignificant, it’s probably because of a few connected reasons:

They’re often disapproval and dismissive of others hence, whatever one does always comes across as insignificant to them

They’re consumed by envy and feel threatened by your achievements and even your actions or feelings

Their low self-esteem and the negative perceptions they have about themselves are inspiring them to drag you down with them

In essence, due to their insecurities, they can’t stand alone by themselves hence, they do so to validate and feel better about themselves

In a negative world where it’s relatively easy for one to be internally unhappy and feel miserable or like a failure in life, many insecure people depend on feeding off others to keep themselves afloat and to feel better about themselves.

They wouldn’t mind making degrading comments about your achievements saying it isn’t much of a big deal.

They’ll somehow brutally minimize, dismiss, and invalidate your feelings.

This addiction to belittling and putting you down in every other way is partly related to an underlying want to keep you from being confident enough to leave them.

And at the end of the day, they’ll simply suck the life out of you by making you constantly double doubt yourself. Yes, they’ll ruin your self-esteem. Of course, that’s the aim, right? Dragging you down with them.

The thing is, when your relationship is harming your self-esteem, it’s easy to believe that you can do nothing other than believing and internalizing the unfriendly behaviors of your partner which simply diminishes your self-esteem.

But that’s not true.

You can stand up for yourself, and fight for what you need by believing that you’re worthy of those things you deeply desire.

4. They have poor or no healthy boundaries

Insecure partners often struggle to communicate how best their partners can be with them via things they like or dislike.

They have this deep-seated fear of abandonment that forces them to do things sorely to keep their significant others interested and happy even at the detriment of their happiness.

The problem with selling one’s self this short in a relationship is that it leaves you drained in every way possible and makes the relationship utterly unhealthy for you no matter how good your partner might or is capable of being.

If you want to enjoy great, balanced, and happy relationships, you need boundaries because they are important elements of healthy and respectful relationships.

You don’t need to give up who you are, succumb to pressures to do things you don’t want to, or put up with obviously unacceptable treatments in your relationships.

Because there’s no point in buying into the popular belief that one has to overly compromise, make a lot of sacrifices, and endure some kind of obviously unacceptable treatment for a relationship to thrive. You’ll only be putting up behaviors that are nothing more than a lack of self-love and knowledge of one’s self-worth and value.

5. Approval seeking and people-pleasing behaviors

We all logically know that other people’s opinions about us shouldn’t matter much more than ours and that we shouldn’t let others determine our worth.

Yet, the insecure ones among us have this unhealthy strong urge to chase external approval and validations as a way to feel valued and like they belong.

If someone’s insecure, they often fixate their worth on the way they’re treated, the love they receive, and even the words that come out of their partner’s mouth because they feel they’re not good enough or even worthy of the good things life has to offer.

People who know they’re amazing just the way they are despite their imperfections usually tend to enjoy happier relationships because they rarely give in to the people-pleasing urge to avoid appearing or seeming selfish that forces some other people to prioritize their partners’ needs, wants, feelings, and happiness over theirs.

If you’re constantly trying to make other people happy with you, make your decision align with what others say, or think too much about the perceptions of others towards you, you’re obviously feeling insecure.

Putting up approval-seeking and people-pleasing behaviors might seem like a smart dating mechanism, but the reality is, it’ll rob you of your happiness in the relationship.

You can try everything humanly possible to please and gain the love and approval of someone, but you can’t feel genuinely happy in a relationship until you feel you’re good enough. And you don’t even need to try that much. Because there will always be people who’ll recognize how amazing you’re and love you just the way you are. You just have to believe you’re good enough.

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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.

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From The Good Men Project on Medium

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