There’s more to a relationship than just being romantic during candle-lit dinners and having an enjoyable sex life. People involved in a serious relationship should take into consideration each other’s physical, emotional, and psychological well-being. It should be founded in the proverbial understanding, trust, respect, and love.
Although all relationships sail through rough waters, without these ingredients it will be difficult to maintain a healthy relationship. There are certain situations where a partner may exhibit unacceptable and abusive behaviors. Violence in a relationship is not just physical abuse. It can involve psychological or emotional bullying.
Abusive relationships are characterized by extreme jealousy, emotional withholding, lack of intimacy, raging, sexual coercion, infidelity, verbal abuse, threats, lies, broken promises, physical violence, power plays and control games.
The damaging effects of emotional abuse is sometimes even greater than physical abuse, though it is often harder to recognize, and therefore to recover from. It causes long term self esteem problems and complex emotional consequences for the abused partner....