So when you think about a child, a close friend, or a romantic partner, the word "love" probably comes to mind, and instandly other emotions rush in: joy and hope, excitement, trust and security, and yes, sometimes sadness and disappointment. There might not be a word in the dictionary that more of us are connected to than love.
Yet, given its central importance in our lives, isn't it interesting that we're never explicitly taught how to love?
We build friendships, navigate early romantic relationships, get married and bring babies home from hospital with the expectation that we'll figure it out.
But the truth is, we often harm and disrespect the ones we love.
It can be subtle things like guilting a friend into spending time with you or sneaking a peek at your partner's texts, or shaming a child for their lack of effort at school. 100 percent of us will be on receiving end of unhealthy relationship beaviors and 100 percent of us will do unhealthy things. It's part of being human. In its worst form, the harm we inflict on loved ones and relationship abuse is something that one in three women and one in four men will experience in their lifetime. Now, if you're like most people when you hear those stats, you'll go, "Oh, no, no, no, that would never happen to me."
It's instinctual to move away from the words "abuse" and "violence," to think that they happen to someone else somewhere else.
But the truth is, unhealthy relationships and abuse are all around us.
We just call them different things and ignore the connection.
Abuse sneaks up on us disguised unhealthy love.
I work for an organization called One Love started by a family whose daughter Yeardley was killed by her ex-boyfriend.
This was a tragedy no one saw coming, but when they looked back they realized the warning signs were there, just no one understood what they were seeing.
Called crazy or drama or too much drinking, his actions weren't understood to be what they really were, which was clear signs of danger.
Her family realized that if anyone had been educated about these signs, her death could have been prevented.
So today we're on a mission to make sure that others have the information that Yeaedly and her friends didn't.
We have three main goals: give all of us a language for talking about a subject that's quite awkward and uncomfortable to discuss; empower a whole front line ,namely friends, to help; and in the process, improve all of our ability to love better.
To do this, it's always important to start by illuminating the unhealthy signs that we frequently miss, and our work really focuses on creating content to start conversations with young people.
As you'd expect, most of our content is pretty serious, given the subject at hand, but today I'm going to use one of our more light-hearted yet still thought-provoking pieces, to illiminate five markers of unhealthy love.
The first is intensity.
B: I haven't seen you in a couple days. I've missed you.
O: I've missed you too.
~~
B: I haven't seen you in five minutes. It feels like a lifetime. What have you been doing without me for five whole minutes?
O: It's been three minutes.
~~
Anybody recognize that? I don't know. I do.
~~
Abusive relationships don't start out abusive.
They start out exciting and exhilarating.
There's an intensity of affection and emotion, a rush.
It feels really good. You feel so lucky, like you've hit the jackpot.
But in unhealthy love, these feelings shift over time from exciting to overwhelming and maybe a little bit suffocating.
You feel it in your gut.
Maybe it's when your new boyfriends or girlfriends says "I love you" faster than you were ready for, or starting showing up everywhere texting and calling a lot.
Maybe they're impatient when you're slow to respond, even though they know you had other things going on that day.
It's important to remember that it's not how a relationship starts that matters, it's how it evolves.
It's important in the early days of a new relationship to pay attention to how you're feeling.
Are you comfortable with the pace of intimacy.
Do you feel like you have space and room to breathe?
It's also really important to start practing using your voice to talk about your own needs.
Are your requests respected?
A second marker is isolation.
O1: Me and my boyfriend always have Monday Funday.
~~~
O2: Want to hang out ?
O1: Me and my boyfriend always have Monday Funday.
O2: Tomorrow?
O1: It's our Tuesday Snooze Day.
O2: Wednesday?
O1: No Friends Day.
~~~
If you ask me, isolation is one of the most frequently missed and misunderstood signs of unhealthy love.
Why?
Because every new relationship starts out with this intense desire to spend time together, it's easy to miss when something shifts, isolation creeps in when your new boyfriend or girlfriend starts pulling you away from your friends and family, your support system, and tethering you more tightly to them.
They might say things like, "Why do you hang out with them? They're such losers" about your best friends, or, "They want us to break up. They're really against us" about your family.
Isolation is about sowing seeds of doublt about everyone from your prerelationship life.
Healthy love includes independence, two people who love spending time together but who stay connected to the people and activities they cared about before.
While at first you might spend every waking minute together, over time maintaining independence is key.
You do this by making plans with friends and sticking to them, and encouraging your partner to do the same.
~~~
A third marker of unhealthy love is extreme jealousy.
B2: What are you so happy about?
B1: She just started following me Instagram!
~~~~
B2: What are you so nervous about?
B1: She, She just started following me, like, everywhere.
~~
As the honeymoon period begins to fade, extreme jealousy can creep in. Your partner might become more demanding, needing to know where you are and who you're with all the time, or they might start following you everywhere, online and off. Extreme jealousy also brings with it possessiveness and mistrust, frequent accusations of flirting with other people or cheating, and refusal to listen to you when you tell them, they have nothing to worry about and that you only love them. Jealousy is a part of any human relationship, but extreme jealousy is different. There's a threatening desperate and angry edge to it. Love shouldn't feel like this.
A fourth marker is belitting.
~~~
B: Wanna hang out?
O: I gotta study.
B: You'll get an A anyway, A for amazing.
~~~
B: Wanna hang out?
O: I gotta study.
B: You'll get an F anyway, F for, F for.... stupid.
~~~~
Yeah, hmm.
In unhealthy love, words are used as weapons.
Conversations that used to be fun and lighthearted turn mean and embarrassing. Maybe your partner makes fun of you in a way that hurts, or maybe they tell stories and jokes for laughs at your expense. When you try to explain that your feelings have been hurt, they shut you down and accuse you of overreacting.
"Why are you so sensitive? What's your problem. Give me a break."
You are silenced by these words. It seems pretty obvious, but your partner should have you back. Their words should build you up, not break you down. They should keep your secrets and be loyal. They should make you feel more confident, not less.
Finally, a fifth marker: Volatility.
O1: I'd sad if we broke up.
O2: I'd be sad too.
~~~
O1: I'd so depressed if we ever broke up.
O2: I'd throw myself off this step. I would! Don't try to stop me!
~~
Frequent breakups and makeups, high highs and low lows: as tension rises, so does volatility. Tearful, frustrated fights followed by emotional makeups, hateful and hurtful comments like, " You are worthless, I'm not even sure why I'm with you!" followed quickly by apologies and promises it will never happen again. By this point, you've been so conditioned to this relationship roller coaster that you may not realize how unhealthy and maybe even dangerous your relationship has become.
It can be really hard to see when unhealthy love turns towards abuse, but it's fair to say that the more of these markers your relationship might have, the more unhealthy and maybe dangerous your relationship could be.
And if your instict is to break up and leave, which is advice so many of us give our friends when they're in unhealthy relationships, that's not always the best advice. Time of breakup can be a real trigger for violence. If you fear you might be headed towards abuse or in abuse, you need to consult with experts to get the advice on how to leave safely.
But it's not just about romantic relationships and it's not just about violence. Understanding the signs of unhealthy love can help you audit and understand nearly every relationship in your life.
For the first time, you might understand why you're disappointed in a friendship, or why every interaction with a certain family member leaves you discouraged and anxious.
You might even begin to see how your own intensity and jealousy is causing problems with colleagues at work.
Understanding is the first step to improving, and while you can't make every unhealthy relationship healthy -- some you're going to leave behind, you can do your part every day to do relationships better.
And here's the exciting news: it's actually not rocket science. Open communication, mutual respect, kindness, patience -- we can practice these things every day.
And while practice will definitely make you better, I have to promise you it's also not going to make you perfect.
I do this for living and every day I think and talk about healthy relationships, and still I do unhealthy things.
Just the other day as I was trying to shuttle my four kids out the door amidst quarreling, squabbling and complaints about breakfast. I completely lost it.
With an intentionally angry edge, I screamed, " Everybody just shut up and do what I say! You are the worst! I am going to take away screen time and dessert and anything else you could possibly ever enjoy in life!"
Anybody been there?Volatility, belittling.
My oldest son turned around and looked at me, and said, " Mom, that's not love." For a minute, I really wanted to kill him for calling me out. Trust me. But then I gathered myself and I thought, you know what, I'm actually proud.
I'm proud that he has a language to make me pause. I want all of my kids to understand what the bar should be for how they're treated, and to have a language and a voice to use when that bar is not met versus just accepting it.
For too long, we've treated relationships as a soft topic, when relationship skills are one of the most important and hard to build things in life.
Not only can understanding unhealthy signs help you avoid the rabbit hole that leads to unhealthy love, but understanding and practing the art of being healthy can improve nearly every aspect of your life.
I completely convinced that while love is an instinct and an emotion, the ability to love better is a skill we can all build and improve on over time.
Thank you.
(Applause)
所以當你想到一個孩子、一個親密的朋友或一個浪漫的伴侶時，“愛”這個詞可能會出現在你的腦海中，然後其他情緒就會湧現：快樂和希望、興奮、信任和安全，是的，有時是悲傷和失望。字典中可能沒有一個詞比愛更能聯繫到我們。
然而，鑑於它在我們生活中的核心重要性，我們從來沒有被明確地教過如何去愛，這難道不是很有趣嗎？
我們建立友誼，駕馭早期的浪漫關係，結婚並將嬰兒從醫院帶回家，並期望我們能解決這個問題。
但事實是，我們經常傷害和不尊重我們所愛的人。
可能是一些微妙的事情，比如讓朋友與你共度時光，或者偷偷看你伴侶的短信，或者因為孩子在學校沒有努力而羞辱他們。我們 100% 的人會接受不健康的關係行為，我們 100% 的人會做不健康的事情。這是人類的一部分。在最糟糕的情況下，我們對親人造成的傷害和關係虐待是三分之一的女性和四分之一的男性在其一生中會經歷的事情。現在，如果您在聽到這些統計數據時像大多數人一樣，您會說：“哦，不，不，不，這永遠不會發生在我身上。”
遠離“虐待”和“暴力”這些詞是本能的，認為它們發生在其他地方的其他人身上。
但事實是，不健康的關係和虐待無處不在。
我們只是稱它們為不同的東西而忽略了聯繫。
虐待潛入我們偽裝的不健康的愛。
我為一個名為 One Love 的組織工作，該組織由一個女兒 Yeardley 被前男友殺害的家庭創辦。
這是一場沒有人預見到的悲劇，但當他們回頭看時，他們意識到警告信號就在那裡，只是沒有人明白他們所看到的。
被稱為瘋狂、戲劇或酗酒，他的行為並沒有被理解為真實的樣子，這是危險的明顯跡象。
她的家人意識到，如果有人接受過有關這些跡象的教育，她的死亡是可以避免的。
所以今天我們的任務是確保其他人擁有 Yeaedly 和她的朋友們沒有的信息。
我們有三個主要目標：為我們所有人提供一種語言來討論一個非常尷尬和不舒服的話題；授權整個前線，即朋友，提供幫助；在這個過程中，提高我們所有更好地愛的能力。
要做到這一點，從闡明我們經常忽略的不健康跡像開始總是很重要的，我們的工作真正專注於創造內容以開始與年輕人的對話。
正如你所料，鑑於手頭的主題，我們的大部分內容都非常嚴肅，但今天我將使用我們更輕鬆但仍然發人深省的作品之一，來闡明不健康愛情的五個標誌。
首先是強度。
B：我已經有幾天沒有見到你了。我很想你。
O：我也很想你。
~~
B：我五分鐘沒見到你了。感覺就像一輩子。整整五分鐘沒有我，你在做什麼？
O：已經三分鐘了。
~~
有人認得嗎？我不知道。我願意。
~~
虐待關係不會以虐待開始。
他們開始令人興奮和令人振奮。
有一種強烈的感情和情感，一種匆忙。
感覺真的很好。你感覺很幸運，就像你中了大獎一樣。
但在不健康的愛情中，這些感覺會隨著時間的推移從令人興奮的轉變為壓倒性的，甚至可能有點令人窒息。
你在你的腸道裡感覺到它。
也許是當你的新男朋友或女朋友說“我愛你”比你準備好時更快，或者開始到處發短信和打電話。
當你反應遲緩時，他們可能會不耐煩，即使他們知道你那天還有其他事情要發生。
重要的是要記住，重要的不是一段關係如何開始，而是它如何發展。
在新關係的早期，關注你的感受很重要。
你對親密的節奏感到舒服嗎？
你覺得你有呼吸的空間和空間嗎？
開始練習用你的聲音談論你自己的需求也很重要。
您的要求得到尊重嗎？
第二個標誌是隔離。
O1：我和我男朋友總是有星期一的Funday。
~~~
O2：想出去玩嗎？
O1：我和我男朋友總是有星期一的Funday。
O2：明天？
O1：今天是我們星期二的貪睡日。
O2：星期三？
O1：沒有朋友節。
~~~
如果你問我，孤立是不健康愛情中最常被忽視和誤解的跡象之一。
為什麼？
因為每段新的關係都始於這種共度時光的強烈願望，所以當事情發生變化時很容易錯過，當你的新男朋友或女朋友開始把你拉離你的朋友和家人、你的支持系統並束縛你時，孤立感就會蔓延開來緊緊地貼在他們身上。
他們可能會對你最好的朋友說“你為什麼和他們一起出去玩？他們太失敗了”，或者說“他們希望我們分手。他們真的反對我們”關於你的家人。
隔離是關於從你的戀愛前生活中播下對每個人的懷疑種子。
健康的愛包括獨立，兩個喜歡共度時光但又與他們之前關心的人和活動保持聯繫的人。
雖然一開始你可能會在醒著的每一分鐘都在一起，但隨著時間的推移，保持獨立是關鍵。
為此，您可以與朋友一起制定計劃並堅持下去，並鼓勵您的伴侶也這樣做。
~~~
不健康愛情的第三個標誌是極度嫉妒。
B2：你為什麼這麼高興？
B1：她剛開始關注我的 Instagram！
~~~~
B2：你這麼緊張什麼？
B1：她，她剛剛開始跟踪我，就像，到處都是。
~~
隨著蜜月期開始消退，極度嫉妒可能會蔓延。您的伴侶可能會變得更加苛刻，需要一直知道您在哪里以及與誰在一起，或者他們可能會開始到處跟踪您，無論是在線還是離線。極度的嫉妒也會帶來佔有慾和不信任，經常指責與他人調情或作弊，當你告訴他們時拒絕聽你的話，他們沒有什麼可擔心的，你只愛他們。嫉妒是任何人際關係的一部分，但極度嫉妒是不同的。它有一種威脅性的絕望和憤怒的邊緣。愛情不應該是這樣的。
第四個標誌是輕視。
~~~
B：想出去玩嗎？
O：我要學習。
B：不管怎樣，你會得到 A，A 是驚人的。
~~~
B：想出去玩嗎？
O：我要學習。
B：無論如何你都會得到一個F，F代表，F代表......愚蠢。
~~~~
是的，嗯。
在不健康的愛情中，言語被用作武器。
曾經有趣和輕鬆的對話變得卑鄙和尷尬。也許你的伴侶以一種傷害你的方式取笑你，或者他們講故事和笑話來取笑你。當你試圖解釋你的感情受到傷害時，他們會讓你閉嘴並指責你反應過度。
“你怎麼這麼敏感？你有什麼問題，讓我休息一下。”
你被這些話沉默了。這似乎很明顯，但你的伴侶應該讓你回來。他們的話應該建立你，而不是讓你失望。他們應該保守你的秘密並保持忠誠。他們應該讓你感覺更自信，而不是更少。
最後，第五個標誌：波動性。
O1：如果我們分手了，我會很難過。
O2：我也會難過的。
~~~
O1：如果我們分手了，我會很沮喪。
O2：我會放棄這一步。我會！不要試圖阻止我！
~~
頻繁的分手和調整，高點和低點：隨著緊張局勢的加劇，波動性也在增加。淚流滿面、沮喪的打架之後是情緒化的妝容、仇恨和傷害性的評論，比如“你一文不值，我什至不知道我為什麼和你在一起！”緊隨其後的是道歉並承諾永遠不會再發生。到目前為止，你已經習慣了這種過山車般的關係，以至於你可能沒有意識到你們的關係已經變得多麼不健康甚至危險。
真的很難看出不健康的愛情何時會變成虐待，但可以公平地說，你們的關係中這些標誌越多，你們的關係就越不健康，也可能越危險。如果你的直覺是分手和離開，這是我們很多人在朋友處於不健康關係時給他們的建議，這並不總是最好的建議。分手時間可能是暴力的真正觸發因素。如果您擔心自己可能會遭受虐待或遭受虐待，則需要諮詢專家以獲得有關如何安全離開的建議。但這不僅僅是關於浪漫關係，也不僅僅是關於暴力。了解不健康愛情的跡象可以幫助您審核和了解您生活中幾乎所有的關係。第一次，你可能會明白為什麼你對友誼感到失望，或者為什麼與某個家庭成員的每一次互動都會讓你灰心和焦慮。你甚至可能開始看到你自己的強度和嫉妒是如何在工作中與同事產生問題的。理解是改善的第一步，雖然你不能讓每一個不健康的關係都變得健康——有些你會留下，但你可以每天儘自己的一份力量來改善關係。
這是令人興奮的消息：這實際上不是火箭科學。開放的溝通、相互尊重、善良、耐心——我們每天都可以練習這些東西。雖然練習肯定會讓你變得更好，但我必須向你保證，它也不會讓你變得完美。我這樣做是為了生活，每天我都在思考和談論健康的關係，但我仍然做不健康的事情。就在前幾天，我正試圖在吵架、爭吵和對早餐的抱怨中把我的四個孩子送出家門。我完全失去了它。我故意用憤怒的邊緣尖叫，“每個人都閉嘴，照我說的做！你是最糟糕的！我要帶走屏幕時間和甜點以及你在生活中可能享受的任何其他東西！”有人去過嗎？波動，貶低。大兒子轉身看著我說：“媽媽，那不是愛。”有一分鐘，我真想殺了他，因為他叫我出來。相信我。但後來我振作起來，我想，你知道嗎，我真的很自豪。
我很自豪他有一種語言讓我停下來。我希望我所有的孩子都了解應該如何對待他們的標準，並在沒有達到標準而不是接受標準時使用語言和聲音。長期以來，我們一直將人際關係視為一個軟話題，而人際關係技巧是生活中最重要且最難建立的東西之一。
了解不健康的跡像不僅可以幫助您避免導致不健康愛情的兔子洞，而且了解和實踐健康的藝術幾乎可以改善您生活的各個方面。
我完全相信，雖然愛是一種本能和一種情感，但更好地愛的能力是一種我們都可以隨著時間的推移而建立和提高的技能。
謝謝你。
（掌聲）
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