Is Your Love Life Secretly Sucking Your Soul Dry? Psychology Spills the Tea on 13 Sneaky Relationship Vampires You Didn’t See Coming!
Added on September 10, 2025 inASTROLOGY CARDS
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Ever feel like your relationship is less “roses and butterflies” and more “slow leak in the emotional tire”? It’s funny how we all agree that love should lift us up, not weigh us down—but somehow, many of us end up stuck in a draining cycle that sneaks in like Mercury in retrograde—subtle, confusing, and a bit of a mind-bender. I mean, shouldn’t love make us feel energized, not like we just ran a marathon in flip-flops? Seriously, it takes guts to notice when your heart’s tank is running low without blaming yourself or your partner. After all, the healthiest love is supposed to fuel your soul, not suck it dry. So, how do you tell if your relationship’s quietly crushing your spirit instead of cozying up to it? Let’s unpack 13 sneaky signs that might just be your emotional warning lights flashing red. Ready to find out if love’s lifting you or leaving you limp? LEARN MORE.
Every relationship requires effort, compromise, and the occasional difficult conversation. There’s a profound difference between the natural work of healthy love and the slow, almost imperceptible erosion that happens when a relationship begins to drain rather than nourish your spirit.
Recognizing these patterns isn’t about finding fault or assigning blame. It’s about honoring the wisdom of your emotional experience and understanding that love, in its healthiest form, should energize rather than exhaust you.
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We all love the idea of falling in love at first sight. We are bombarded with images of people who do so and live happily ever after. I get it! I always wanted that, too. But the reality is, when you fall in love with someone at first sight, you don’t fall in love with who they are. You are falling in love with how they look first.
Second, you fall in love with who they could be. You don’t truly know them, flaws and all. The person you are “in love with” you barely know! So, try to tread cautiously when you fall too fast. For some people, love at first sight is possible, but more often than not, it’s just a recipe for heartbreak.
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I have a client who twists herself into a pretzel whenever she gets into a new relationship. She is a relentlessly anxious person, but the person she presents herself to be is chill.
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It is only to her friends that she shares her anxiety and insecurities about the relationship. With her guy, she is cool and confident. This attitude is a relationship killer.
Not being yourself is unsustainable, and your person will fall in love with someone you aren’t. When, ultimately, the true you comes out, your person will be confused and will, most likely, walk away.
It is vital for each person in a relationship to be each other’s priority. Life is busy and messy. Between work, kids, friends, social media, and extended family, there are hardly enough hours in the day.
Unfortunately, for many people, when it comes to what should be a priority, it’s rarely their partner. Why? Because people often take their partner for granted. Expecting they will understand and stay. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work this way.
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Being a priority, not necessarily the priority, is very important in a relationship. If you find you can’t make your partner a priority because you have to take care of your kids or a sick parent, then tell them! If they understand the reason behind a behavior, they can view the situation differently.
Investing significant emotional energy, time, and attention into a relationship that is not reciprocated is mentally draining. A recent study concluded that this constant, unrewarded effort leaves the neglected partner feeling depleted and tired.
How many times have you justified your partner’s behavior? When they don’t show up on time and don’t let you know, they must have been distracted at work.
When they ghost you and tell you they have had to step back to do some reflection and tell yourself it is a good thing. When they lie about who they spend time with, you remind yourself that everyone can have some secrets.
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None of these justifications is okay. If you find you are justifying your partner’s bad behavior not to seem needy or worried, you might sabotage the relationship. Recognize this is not the sign of a healthy relationship.
This is an important one. When someone makes a promise, the person must follow through with their promise. Of course, a critical part is making sure each person understands what a promise means. Is it truly a promise or an idea? The answer makes sure someone isn’t disappointed, but if your partner repeatedly makes promises they don’t keep, they aren’t the one for you.
While a single broken promise can be forgiven, a pattern of unfulfilled commitments indicates a lack of respect and reliability that ultimately drains emotional and mental energy. One study suggested that over time, you may begin to question your own worth, wondering if you are somehow to blame for your partner’s unreliability.
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This is the number one reason people come to me for relationship help. Ironically, they often don’t realize the communication in their relationship is off.
They believe it is something else. But, the reality is every relationship needs communication, two people being able to talk and listen to each other’s wants and needs to keep a relationship healthy. Without communication, a relationship will die. (This is not an exaggeration. This is a hard, fast, proven reality.
When we are in a relationship, it’s crucial that we feel good about ourselves. After all, that is what relationships are about — finding someone who complements you and helps you be the person you want to be.
If your person makes you feel any less than good about yourself, this is a relationship you don’t want to be in. It’s hard enough to be a confident person in this world. So, if the person who says they love you makes you feel bad about yourself, it is not OK.
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A partner may subtly put you down or belittle you, a pattern that research connects to a desire for superiority. This can be a form of emotional abuse that comes from their own insecurities but results in chipping away at your self-worth.
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I have a client who will do anything, anytime for her boyfriend. She shops for his clothes, does his laundry, shops for Christmas presents for his family, and plans their vacations. And, while this is okay in a relationship, the problem with hers is that she does it all, and he does nothing. And this is not okay.
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Of course, many women don’t make room for their partners to do things. They just go ahead and do the things themselves and feel resentful. This makes the relationship ripe for a blowout. So, if you are doing all the heavy lifting in the relationship, ask yourself why. If it’s any reason other than the fact that you fill the void in your relationship, it’s time to let go.
This one should go without saying, but I am going to say it. Getting involved with a married man will be a dead end for you, relationship-wise. A married man might truly believe he loves you, and he will leave his wife for you, but the reality is, he won’t.
Why? Because leaving his wife means leaving his family, messing up their finances, and losing face with his kids and community. No man is going to do that. I have never seen a married man leave his wife. Just remember this as you consider entering into an affair.
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The inherent imbalance of power, secrecy, and emotional limitations common to these affairs creates a dynamic that can quietly erode a person’s mental health and self-worth. Research has shown that you might internalize the idea that you are not good enough to be someone’s primary partner, especially when you are constantly put in a secondary role.
From almost day one of my marriage, there was a conflict between my husband and me and his family. They were just so different from me, and I struggled with fitting in. He didn’t know how to navigate it all, and so he didn’t. Over the years, this conflict only got worse until it finally killed our marriage.
I know everyone believes love can overcome everything, but family dynamics are a challenging thing. Your partner has been a part of their family much longer than they have known you. Who might they unwittingly put first?
Being in a relationship with someone who is abusing substances is only a dead-end relationship. Not only is a substance abuser emotionally unavailable, but the abuse will only affect every aspect of their lives, something that will make your life very unstable. If both of you are abusing substances, then it’s even worse.
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The opportunity for conflict and abuse is significantly higher than with sober people because the muzzle comes off when someone is in an altered state. This can only lead to intense negative emotions that will spell doom for the relationship.
A partner’s addiction shifts their priorities to substance use, leading to a breakdown in intimacy, emotional support, and communication, which can leave you feeling neglected, alone, and isolated. Research has also found that you might also experience increased stress, irritability, and a sense of hostility, making it difficult to connect and share positive experiences with your partner.
Many people who are in abusive relationships don’t see it. Because the abuse has been happening for so long, they come to see it’s the norm, and they brush it off, no matter how much it pains them.
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Why do they do this? Because they don’t want to lose the relationship and end up alone. If you know deep down that how you are being treated isn’t okay, or if your friends and family are telling you so, this relationship is something you want to get out of ASAP.
Every single person I know who has escaped from a relationship that isn’t good for them tells me their gut had told them long ago, maybe even in the beginning, that the relationship was never going to work. And almost every one of them ignored their gut.
One of the problems in relationships is that our brains are often in charge. The brain makes us want to justify behavior or stay in a relationship because we are afraid of being alone, so we believe our brain and stay.
Our gut doesn’t lie to us. It’s our body warning you that something is not right. It’s a survival mechanism we often ignore. Don’t ignore yours. Listen to your gut and follow what it says.
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No one wants to let go of a relationship. After all, lots of time and effort have been spent in this relationship, and breaking up would mean all that time would be wasted.
Breaking up means being alone again and having to date. You might even believe you will never love or be loved again, so you stay.
What I can tell you is the longer you stay in a relationship that isn’t working, the more time you will waste finding the love you want and the happily ever after you have always sought.
Mitzi Bockmann is a NYC-based Certified Life Coach who works with individuals who strive to heal their toxic relationships so they can have their happily ever after. Mitzi’s bylines have appeared in The Good Men Project, MSN, PopSugar, Prevention, Huffington Post, Psych Central, among many others.
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