So when you think about a child, a close friend, or a romantic partner,
the word "love" probably comes to mind, and instantly other emotions rush you:
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 the 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 peak at your partner's texts
or shaming a child for their lack of effort at school.
100 percent of us will be on the receiving end of unhealthy relationship behaviors
and 100 percent of us will do unhealthy things.
It's worst from, the harm we inflict on loved ones shows up as abuse and violence,
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 in 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
Yeardley 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,
"The Couplets", to illuminate five markers of unhealthy love.