“I love you because I need you” is not love. It’s called “codependency”.

A relationship is defined as “codependent” when I hang onto the other to meet any need I should be meeting within myself.

This kind of relationship is unhealthy because it carries more than it should. I expend an unsustainable amount of energy keeping propped up something that should be able to hold itself up.

It’s like swimming and drowning the person I love in an effort to remain afloat.

Here are some of the things someone in a codependent relationship would say:

I am not enough.

Without you, I wouldn’t know what to do with my time.

I am either with you or waiting.

I would do anything to make you happy, even if it compromises me.

I don’t know how to say no because it makes me feel you won’t love me anymore.

If you don’t approve of me or if you disagree with me I will lose you forever and I can’t live without you.

I want to tell you what to do, tell you who you can be friends with and in general try to control you because I cannot survive without you. It’s for these reasons that I am territorial, jealous, possessive and scared.

I am afraid to tell you the truth.

And now, here is the trickiest, sneakiest symptom of a codependent relationship:

You read about it, recognize yourself and secretly think “clearly, I am not codependent. It’s just that I love madly, deeply, and others are selfish and don’t know how to truly love”.

To make things even more complicated, pretty much every fairy tale, movie, song, lyric and poem expresses codependency. This is why it’s so hard to recognize just how unhealthy it truly is.

The fact is this: to not place an unbearable burden on your relationship, in order to not suffocate it, in order to instead say “I need you because I love you”, you need to know yourself, take care of yourself, love yourself and make yourself happy.

If you expect anyone else to do any of these things for you, if you insist this is true love, if you must declare everyone else is selfish and does not understand, your relationships will be painful, dramatic, obsessive, desperate and often abusive and will fail for the same reason over and over and over again until you see.