Relationships can be challenging for reasons that aren’t always obvious.
Most people tend to focus on the great or terrible relationships that they have. However, there’s another kind of relationship that falls somewhere in the middle.
It’s not bad, but it’s not good. It’s not abusive and toxic, but it doesn’t nourish and fulfill you like a good relationship should.
Granted, not every relationship is going to be endlessly nourishing and smooth sailing. Life happens. However, a healthy relationship should be more good than bad, and it should provide some kind of fulfillment.
If your relationship feels draining, instead, it could be for one of these reasons.
7 reasons your relationship feels draining, even when neither of you is doing anything wrong:
1. It requires more emotional energy than it gives back.
I tend to view a relationship like two pitchers of water. You pour into the other person’s pitcher, and they pour into yours. You can’t pour from just one of the pitchers forever. Sooner or later, it’s going to be empty.
Therefore, you need to refill the pitcher by the other person pouring more water back into it. If this balance is off, the relationship can start feeling one-sided, and you’ll feel more and more drained as time passes.
In a perfect world, both partners would pour into one another in about equal amounts. But unfortunately, that doesn’t always happen.
Sometimes you’re able to pour more than other times. People go through life struggles that may leave their pitcher empty, so they have little to pour with. That’s normal. However, if it goes on long-term, it often isn’t sustainable in a relationship.
Sooner or later, the pitcher will empty, and the relationship will struggle. In my experience, it’s usually long, slow, and drawn out when it happens.
2. Your personality or social needs don’t mesh.
Both people can be fantastic humans, and the relationship still doesn’t work out.
I ran into this issue in one of my relationships. My partner had a huge family that she was very close to. They all grew up together, and as adults, they would still get together regularly.
Almost every weekend, someone was crashing at someone else’s house after a night of drinking and festivity.
I, on the other hand, am a creature of solitude. I’m an introvert and a loner. Having other people around all the time was so exhausting, and it took so much emotional energy out of me.
That was emotional energy I could have been pouring into her if my pitcher wasn’t constantly running dry. Even though we were compatible in many other ways, the dramatic difference in our social needs became a big problem.
It became enough of a problem that it ultimately contributed to the relationship ending. I wasn’t going to demand that she spend less time with her family because that would be wrong. But I still had to take care of myself too.
3. You’re constantly monitoring yourself around them.
It is incredibly exhausting to constantly be monitoring yourself and walking on eggshells when you’re around your partner.
Sometimes it happens because of a toxic dynamic, but just as often it’s because there’s a mismatch in communication style or emotional needs.
For example, one person is more sensitive, the other more direct; one needs reassurance, the other assumes everything is fine.
You shouldn’t be spending your time wondering how the other person is going to feel about you doing or saying this or that. Will it upset them? Will it result in an argument? Will it offend them?
You may find that you subconsciously start changing your behavior to avoid negative attention from your partner.
That’s not healthy, even if no one is in the wrong, per se. You end up using a lot of emotional energy trying to “manage” yourself instead of relaxing into the connection. And over time, that constant self‑monitoring becomes draining,
4. You don’t feel like you can be yourself around them.
As an autistic man, I’ve always found the concept of dating kind of odd.
The way I perceive much of dating is that two people are going to meet up. Sure, they’re going to be putting their best foot forward, but ultimately they need to be themselves to see if there is any compatibility or chemistry there for romance.
Yet so many people go into dating not representing who they actually are. They have this different demeanor that they use for dating.
But what happens when the other person develops feelings for that demeanor? If they fall in love with how you represent yourself rather than who you are, that can carry into the relationship.
One participant is trying to keep up their dating persona until they can’t, and the other has feelings for someone who doesn’t exist.
They don’t feel like they can be their true, authentic self, which gets pretty exhausting after a while.
5. Their problems are always present in some way.
It can be difficult to love someone through chronic struggles, even if they aren’t asking you to solve the problem for them.
Personally, I used to be an incredibly pessimistic, negative person. I did not realize just how draining that was to other people until I dated someone who was also a pessimistic, negative person.
By that point, I had spent a lot of time climbing out of the hole of depression, and it was exhausting to try to not get sucked back down that hole.
She never asked me to solve her problems, and she was proactive in confronting them, but she also didn’t see why she needed to address her negative perceptions.
Depression often causes us to see the awful in everything, and it’s a habit you have to proactively change when you start trying to recover.
It doesn’t have to be depression, though. It could also be a situation where your partner has a tough job, and they always come from work stressed out.
You start dreading when they come home because you know they’re going to take their stress out on you by being short-tempered.
That’s draining, and it’s also not fair.
6. You may have different expectations of the relationship.
One person may find the relationship fulfilling; the other one may struggle with feeling connected. Sometimes, there’s just a mismatch in how people want to conduct their relationship.
For example, I’m someone who is perfectly happy being at home with my partner. I like to peacefully coexist in the same space with my person. That’s enough for me to stay connected to someone.
But I know that most other people need more than that. They want to actively do things together to help build and strengthen that bond. It can be an effort to balance and maintain that.
You don’t have to be perfectly aligned on everything, but you do need to make sure you’re filling their pitcher.
If they like to go out and do things to feel connected, then you need to do that, and if you can’t, then your expectations are probably too mismatched to work.
7. You don’t enjoy their company anymore.
I think one of the most painful circumstances you can experience is the realization that you just grew apart. There isn’t anything necessarily wrong with the relationship, but it’s not fulfilling either.
That can happen because people change over time. I recall reading something a while ago that suggested that people tend to change about every ten years or so. When you’re in a long-term relationship, the challenge and commitment is to fall in love with each new version.
However, you can run into the situation where that new version is just not someone that you’re compatible with.
Maybe your partner develops interests or attitudes that don’t align with yours anymore. It could be that they’ve lost interest in the things that connected the two of you.
Sometimes, different desires and life goals can put you on differing paths. When that happens, it’s often quiet rather than loud.
Closing thoughts…
A relationship need not be your only source of fulfillment, but it is one of the most important.
Presumably, you’re going to be spending a lot of time with this person. Problems like mismatched expectations, a bad attitude, or different life goals can create an unhealthy environment. It doesn’t have to be toxic, loud, and destructive to be harmful.
Sometimes, the biggest clue that things aren’t right is just quietly wishing the other person wasn’t coming home so soon or that they would go away for a little while. If you’re feeling like that, it might be asking some hard questions.
