Is your gut telling you that something is not right in your relationship? The signs of romantic manipulation can be hard to recognize and harder to address.
It’s rather easy to identify manipulation when someone close to you is on the receiving end of this kind of emotional abuse. But it gets a bit tricky to detect the manipulative strategies when they are targeted at you.
What Is Manipulation?
Manipulation is a twisted mind game played by a conniving individual who unleashes several psychological tactics to exert control and dominance over others. The end goal is to emotionally exploit and influence the unwary victim so that they do the manipulator’s bidding.
Romantic Manipulation
Especially, romantic manipulation can be quite a challenge to detect because manipulation in romantic relationships can come in the guise of love bombing, gaslighting, ingratiating behavior, and many other covert and overt intimidation techniques.
The incohesive combination of lies, blames, denials, omissions, smothering, and other psychological warfare strategies are meant to make you disoriented, confused, and question your own rationalization capability and sanity. And in the mist of chaos, your partner always gets his way.
Even the most visibly toxic type of emotional manipulation in romantic relationships can start subtle and eventually transform into an established relationship dynamic. By the time you realize you are being emotionally manipulated by your romantic partner, you are already far too deep in a messy relationship.
If you are in a similar situation, to safeguard your safety and emotional well-being, you need to be aware of the signs of psychological manipulation in romantic relationships and figure out a way to deal with them, quite early.
So, What Are The Signs of Romantic Manipulation?
The followings are 10 telltale signs of manipulation in a romantic relationship. Be on your guard if you can identify with more than one.
1. Gaslighting
Your partner always downplays your emotions and invalidates your feelings. Not only do they lie about past events or their actions, but they also twist the narrative in such a way that it seems like you are exaggerating your experiences. They flip the blame on you and accuse you of being hyper-sensitive or unstable. They do this to avoid accountability for their misdeeds, to make you doubt yourself, and to control the way you think and react.
“I was not even talking to that girl. Have you slept well last night? You seem to be delirious”, this is how a manipulator argues in a romantic relationship when straying and gaslighting their partner.
2. Passive-Aggression
Your partner is being hostile towards you and you can sense their displeasure and rebuff in their body language and verbal communication. They avoid eye contact, sigh dramatically, pout, get sarcastic, whine, and do everything in their power to make their dissatisfaction clear, except for talking about it.
If your romantic partner adopts juvenile emotional expressions to get a reaction from you, instead of being upfront about what’s bugging them, this signs you’re being manipulated in a relationship through passive-aggressive behavior.
3. Stonewalling
After a fight between you two, does your partner stonewall you and give you the silent treatment? One of the signs of romantic manipulation is when one of the partners chooses to be evasive, dodges questions, and tunes out of conversations deliberately. They make you feel that you, your emotions, and what you have to say don’t matter to them. They simply refuse to engage with you and all your pleas fall on their deaf ears.
