TED Talks Daily - The difference between healthy and unhealthy love | Katie Hood (re-release)

Episode Date: October 18, 2025

In a talk about understanding and practicing the art of healthy relationships, Katie Hood reveals the five signs you might be in an unhealthy relationship -- with a romantic partner, a friend, a family member -- and shares the things you can do every day to love with respect, kindness and joy. "While love is an instinct and an emotion, the ability to love better is a skill we can all build and improve on over time," she says.Interested in learning more about upcoming TED events? Follow these links:TEDNext: ted.com/futureyouTEDAI San Francisco: ted.com/ai-sf Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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relationship expert Katie Hood tells us that love is a verb, meaning it's a skill we need to actively practice. She reveals the five signs you might be in an unhealthy relationship, and that can be with a romantic partner, a friend, or a family member. And she offers things to do daily to love with respect, kindness, and joy. 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 in. 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 gilting a friend into spending time with you, or sneaking a peek at your partner's texts. or shaming a child for their lack of effort at school. 100% of us will be on the receiving end of unhealthy relationship behaviors, and 100% of us will do unhealthy things. It's part of being human. In its worst form, 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 Yardley 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 Yardley 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's pretty serious, given the subject at hand.

But today I'm going to use five markers of unhealthy love. The first is intensity. Abusive relationships don't start out abusive. They start out exciting and exhilarating. There's an intensity of affection and emotion, a rush. It feels really good. You feel so lucky like you've hit the jack- But in unhealthy love, these feelings shift over time, from exciting to overwhelming and maybe a little bit suffocating. You feel it in your gut. Maybe it's when your new boyfriend or girlfriend says, I love you faster than you were ready for,

or start showing up everywhere, texting and calling a lot. Maybe they're impatient when you're slow to respond, even though they know you had other things going on that day. It's important to remember that it's not how a relationship starts that matters. It's how it evolves. It's important in the early days of a new relationship to pay attention to how you're feeling. Are you comfortable with the pace of intimacy? Do you feel like you have space and room to breathe? It's also

really important to start practicing using your voice to talk about your own needs. Are your requests respected? A second marker is isolation. If you ask me, isolation is one of the most frequently missed and misunderstood signs of unhealthy love. Why? Well, because every new relationship starts out with this intense desire to spend time together, it's easy to miss when something shifts. Isolation creeps in when your new boyfriend or girlfriend starts pulling you away from your friends and family, your support system, and tethering you more tightly to them. They might say things like, why do you hang out with them? They're such losers about your best or they want us to break up, they're totally against us about your family.

Isolation is about sowing seeds of doubt about everyone from your pre-relationship life. Healthy love includes independence, two people who love spending time together, but who stay connected to the people and activities they cared about before. While at first you might spend every waking minute together, over time maintaining independence is key. You do this by making plans with friends and sticking to them. and encouraging your partner to do the same. A third marker of unhealthy love is extreme jealousy. As the honeymoon period begins to fade,

extreme jealousy can creep in. Your partner might become more demanding, needing to know where you are and who you're with all the time, or they might start following you everywhere, online and off. Extreme jealousy also brings with it possessiveness and mistrust, frequent accusations of flirting with other people or cheating, and refusal to listen to you when you tell them they have nothing to worry about

and that you only love them. Jealousy is a part of any human relationship, but extreme jealousy is different. There's a threatening, desperate, and angry edge to it. Love shouldn't feel like this. A fourth marker is belittling. In unhealthy love, words are used as weapons. Conversations that used to be fun and light-hearted

turn mean and embarrassing. Maybe your partner makes fun of you in a way that hurts. Or maybe they tell stories and jokes for laughs at your expense. When you try to explain that your feelings have been hurt, they shut you down and accuse you of overreacting. Why are you so sensitive? What's your problem? Give me a break.

You're silenced by these words. It seems pretty obvious, but your partner should have your back. Their words should build you up, not break you down. They should keep your secrets and be loyal. They should make you feel more confident, not less. Finally, a fifth marker, volatility. Frequent breakups and makeups, high highs and low lows. As tension rises, so does volatility.

Tearful, frustrated fights followed by emotional makeups. Hateful and hurtful comments like, you're worthless. I'm not even sure why I'm with you. Followed quickly by apologies and promises it will never happen again. By this point, you've been so conditioned to this relationship roller coaster that you may not realize how unhealthy and maybe even, and dangerous your relationship has become. It can be really hard to see when unhealthy love turns towards abuse.

But it's fair to say that the more of these markers your relationship might have, the more unhealthy and maybe dangerous your relationship could be. And if your instinct is to break up and leave, which is advice so many of us give our friends when they're on unhealthy relationships, that's not always the best advice. Time of breakup can be a real trigger for violence. If you fear you might be headed towards abuse or in abuse,

you need to consult with experts to get the advice on how to leave safely. But it's not just about romantic relationships, and it's not just about violence. Understanding the signs of unhealthy love can help you audit and understand nearly every relationship in your life. For the first time, you might understand

why you're disappointed in a friendship, or why every interaction with a certain family member leaves you discouraged and anxious. You might even begin to see how your own intensity and jealousy is causing problems with colleagues at work. Understanding is the first step to improving. And while you can't make every unhealthy relationship healthy,

some you're going to have to leave behind. You can do your part every day to do relationships better. And here's the exciting news. It's actually not rocket science. Open communication, mutual respect, kindness, patience. We can practice these things every day. And we'll practice these things every day. will definitely make you better.

I have to promise you it's also not going to make you perfect. I do this for a living. Every day, I think and talk about healthy relationships and still I do unhealthy things. Just the other day as I was trying to shuttle my four kids out the dorm, amidst quarreling, squabbling, and complaints

about breakfast, I completely lost it. With an intentionally angry edge, I screamed, everybody just shut up and do what I say. You are the worst. I'm going to take away screen talk. and dessert and anything else you could possibly ever enjoy in life. Anybody been there?

Volatility, belittling. My oldest son turned around and looked at me and said, Mom, that's not love. For a minute, I really wanted to kill him for calling me out, trust me. But then I gathered myself, and I thought, you know what, I'm actually proud. I'm proud that he has a language to make me pause. I want all of my kids to understand what the bars should be for how they're treated

and to have a language and a voice to use when that bar is not met versus just accepting it. For too long, we've treated relationships as a soft topic when relationship skills are one of the most important and hard to build things in life. Not only can understanding unhealthy signs help you avoid the rabbit hole that leads to unhealthy love. But understanding and practicing the art of being healthy

can improve nearly every aspect of your life. I'm completely convinced that while love is an instinct and an emotion, the ability to love better is a skill we can all build and improve on over time. Thank you. As Katie Hood speaking at TED 2019, this talk was originally published in May 2019. If you're curious about Ted's curation, find out more at TED.com slash curation guidelines. And that's it for today. Ted Talks Daily is part of the TED Audio Collective. This episode was produced and edited by our team, Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Green, Lucy Little, and Tonzika Sangmar Nivong.

This episode was mixed by Lucy Little. Additional support from Emma Tobner and Danielle. Baleroza. I'm Elise Hu. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feet. Thanks for listening. kids just pop in a card and listen, hours of stories, music, podcasts, and more, and no screens or ads. With hundreds of options for ages zero to 12, it's the perfect gift they'll go back to again and again. Check it out at yotoplay.com. Y-O-T-O-P-L-A-Y. Time to check on the skies. It's another sunny day in Calgary. Forecast calls for high levels of economic activity. Late afternoon, we've got a burst of potential in a place-ranked North America's most livable city.

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