There are millions of people who constantly sacrifice their own needs in favor of someone else's, take on other people's responsibilities, and work to ensure everyone else's happiness but their own. They push aside their own goals, dreams, and habits.
In these relationships, manipulation, guilt and resentment take the place of healthy, balanced affection. Codependent partners are not necessarily together because they want to be, they are because they have to be, because they don't know how to live otherwise.
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The relationships we are in can never be better than the relationships we have with ourselves. When you remove need, fear, obsession and desperation, you open up the way for love and affection just for its own sake.