Why is lack of empathy in relationships so hard?

The level of happiness, intimacy, and connection you feel in your relationships will always be directly related to the level of empathy you and your partner have.

The same goes for your relationship with yourself. The level of confidence, self-love, and strength you feel, 100 percent of the time, is tied to the level of empathy you feel for yourself.

If you don’t have empathy for yourself, you’ll continue to seek love, acceptance, and validation from those who can’t empathize with you either (but somehow, you continue to have an abundance of empathy for them).

Related : 10 signs you’re dealing with a master manipulator (according to psychology)

Empathy bankruptcy is the common denominator of all toxic relationships.

So, what do you do when you fall in love with someone who lacks empathy? How do you deal with an unempathetic partner?
Is it possible to date someone who lacks empathy (or has any relationship with them)?

What is empathy?

Wikipedia defines empathy as “the ability to understand or feel what another person is going through from within the other person’s frame of reference; that is, the ability to put yourself in another person’s shoes.”

Empathy is the ability to put yourself in someone else’s shoes. It’s about feeling and being with someone — even if you’re not going through exactly what they’re going through. It’s also about self-awareness.

If there’s a lack of empathy in your relationship, you’re not having a healthy, reciprocal relationship. You’re having a very painful transaction.

In the past, I was overly empathetic to others but kept finding myself in relationships where the other person had no empathy.

Why?

We will only tolerate relationships with people who treat us the same way we treat ourselves. You can’t give a dollar you don’t have. I had no real compassion to give to others because I had no compassion for myself. The “compassion” I felt for others was nothing more than what I felt for them. I made it all about my need to “be good enough,” and then tied my worth to the impossibility of being able to do that. For me, compassion meant giving second chances that were never earned and excusing bad behavior from toxic people. That’s not what compassion is about.

Compassion is when you’re there and you feel for someone, not just for them.

I used to find myself in relationships and friendships where I felt more alone than I would physically be in a prison cell. This is because there was a lack of compassion.
If you’re in a relationship where you feel like there’s a lack of empathy, here’s what you need to know:

Just as you can’t be a millionaire and claim poverty when it suits you, you can’t be selectively empathetic. You can’t.

The reason some people seem to “withhold” empathy from you or don’t empathize with you and give it easily to others isn’t because you’re not good enough. They do it because, as long as they can prove to you that they can “empathize” with others, they can keep you in a state of fear-based hope that one day, if you’re “good enough,” they’ll do the same for you. This is what keeps you ignoring red flags and staying in toxic relationships. You’re constantly trying to “be better” for them and understand them deeper.

Related : 11 phrases a narcissist will use to chip away at your confidence

These people aren’t truly empathetic because selective empathy is impossible. They don’t empathize with themselves, and so they selectively give affirmation wrapped in a cloak of false “empathy.”

Empathy and vulnerability go hand in hand. If someone can’t be vulnerable, they have no empathy to offer. To connect and empathize with you, they must be vulnerable enough to connect with something inside themselves.

Just as empathy can’t be selective, it can’t be conditional either. If someone places conditions on their empathy, it’s not empathy. It’s “let’s see how desperate you are for validation/approval.”

Judgment and empathy cannot coexist. Judgment is putting yourself on a higher level while failing to see the connection that defines empathy—the connection that we all share.

How do you deal with people who lack empathy?

Understand that without the other person being able to put themselves in your shoes, feel you, and see themselves in you and your experience… there will never be a healthy relationship. Your love and devotion will never be enough to extract empathy from people who are not empathetic.

Yes, it can be incredibly painful to admit and accept this, but I promise you that the pain you feel in this acceptance will be short-lived and will eventually translate into a life of peace.

Accepting people as they are is scary. It’s scary because the moment you stop fighting them, attaching your worth to them, and trying to make sense of the bullshit, you have to do the one thing you’ve been avoiding at all costs…

Accept yourself as you have become and use that acceptance as motivation to rise above your triggers.

If you find yourself continuing to engage with people who don’t have empathy, the best thing you can do is start working on empathizing with yourself.

And the only way to do that is through vulnerability. Be the advocate, confidant, and champion that you needed as a child. Be vulnerable enough to acknowledge what your younger self needs and attach your worth to not receiving it.

If you’re in a relationship with someone who lacks empathy, let go of the expectation that one day they will magically empathize with someone better. Let go of all expectations and remember…

Once you know you’re dealing with an unempathetic person, if you continue to reconnect with them, it’s not that they’re hurting you, it’s that you’re continuing to dunk your head in the toilet and then cry because you’re sick and smelly. Keep your boundaries intact, enforce your standards, and understand that you wouldn’t be in this situation if you were more compassionate with yourself.

Unempathetic people only care about themselves. That’s why they affect you and your emotions. They withhold from you and keep you in an emotional desert. Then when they give you a tiny drop, you overestimate it and mistake it for a gallon. It’s just a dirty drop.

Just because they seem to give gallons to others doesn’t mean you’re worth a drop (or that the gallons they give aren’t tainted).