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90% Love, 10% Problems

Your Relationship Is Probably a Lie and You Don’t Even Realize It

Mary Carter
4 min readJan 22, 2025
Photo by Ba Tik

Stop everything and look at the person next to you. The person you share your bed with, your couch, your breakfast. The person who swore eternal love. The person who makes you happy 90% of the time.

That same person who, without warning, transforms your life into a minefield of inexplicable insecurities and doubts.

The other 10%? Those are the moments when they completely shut down. Disconnect. Pull away without explanation. And you, like an idiot trained since childhood, swallow hard and pretend everything’s fine. Because 90% happiness is good, right? Wrong. That 10% is a time bomb that will explode in your face.

And when it does, it will take with it all the confidence you’ve built over the years, leaving only the ashes of destroyed self-esteem.

I spent years lying to myself about that 10%. “It’s normal, they had a rough day.” “Men are just like that.” “At least they don’t cheat or hit me.” The list of excuses is endless when we desperately want to believe we’ve found the love of our life. Each excuse is another brick in the wall we build to hide the truth from ourselves, until that wall becomes so high we can’t even see the sky.

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