The other night, I distracted myself in between catching up on work projects in the way most Millennials probably do: I logged on to Facebook. I proceeded to go through the profile of a person I found myself missing, a person who made me angry as frequently as he made me smile, a person who caused about as much hurt as he did happiness, and a person who I figured out was nothing but problematic months ago, yet I still continued my involvement with him. After I'd gotten through the last album of embarrassing, brace-faced middle school pictures taken eons before he was anywhere near my radar, I realized something: This emotional destruction probably isn't normal.

Some of my friends have joked that I am an emotional masochist. I decided I had to further research this newly popular term. According to Wikipedia, the definition of emotional masochism is a person who is "more comfortable when they feel sad or consider themselves failures in life." I don't think this is exactly what they meant, nor is this really me. I clearly required further research.

Lots of articles came up. A piece on Thought Catalog discussed looking for the signs that indicate you may be an emotional masochist. The first item, "indulging in depressing music," shook me a little since my Spotify Discovery Weekly playlist in the background crooned out songs like this and this where banjos, pianos, and sad guys sang about lost opportunities they simply couldn't get over. I moved on to something more scientific from PsychCentral. It had fifteen behavioral patterns of an emotional masochist. Again, I could easily tick off the "tolerating people who hurt us" and "holding on to painful feelings," among many others. OK, the signs were there, that I clearly held had some of these traits, but a question remained... why?

Then, I found this quote at the end of the article.

"Even though we consciously hate the angst, we are somehow attached to it. It’s often been with us so long that we can’t imagine any other way of being."

Emotional masochism has become a coping mechanism for Millennials in a generation that no longer can figure out how to have a normal relationship. So few of us are coupling up in the way our parents did while they were in college. It's no longer being made a priority, either. Therefore, we end up in the kind of relationships where momentary highs are taken with numerous lows in order to feel something, even if it's brief. We never think about the fact it isn't working.

Our generation has also become very keen on the idea that we can fix anything as long as we put our minds to it. This includes negative people. We see the bad and feel that the small amounts of good can be pulled out strongly enough to counteract it, and then perhaps we can eventually find the happiness we know we really want. But life is not a romantic comedy, so this rarely works out. Instead, we're left wondering what we did wrong, and why we couldn't make them happy, and if nothing works out what's the point in getting so invested anyway? So the vicious cycle never ends.

And then what do we do when someone does come along and breaks this mold? We don't trust it. The typical pattern of negative behavior has already been so ingrained in us that it's now difficult to see the possibility of a situation where this isn't involved, where you don't have to be arguing and confused and wary more frequently than you are comfortable and relaxed. Frankly, and sadly, this kind of positivity is scary, and we don't really know what to do with it other than not to trust it.

Perhaps the worst part of the emotional masochist complex is that it isn't being addressed, despite the fact that mental health professionals are now classifying it as a condition that requires some sort of help in order to overcome -- it's not a kink, or a positive trait. Bad relationships have become just another piece of the Millennial puzzle, one we aren't concerned with. They have been thrown to the back burner of our tiny stoves in our crowded apartments, bound to fall into our sink full of dishes from Monday which still remain unwashed on Thursday, but we don't care so long as our papers are turned in via email to our professors before midnight and our resumés have one more internship than the person sitting next to us at a job interview. Emotional masochism has become the norm, but it isn't healthy to allow this to continue.

So next time someone tells you that you have a pretty smile or does something nice just for the sake of doing it rather than to apologize for something bad, give them the benefit of the doubt that maybe, just maybe, that is who they really are, and that could be wonderful. I'm going to try.