Recently I was scrolling through Facebook and saw this post that stood out to me.

It took me a minute to process what this said. I've been in a situation before where my boyfriend (now ex) was my only "friend." But now, I'm in the situation where my boyfriend (current) is my best friend. Having someone who you can trust and be around all the time is the best feeling in the world, but it can lead to disaster if it's handled the wrong way.

I think girls get this confused these days because dating has become something centered around control and power. Social media has ruined the dating world. Dating a few years ago was between the two people who are in the relationship. That's it. Now, it has become this whole charade where everyone is trying to outdo each other. There are couples who post about each other every day, and those usually aren't the most healthy relationships. My last relationship was a disaster. Every time we got into an argument (which was often), I would feel the need to post about my boyfriend and how wonderful he was as kind of an apology or to reassure myself that our relationship was stable. But the reality was that my relationship was unhealthy and unstable, and I was trying to cover up for it.

I also realized something during my last relationship: your friends see the warning signs before you do.

Slowly, over the course of my relationship, I started seeing less and less of my girlfriends and more and more of my boyfriend. This wasn't intentional on my part; it was because every time I would want to hang out with my girlfriends, my boyfriend would suddenly come up with plans for me and him. They saw it, but I was oblivious. They tried to warn me about it, too, but I just thought they were jealous. I didn't realize that he was trying to control every aspect of my life, and it didn't stop there.

There were things that I wasn't allowed to do. I had to delete certain boys from my social media accounts, and I had to give my boyfriend all my passwords to those social media accounts so he could make sure they didn't try to re-add me. He told me it was because he loved me and wanted to keep me safe. My friends saw that from a different side.

I think the reason I let it go on so long is that not all of our relationship was bad. We would have some really good days. He made me laugh, and showered me with gifts. I don't blame him for everything that went wrong in our relationship. I really was in love with him.

Needless to say, when the breakup happened, none of my friends were really surprised. They were more relieved than anything. Even though the breakup was super messy and caused a lot of tears, I felt like a weight had been lifted off of my shoulders. Yes, it was the worst breakup of my entire life, not only because of the reason behind it, but because I finally saw what my friends had been trying to tell me for two years. My real friends saw through my daily Instragram posts about how wonderful and loving he was. They saw how I slowly changed into the person that he wanted me to be. They saw me start to shut them out and not be as open with them as I once was.

My advice to anyone who sees the warning signs of an unhealthy relationship is to help their friend get out. Your friend might get mad at you. I sure did. She might tell you that you "just don't know him," or "he's just trying to protect me," but don't stop trying to help her. Sometimes all you can do is be there for her, and try to minimize the damage when the breakup happens. The love and support from my friends was the only thing that kept me sane when I was going through my breakup, and I will never be able to repay them for that. My only regret is not listening to them earlier, and not seeing the warning signs when they were right in front of my face.