Despite their portrayal, it’s healthy and normal for beginning relationships to sometimes feel dull, difficult or terrifying (to a degree).

I recently had to learn this myself, and just understanding that everyone has some problems early on has made me feel a lot more secure in my relationship, and helped improve my communication with my partner.

The media often portrays early relationships as nothing more than the honeymoon phase, and a lot of couples don’t air their dirty laundry every time they’re in a dull patch, so it’s easy to get the idea that relationships need to be perfect or that you have to feel madly in love all the time. In reality, it’s perfectly normal to feel otherwise, and even makes a lot more sense than false bliss.

It’s okay to feel insecure and afraid at the beginning of a relationship, because you don’t know the person well enough to understand them or how they communicate. It’s easy to feel like someone might not be that into you if you don’t understand the ways that they give or receive affection.

Small disagreement or even arguments are more than healthy as well. Again, it boils down to knowing how to communicate with your partner, and how to do it in a healthy way. That takes a lot of understanding from both sides, and understanding that you aren’t always in the right. Obviously there are forms of arguing that are unhealthy and even damaging that are not normal in a relationship, but if both you and your partner can recognize them and are willing to work on them, it doesn’t have to be an ending.

As far as the passion and romance side of it, I think it’s unhealthy to expect constant passion from a relationship. Everyone has days that they’re happy with their partner but just feel a little bored. It isn’t initially a reason to jump ship.

Basically, relationships are going to take work. You likely don’t know the person well in the beginning of a relationship, and getting to know them and how the operate, and learning to operate with them, is scary and difficult. And that’s perfectly healthy. There are going to be days where all you do together is sit on the couch and watch a movie, and that’s normal as well.

Obviously there are unhealthy arguments, the bad kind of fear and relationships where there is no chemistry or passion whatsoever, and I don’t have advice for those. It depends on you and your partners willingness to acknowledge and improve yourselves.

**If you feel unsafe in a relationship, I would say to trust your gut and leave. Feeling generally unhappy is something that can sometimes be changed, but feeling unsafe is not normal or healthy, and something that I personally wouldn’t risk.

tl;dr Don’t jump ship in a relationship early on just because it isn’t as exciting or easy as you expected it to be. It’s normal to have issues in the beginning because communication is often misunderstood. Relationships take work.