5 Big Challenges Empaths Face In Romantic Relationships + How To Overcome Them

If you're an empath—someone who can feel the energies and emotions of other people as if other people's energies and emotions were your own—your sensitivity sets you up for some unique blessings regarding love. Empaths can be incredibly compassionate, supportive partners. Yet being an empath also sets you up for unique challenges with lovers.

Some empaths may avoid dating or romantic commitment because they fear being overwhelmed by a partner's energies and emotions. Many empaths like to have plenty of space—energetic, emotional, and physical. This is how empaths retreat and recover, or give their hyper-perceptive systems a break from overstimulation and absorbing the energies and emotions of others. If you're a single empath and loving it, congratulations! If you're an empath who wants to date or be in a committed partnership, remember that your sensitivity does not have to hold you back. You can maintain your need for space while enjoying a successful partnership. If you're already in a committed relationship, mindfully creating space for yourself might improve the relationship.

Many empath friends and clients have confessed that it took them too long to realize they were prioritizing their partner's wishes over their own. Because empaths can feel other people's energies and emotions so intimately, they may struggle with confrontation or asserting themselves in a romantic relationship. Instead of challenging a mate on a big purchase, for example, an empath might bury their objection in order to avoid feeling all the challenging emotions their partner will feel when challenged. This is how empaths can fall easily into people-pleasing—in a romantic or any other relationship.

Humans can bond deeply with lovers and partners, and when you're a sensitive empath, it's important not to take bonding too far and merge with a partner. Because empaths pick up easily on what's around them, if you're feeling a challenging emotion out of the blue—like sadness or anger—ask yourself, "Is this mine or someone else's?" You may be carrying some of your partner's emotions to an unhealthy degree. Even intense joy can be draining when you're too much in another's emotional experience. Allow your partner to have their own emotional experience, and remember that you don't always have to feel with them. You have a lovely shared emotional and energetic bubble with lovers, but you also have a bubble that is all your own. Keeping that in mind is powerful.

An empath's default wiring is to tune into what's around them—the energy of a crowd, a physical space, or a lover—with their clairsentient or feeling psychic pathway. Being able to feel with people or take the energetic pulse of a space or group is useful, but if it's the only way you navigate life, it can quickly leave an empath feeling drained or overwhelmed. Sometimes tuning into a partner is the nourishing, healthy, supportive option. Other times it's the opposite, especially if the empath is already feeling drained and overwhelmed.

Because empaths can feel a partner's emotions in their own system, they can mistake this for being responsible for a partner's emotions. Consider that your partner's emotions are their own business. If a lover's emotions make you overwhelmed or uncomfortable, that's usually your business. Yet handling your overwhelm by attempting to control your partner's emotions, which could look like always wanting to soothe your partner when they are upset or trying to talk a partner out of a challenging emotion, isn't the best path forward for either of you.