Hilary Duff's Admission About Needing Relationship 'Chaos' is So Relatable. But is That a Good Thing?

Last week, I posed a question to BODYTALK’s newsletter subscribers (side note: Have you joined the chat yet?): I asked them if they’d ever been in a truly toxic relationship…and 70 percent of respondents said yes. 

This doesn’t surprise me: Toxic relationships have been glorified and romanticized, and we’ve all been conditioned to believe that the heart-pounding, butterfly-inducing, high-highs-and-low-lows type of relationships are the height of romance. See: Oh…pretty much every movie and TV show ever. Love triangles and will-they-won't-they stories and "passionate" fights between lovers were forced down our throats at pretty much every turn.

And it turns out, even our millennial screen queen/relatable celeb icon isn’t immune to the pull of these messages. On a recent Call Her Daddy appearance, Hilary Duff opened about the beginning of her relationship with her now-husband, Matthew Koma. 

“He was very sweet,” she said of their relationship’s earliest days. “He was so nice to me and I remember being like…he’s so nice. That's not really a thing.”

And then, she dropped a bomb that made so many things — even in my own life — instantly make sense. “I think I needed some chaos first,” she said.

I can relate…and if you’re reading this, I’m guessing you can as well.

Duff went on to talk about how she and Koma broke up multiple times (and really, haven’t we all done the on-again-off-again thing at one point or another?). Again…it’s really relatable. And it clarifies why pretty much every woman I know has, at one point or another, turned away from a good thing in favor of…well, more chaos.

I think we’ve been so conditioned to believe that romantic relationships should make our nervous systems go a little crazy…and I also think we as women have been conditioned to feel we don’t deserve nice things. 

Part of me feels like craving the chaos is just a rite of passage….but is it really? Or is it just years and years of being made to feel like stability is boring or stale? And also...years of being made to feel like we don't deserve to just be treated well without the drama and emotional labor and the fighting to prove our worth. 

We’ve recieved so many ideas about the excitment and the buzz or being in an unstable partnership that makes us feel a little bit crazy. But can we put a new narrative in place now? Chaos isn’t cute. Sometimes, people really are nice and good…and we’re worthy of that niceness and goodness.