Relationships

4 Signs That Man Is Not Your Soulmate—He’s Your Villain Origin Story

February 28, 2026

Between Tell Me Lies wrapping up and Love Is Blind serving us Alex on a silver platter of audacity, we’ve been watching villains operate in real time from the comfort of our couches this year. And it’s easy to sit there like, “How does she not see it? I would never let a man treat me that way.” Until you remember that one situationship from 2021 where you absolutely did.

On Don’t Think, host Carla Bezanson gets brutally honest about the signs you’re dating your personal villain, pulled directly from her own experience. “Once you’ve been through it, you just clock it so quickly,” she says. “It’s like they’re all using a shared playbook or handbook on what to say and what to do and how to act and how to lie.”

Whether it’s casual or serious, here are four signs the dynamic isn’t healthy.

4 Signs You’re in an Unhealthy Relationship

You feel like you won something—not like you’re building something

“Villains do not start by hurting you. That’s the tricky part,” Bezanson says. “They start by selecting you, making you feel really special.” Maybe he has status, money, options, or just this energy that makes him feel unobtainable. And when someone like that turns toward you, it’s intoxicating.

Bezanson says when she dated her villain, it wasn’t love that hooked her. “I was feeling chosen. He had options, many women, and he made that very clear.” She points out that Lucy on Tell Me Lies says it perfectly before her first date with Steven: “I don’t even like him. I think I hate him.” And then she goes anyway. Because being selected hits different from being respected, and your brain doesn’t always know the difference in the moment.

Your screen time is 90 percent detective work and 10 percent actually enjoying the relationship

“It’s not like 50 percent enjoying, 50 percent analyzing,” Bezanson says. “No, it’s like 80 percent misery. Maybe 20 percent is good and that’s generous.” If you’ve become a full-blown FBI agent on Instagram—if you’re checking his new followers then clicking through to her page then finding her best friend’s TikTok to see if he’s in the background of a video—that’s not you being crazy. That’s the situation making you crazy.

Bezanson says the amount of screenshots on her phone during her villain era could’ve filled an external hard drive. “I needed external validation all of the time, whether it be ChatGPT, pathetic as that is, or friends or other people.” She makes an important distinction though. Wanting a third-party opinion after a fight is normal. Needing one daily just to confirm you’re not losing your mind is not.

You’re apologizing for being hurt

Gaslighting doesn’t always look like a dramatic movie scene. “It’s subtle,” Bezanson says. “And that’s actually when you understand where the term gaslighting comes from.” She explains it like this: a man slowly dims the gas lights in the house every day by the tiniest amount. His wife keeps asking if it’s getting darker. He keeps telling her she’s crazy. Then one day she wakes up in the pitch black. That’s how it works. Tiny shifts over time until your entire sense of normal is recalibrated.

@carlabezanson 911? #fyp #foryou ♬ original sound – 🧁 snarly carly

Bezanson shares that her villain once accidentally sent her a voice note of him in bed with another woman. When she confronted him, “he denied it so confidently that I not only questioned myself, but I think I probably ended up apologizing to him.” The real red flag isn’t lying. “It’s convincing you that you’re unstable for even noticing or questioning that they’re lying,” she says. “And if you find yourself apologizing for reacting to something that hurt you, run.”

Everyone around you can see it except you

Bezanson says that during her peak villain era, 90 percent of the time she spent with friends or family was ruined because she was in a terrible mood over something happening in the relationship. “Once it was over, I heard from so many people, and not in a mean or judgmental way, that I was not fun to be around during that time. I was a shell of myself.”

The moment that hits hardest is when she was in Vegas and his sister’s friend pulled her aside to ask if she was OK. Bezanson was genuinely confused because she’d gotten so used to his behavior in public that it seemed fine compared to the stuff nobody saw behind closed doors. “I think I even defended him,” she says. “In fact, I was excited to tell him that someone had asked me—like almost as though to prove my alliance to him.”

And here’s the hard truth she lands on: “Villains don’t get us because we’re weak or stupid. They get us because they activate something in us. Ego, competition, an attachment wound, that little girl inside. Sometimes we mistake the nervous system chaos for chemistry or a spark…it can happen to anybody.”

Listen to the full episode on Don’t Think, available wherever you listen to podcasts.