What Are Karmic Relationships? The 2024 Guide

It’s easy to confuse a karmic relationship with a soulmate. Both of them make your heart race and pull you closer to your partner, as a strong mutual connection forms. But in reality, they’re far from the same.

Unlike a lifelong partnership with a soulmate, a karmic relationship is usually difficult to maintain and comes with intense highs and lows. While there’s lots of passion and intimacy at first, the lesson comes from the fact it’s not meant to be.

If you aren’t careful, the negative pattern of karmic relationships can lead to plenty of uncertainty and confusion. Therefore, I’ve created this guide to help you get your head around karmic relationships, so you can do something about them. But for the best guidance, I recommend speaking with an expreiced relationship psychic.

Karma, or Karmic?

Karmic relationships sound like they’re just meant to be – after all, they feel like something that was set into motion by karma.

But actually, nope – karmic relationships are life and love lessons you have to go through in order to learn something about yourself.

It’s a type of relationship that is meant to show you how to grow. It is not meant to be permanent, and it’s not ‘it’. 

While I’ve personally been through a few, and can tell you from the depths of my heart that I honestly believed I’d found my soulmate, I hadn’t. Here’s why.

Karmic Relationships: 10 Signs and Symptoms

I hope you’re settled in comfortably, because what you’re about to read might make you uneasy.

Despite seeming perfect on the surface, you will intuitively feel that something is wrong. This person may seem like your soulmate, but certain signs will continually create doubt in your mind.

1. It seems like ‘you’re meant to be’

   This implies that one could be in a destructive or harmful relationship. Regardless of the emotional distress and possible mistreatment, one might persist in envisioning the concept of a ‘flawless’ relationship due to idealistic or romanticized views. It is crucial to identify these circumstances and undertake suitable measures to guarantee physical and emotional health.

2. They have boundary issues

   Even if you believe that your fates are intertwined, you can’t help but observe that your partner prioritizes themselves above you. They exhibit a self-centered nature, where their needs will always come before yours.

3. They repeat negative patterns

   Maybe you’re in a cycle of breaking up and making up. Think about the last argument you had. Did it show uncanny resemblances to the fight before it? And the one before that? It seems that your partner’s recurrent negative actions are developing in a recognizable pattern every time, despite your clarifications, sincere pleas, and other attempts. This situation is a classic example of a karmic relationship at its most transparent level – the karmic cycle is delivering a message for you to see the situation plainly and break this monotonous cycle.

4. They’re controlling

   Karmic connections often resemble the dynamics of a teacher-student relationship. These bonds are typically imbalanced, with one person exercising control over the other. The interplay between selfishness and control can be difficult to navigate but ultimately serves as a lesson in your karmic cycle. However, it is crucial to liberate yourself from this karmic relationship and gain wisdom from it.

5. The attraction is unreal

   Love at first glance? Hardly. Actually, falling in love the moment your eyes meet is not only volatile, but it also isn’t designed to endure. You’re experiencing the usual chemical reaction of a karmic relationship at first glance; you likely believe your partner is flawless…until you familiarize yourself with them more.

6. You discover a whole new set of fears

   Your worst fear before your karmic relationship might have been something more rational…but suddenly, the thought of your partner leaving you, not committing to you or in any way abandoning you fills you with sheer terror. These feelings might control your every waking (and sleeping) moment. This is a sign straight from your soul that something is incredibly unhealthy in this relationship.

7. They’re totally irrational

   You might not notice it, but your karmic relationship partner likely isn’t behaving in ways that are rational. And, since they repeat negative behavior patterns, you’ll start seeing this irrational behavior again and again.

8. They’re jealous

   Jealousy isn’t the healthiest sign, even in the best relationships, and it definitely does not bode well for karmic ones either. The jealousy is your karmic relationship’s partner’s way of feeling fear and acting on it. Instead of being a supportive partner, their negative tendencies manifest themselves in jealousy, leading to a withdrawal of any type of love and support…which will eventually disintegrate the relationship (if nothing else gets there before).

9. They make you feel dependent…and addicted

   Traditional dependency or codependency is somewhat normal in any healthy relationship…but not at the cost of your sense of self. You’ll likely start losing a sense of who you are, all the while freely handing everything you need or want into your partner’s decision-making hands.

   If your partner feels this way too, then you’re in a codependent karmic relationship. 

   The worst thing though? You feel like you’re literally addicted to this person. I personally could feel my brain release a dopamine hit every time he texted, or every time I saw him…and could feel an actual slump once I left his presence.

   I felt like a drug addict. 

10. They bring out your worst side

    Maybe you’ve stopped and looked in the mirror and asked yourself who the person staring back at you is (I know I did, more than one time). Maybe you’ve discovered a darker, hurtful side to yourself. Maybe you’ve brought past wounds and trauma to the surface that you’d long buried. Either way, once you discover that you’ve become a form of yourself that you’re ashamed of, hurt by or just plain don’t like, it’s time to let go of the karmic relationship. 

My Karmic Relationship Story

You will usually find yourself in a karmic relationship when you’re at a vulnerable point: I know I did.

I had just broken up with a long-term partner, when I met my karmic relationship partner, I felt like I’d been electrocuted, and he described it in the exact same way.

We spent every day and night together for two months. We were finishing each other’s sentences within days of meeting. He told me I was beautiful. We had the same sense of humor and food aversions.

I’d never met anyone like him before, and we seemed to fit together so perfectly. 

And then I started noticing some small things. He started insulting me in public, telling me I’d been ‘unpleasant;’ around his friends, or that I’d been rude (when I had been anything but).

Then he started looking at me differently. And then he decided he couldn’t be with me..but kept calling me and talking to me like nothing had ever happened.

We soon got into a cycle where he couldn’t be with me, but didn’t want to let me go. Suddenly, those feelings of abandonment, fear of losing him and more became pretty commonplace, and I became numb.

And it was only then that I realized that I was in a karmic love relationship.

You see, when it gets to that stage – when you feel as if you’ve met someone who loves you, and understands you and who you want always to be around…something isn’t healthy.

And it was only when I stopped and reflected on why I felt so deeply connected to this person – even after he had destroyed my heart, time and time again – did I take a step back and realize: I had been super emotionally vulnerable at the time he found me, destroyed from another relationship and in need of some hardcore life learning.

And that is karmic love relationships in a nutshell. 

They are never meant to work out there to teach you, to help your soul grow and to help you move on.

And move on I did: my next partner was supportive, loving (in all the right, healthy ways) and taught me to love myself, in the same way that he did. And I’ve never been better or healthier.

Without my karmic relationship, I would never have learned that I was worth something and I would definitely have never been able to accept that love that my partner had given me.

How to Break Free of Karmic Relationships

Karmic love relationships are toxic, for many reasons.

Not only for the reasons that I’ve detailed above, but because of what they do to you and your soul. 

During this time, I spoke with a few psychic reading experts. I had tarot readings, I had remote viewings for my on-again, off-again karmic relationship partner and I sport hours talking every love and relationships psychics expert under the sun.

While they all had excellent advice to give me and gave me a lot of insight – not that I wanted to hear it – about myself and my ex-partner, there was one moment that really stood out for me.

I had an aura reading, and during an aura reading, your aura will change color according to your mood and according to the topics you discuss.

But not mine; my aura stayed dark black the entire time – the color of ill-health and depression.

It was a real wake up call, and led me to break off my karmic relationship, once and for all.

Here’s how I did it.

Turn away

By the last time we had fought and gotten back together, I was exhausted; it got to the point where I knew that this would be our last fight, as I couldn’t handle it anymore; I was at breaking point.

Cut off all contact

My aura stayed black for months on end… Both I and my soul had had enough. I cut off all contact with him, unfollowed him on social media and deleted his number, and when he texted again – because obviously he would – I deleted that too.

Take some time for yourself to heal

I was an absolute mess after our final breakup. I didn’t want to see anyone, friends, potential new partners, or even leave the house.

And that’s completely fine. Your soul needs time to heal. 

And heal it did. In my next aura reading, my aura started to slowly change color. It was a while before it was back to a healthy, happy color, but I knew I was making progress.

Seek advice

I couldn’t stomach talking to my friends or family, and hearing all of their questions and advice about my ex. So I turned to an online psychic reading site.

This was how my love affair with psychic reading began. I ended up meeting some amazing psychics readers who advised me about my situation – love and relationships psychics, the area readers I’ve mentioned above. And it really, really helped.

The Difference Between a Karmic Relationship and a Soulmate Relationship

If you haven’t gathered by this point, these are not one and the same.

Yes, they feel like they are – that person you’ve just fallen head over heels in love with, who gets you to your very core and with whom you can’t imagine life without?

That’s not a soulmate. 

That’s how karmic relationships are – you ‘fall in love’ to the point of irrationality. 

That’s because you are irrational: your karmic relationship is triggered by the energy that you put out in the universe. Unstable, vulnerable energy invites other unstable, vulnerable energy. Which results in a karmic relationship.

Here’s a key to knowing which type of relationship you’re in: a soulmate will get to know you on every single level, and your relationship will become better, deeper and more loving over time.

Karmic relationships begin intensely; you feel as if you already know everything there is to know about each other, and over time you will feel less loved, less stable and less together.

Do you see the difference?

Soulmates are there to make us better people. They don’t take it easy on us, but they always show us love and support, working out the differences in a constructive, mature way.

Karmic relationships are the opposite. They are unsupportive, usually one-sided and don’t make you feel supported, or sometimes, even safe.

Learning the Hard Lessons from Karmic Relationships

This is the tricky part: your soul has manifested a karmic relationship to teach you something, and it’s up to you to learn from it.

Whether that’s to learn to love yourself or respect yourself, it’s up for you to know.

For me personally, I began my psychic journey by trying to understand what I had been through when traditional therapy had failed me. There was nothing emotionally wrong with me…but there was something on a psychic level. 

Chatting with a love and relationships psychic helped to get me to the point where I found a true, soulmate connection.

I hope you get to that point too. In the meantime, if you’re seeking psychic advice, check out my comparisons of the best love and relationships psychics online.

Good luck with your relationship – here’s to only happy and healthy ones!