Women Who Love Too Much: When You Keep Wishing and Hoping He'll Change

ISBN-13: 9780593716779

Media Type: Paperback

Publisher: Tarcherperigee

Publication Date: 06-18-2024

Pages: 352

Product Dimensions: 8.00h x 5.19w x 0.72d

Robin Norwood was a licensed marriage and family therapist who worked in the field of addiction for fifteen years. She specialized in treating co-alcoholism and relationship addiction. She is the bestselling author of Women Who Love Too Much, with books in print throughout the world.

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Women Who Love Too Much

When You Keep Wishing and Hoping He'll Change

Copyright © 1990 Robin Norwood
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780671733414

1

Loving the ManWho Doesn't Love Back

Victim of love,
I see a broken heart.
You've got your story to tell.

Victim of love,
It's such an easy part
And you know how to play it so well.

...I think you know what I mean.
You're walking the wire
Of pain and desire,
Looking for love in between.
-- "Victim of Love"

It was Jill's first session, and she looked doubtful. Pert andpetite, with blond Orphan Annie curls, she sat stiffly on the edge of the chair facing me. Everything about her seemed round: the shape of her face, her slightly plump figure, and most particularly her blue eyes, which took in the framed degrees and certificates on my office wall. She asked a few questions about my graduate school and counseling license, and then mentioned, with obvious pride, that she was in law school.

There was a brief silence. She looked down at her folded hands.

"I guess I'd better start talking about why I'm here." She spoke rapidly, using the momentum of her words to gather courage.

"I'm doing this -- seeing a therapist, I mean -- because I'm really unhappy. It's men, of course. I mean, me and men. I always do something to drive them away.Everything starts out fine. They really pursue me and everything, and then after they get to know me" -- she tensed visibly against the coming pain -- "it all falls apart."

She looked up at me now, her eyes shining with held-back tears, and continued more slowly.

"I want to know what I'm doing wrong, what I have to change about me -- because I'll do it. I'll do whatever it takes. I'm really a hard worker." She began to speed up again.

"It's not that I'm unwilling. I just don't know why this keeps happening to me. I'm afraid to get involved anymore. I mean, it's nothing but pain every time. I'm beginning to be really afraid of men."

Shaking her head, the round curls bouncing, she explained with vehemence, "I don't want that to happen, because I'm very lonely. In law school I have lots of responsibility, and then I'm working to support myself, too. These demands could keep me busy all the time. In fact, that's pretty much all I did for the past year -- work, go to school, study, and sleep. But I missed having a man in my life."

Quickly she continued. "Then I met Randy, when I was visiting friends in San Diego two months ago. He's an attorney, and we met one night when my friends took me out dancing. Well, we just hit it off right away. There was so much to talk about -- except that I guess I did most of the talking. But he seemed to like that. And it was just so great to be with a man who was interested in things that were important to me, too."

Her brows gathered together. "He seemed really attracted to me. You know, asking if I was married -- I'm divorced, have been for two years -- if I lived alone. That kind of stuff."

I could imagine how Jill's eagerness must have shown as she chatted brightly with Randy over the blaring music that first night. And the eagerness with which she welcomed him a week later when he extended a business trip to Los Angeles an extra hundred miles to visit her. At dinner she offered to let him sleep at her apartment so that he could postpone the long drive back until the next day. He accepted her invitation and their affair began that night.

"It was great. He let me cook for him and really enjoyed being looked after. I pressed his shirt for him before he dressed that morning. I love looking after a man. We got along beautifully." She smiled wistfully. But as she continued her story it became clear that Jill had almost immediately become completely obsessed with Randy.

When he returned to his San Diego apartment, the phone was ringing. Jill warmly informed him that she had been worried about his long drive and was relieved to know he was safely home. When she thought he sounded a little bemused at her call, she apologized for bothering him and hung up, but a gnawing discomfort began to grow in her, fueled by the awareness that once again she cared far more than the man in her life did.

"Randy told me once not to pressure him or he would just disappear. I got so scared. It was all up to me. I was supposed to love him and leave him alone at the same time. I couldn't do it, so I just got more and more scared. The more I panicked, the more I chased him."

Soon Jill was calling him almost nightly. Their arrangement was to take turns calling, but often when it was Randy's turn the hour would grow late and she would become too restless to stand it. Sleep was out of the question anyway, so she would dial him. These conversations were as vague as they were lengthy.

"He would say he'd forgotten, and I would say, 'How can you forget?' After all, I never forgot. So then we'd get into talking about why, and it seemed like he was afraid to get close to me and I wanted to help him get through that. He kept saying he didn't know what he wanted in life, and I would try to help him clarify what the issues were for him." Thus, Jill fell into the role of "shrink" with Randy, trying to help him be more emotionally present for her.

That he did not want her was something she could notaccept. She had already decided that he needed her.

Twice, Jill flew to San Diego to spend the weekend with him; on the second visit, he spent their Sunday together ignoring her, watching television and drinking beer. It was one of the worst days she could remember.

"Was he a heavy drinker?" I asked Jill. She looked startled.

"Well, no, not really. I don't know, actually. I never really thought about it. Of course, he was drinking the night I met him, but that's only natural. After all, we were in a bar. Sometimes when we talked on the phone I could hear ice tinkling in a glass and I'd tease him about it -- you know, drinking alone and all that. Actually, I was never with him when he wasn't drinking, but I just assumed that he liked to drink. That's normal, isn't it?"

She paused, thinking. "You know, sometimes on the phone he would talk funny, especially for an attorney. Really vague and imprecise; forgetful, not consistent. But I never thought of it as happening because he was drinking. I don't know how I explained it to myself. I guess I just didn't let myself think about it."

She looked at me sadly.

"Maybe he did drink too much, but it must have been because I bored him. I guess I just wasn't interesting enough and he didn't really want to be with me." Anxiously, she continued. "My husband never wanted to be around me -- that was obvious!" Her eyes brimmed over as she struggled on. "Neither did my father....What is it in me? Why do they all feel that way about me? What am I doing wrong?"

The moment Jill became aware of a problem between her and someone important to her, she was willing not only to try and solve it but also to take responsibility for having created it. If Randy, her husband, and her father all failed to love her, she felt it must be because of something she had done or failed to do.

Jill's attitudes, feelings, behavior, and life experiences were typical of a woman for whom being in love means being in pain. She exhibited many of the characteristics that women who love too much have in common. Regardless of the specific details of their stories and struggles, whether they have endured a long and difficult relationship with one man or have been involved in a series of unhappy partnerships with many men, they share a common profile. Loving too much does not mean loving too many men, or falling in love too often, or having too great a depth of genuine love for another. It means, in truth, obsessing about a man and calling that obsession love, allowing it to control your emotions and much of your behavior, realizing that it negatively influences your health and well-being, and yet finding yourself unable to let go. It means measuring the degree of your love by the depth of your torment.

As you read this book, you may find yourself identifying with Jill, or with another of the women whose stories you encounter, and you may wonder if you, too, are a woman who loves too much. Perhaps, though your problems with men are similar to theirs, you will have difficulty associating yourself with the "labels" that apply to some of these women's backgrounds. We all have strong emotional reactions to words like alcoholism, incest, violence, and addiction, and sometimes we cannot look at our own lives realistically because we are so afraid of having these labels apply to us or to those we love. Sadly, our inability to use the words when they do apply often precludes our getting appropriate help. On the other hand, those dreaded labels may not apply in your life. Your childhood may have involved problems of a subtler nature. Maybe your father, while providing a financially secure home, nevertheless deeply disliked and distrusted women, and his inability to love you kept you from loving yourself. Or your mother's attitude toward you may have been jealous and competitive in private even though she showed you off and bragged about you in public, so that you ended up needing to do well to gain her approval and yet fearing the hostility your success generated in her.

We cannot cover in this one book the myriad ways families can be unhealthy -- that would require several volumes of a rather different nature. It is important to understand, however, that what all unhealthy families have in common is their inability to discuss root problems. There may be other problems that are discussed, often ad nauseum, but these often cover up the underlying secrets that make the family dysfunctional. It is the degree of secrecy -- the inability to talk about the problems -- rather than their severity, that defines both how dysfunctional a family becomes and how severely its members are damaged.

A dysfunctional family is one in which members play rigid roles and in which communication is severely restricted to statements that fit these roles. Members are not free to express a full range of experiences, wants, needs, and feelings, but rather must limit themselves to playing that part which accommodates those played by other family members. Roles operate in all families, but as circumstances change, the members must also change and adapt in order for the family to continue to remain healthy. Thus, the kind of mothering appropriate for a one-year-old will be highly inappropriate for a thirteen-year-old, and the mothering role must alter to accommodate reality. In dysfunctional families, major aspects of reality are denied, and roles remain rigid.

When no one can discuss what affects every family member individually as well as the family as a whole -- indeed, when such discussion is forbidden implicitly (the subject is changed) or explicitly ("We don't talk about those things!") -- we learn not to believe in our own perceptions or feelings. Because our family denies our reality, we begin to deny it, too. And this severely impairs the development of our basic tools for living life and for relating to people and situations. It is this basic impairment that operates in women who love too much. We become unable to discern when someone or something is not good for us. The situations and people that others would naturally avoid as dangerous, uncomfortable, or unwholesome do not repel us, because we have no way of evaluating them realistically or self-protectively. We do not trust our feelings, or use them to guide us. Instead, we are actually drawn to the very dangers, intrigues, dramas, and challenges that others with healthier and more balanced backgrounds would naturally eschew. And through this attraction we are further damaged, because much of what we are attracted to is a replication of what we lived with growing up. We get hurt all over again.

No one becomes such a woman, a woman who loves too much, by accident. To grow up as a female in this society and in such a family can generate some predictable patterns. The following characteristics are typical of women who love too much, women like Jill and perhaps like you, too.

1. Typically, you come from a dysfunctional home in which your emotional needs were not met.

2. Having received little real nurturing yourself, you try to fill this unmet need vicariously by becoming a caregiver, especially to men who appear in some way needy.

3. Because you were never able to change your parent(s) into the warm, loving caretaker(s) you longed for, you respond deeply to the familiar type of emotionally unavailable man whom you can again try to change through your love.

4. Terrified of abandonment, you will do anything to keep a relationship from dissolving.

5. Almost nothing is too much trouble, takes too much time, or is too expensive if it will "help" the man you are involved with.

6. Accustomed to lack of love in personal relationships, you are willing to wait, hope, and try harder to please.

7. You are willing to take far more than 50 percent of the responsibility, guilt, and blame in any relationship.

8. Your self-esteem is critically low, and deep inside you do not believe you deserve to be happy. Rather, you believe you must earn the right to enjoy life.

9. You have a desperate need to control your men and your relationships, having experienced little security in childhood. You mask your efforts to control people and situations as"being helpful."

10. In a relationship, you are much more in touch with your dream of how it could be than with the reality of your situation.

11. You are addicted to men and to emotional pain.

12. You may be predisposed emotionally and often biochemically to becoming addicted to drugs, alcohol, and/or certain foods, particularly sugary ones.

13. By being drawn to people with problems that need fixing, or by being enmeshed in situations that are chaotic, uncertain, and emotionally painful, you avoid focusing on your responsibility to yourself.

14. You may have a tendency toward episodes of depression, which you try to forestall through the excitement provided by an unstable relationship.

15. You are not attracted to men who are kind, stable, reliable, and interested in you. You find such "nice" men boring.

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Table of Contents

Contents

Acknowledgments

Preface

Introduction

1 Loving the Man Who Doesn't Love Back

2 Good Sex in Bad Relationships

3 If I Suffer for You, Will You Love Me?

4 The Need to Be Needed

5 Shall We Dance?

6 Men Who Choose Women Who Love Too Much

7 Beauty and the Beast

8 When One Addiction Feeds Another

9 Dying for Love

10 The Road to Recovery

11 Recovery and Intimacy: Closing the Gap

Appendixes

How to Start Your Own Support Group

Sources of Help

Suggested Reading

Affirmations

Index