Loving Him Without Losing You (17 page)

1. J
   USTINE
   : A L
   ONGING FOR
   E
   XCITEMENT
   

   Justine and Brett hit it off right away. Justine admired Brett’s enthusiasm and spontaneity. Although she liked her job and had some very good friends,
   

   Justine’s life felt very empty to her, and she longed to break out of what she considered a mundane life and to discover more meaning and more excite- ment. Brett seemed to offer her just that. He introduced her to a lot of new people, people who were involved in the kinds of activities she’d always wanted to do—artists and writers and other types of creative people. Soon she was spending every weekend with Brett and his friends, attending concerts and lectures. Her own friends and the area where she lived began to seem bor- ing to her by comparison.
   

   Unlike Justine, Brett didn’t hold a steady job but instead freelanced as a writer for various magazines throughout the United States. Because his work didn’t require him to live in one area, he tended to move often, going wher- ever his spirit led him. Justine had always been afraid to take the kind of risks in life that Brett did. Because of her need for security, she tended to stay at the same job and live in the same area for many years.
   

   After dating for only a few months, Brett started talking to Justine about moving to Oregon, where many of his friends had recently moved. He con- stantly told Justine about how much more beautiful it was there and how cul- turally active the area was. Soon Justine began talking about moving up to Oregon, even though she hadn’t explored job opportunities there.
   

   When Brett announced he was going to Oregon in a few months and wanted Justine to go with him, Justine hesitated. She didn’t want to give up the security of her job and leave the area she’d lived in for so long, but at the same time she chastised herself for being afraid and told herself that this was her chance to finally change her life.
   

   “All I could think of was I didn’t want my life to go back to the way it was before I met Brett. I knew I was taking a chance, but at the time it felt worth it to be with Brett and to get a chance at living a more exciting life like he did.” Within a month after moving to Oregon, Justine realized she’d made a huge mistake. The qualities she’d initially admired so much in Brett and had tried to emulate—his free spirit and spontaneity—soon grew old when it came to living with him daily. He refused to make plans and this felt far too chaotic for Justine, who preferred to know what to expect. And although she was having trouble finding a job, all she ever heard from Brett was that she was worrying too much and that the right job was going to turn up anytime now. All she had to do was stay positive. While Brett was generous enough about sharing what little money he had, Justine soon grew tired of living in the small cottage they rented in the back of a friend’s house and having no
   

   money to spend.
   

   Justine had merged with Brett because she wanted what he had— spontaneity and the willingness to create. But instead of merging with
   

   someone who had the qualities she admired, Justine needed to develop them in herself.
   

   In real love we truly appreciate the other person for who he is. In roman- tic love we merely covet what the other person has.
   

   Real love is expansive, open, and trusting, not restrictive, withholding, and possessive. It is not based on need but on a desire to give the person we love the space and the encouragement to be the best he can be, and in the process we become the best we can be. It is based on caring, trust, and mutual respect.
   

   True love brings out the best in us. Romantic, needy love often brings out the worst. When we genuinely love someone and feel loved, we become the best version of ourselves that is possible, and so does our partner.
   

   How Fantasy Can Lead to Obsessive Love
   

   Often those women who are prone to constant fantasizing are also prone to becoming obsessive. Some become obsessive about a man they hardly know and are not even dating, while others become obsessive about men they are actually involved with.
   

   One of the indicators of obsessive love is having an all-consuming pre- occupation with a lover or wished-for lover. Often this preoccupation is painful, since the more you allow yourself to fantasize about a man, the more you want him. The more you want him, the more likely you are to act in ways that drive him away.
   

   We’ve all had the experience of thinking about a man constantly, won- dering whether he is going to call, replaying in our mind everything he said to us or everything that happened the last time we saw him. But some people never outgrow this initial state of preoccupation and instead become driven by obsession.
   

   Just as our culture has encouraged fantasy, it has also cultivated a roman- tic fascination for obsessive love. We see this fascination played out in every- thing from ads for popular perfumes to movies such as
   Fatal Attraction
   and the classic
   Play Misty for Me
   . We are led to believe by movies, television, advertisements, and popular songs that love is not real unless it is all- consuming.
   

   Fantasy can turn to obsession under the following conditions:
   

   • When your relationship is not mutual—if you don’t even know a man or have only dated him once or twice but begin to fantasize about him continuously.
     

   • When the man you are interested in is not available (he is married, involved with another woman, much older, or gay).
     

   • When a man has shown you, either by word or action, that he is not interested in you or not
     as
     interested in you as you are in him, and this does not diminish your preoccupation with him but, in fact,
     increases
     it.
     

No matter how promising a relationship may be at first, the insatiable needs of the obsessive person will drive away most partners. Because she is driven by her own unmet needs and desires, she places these needs and desires ahead of those of her partner and ahead of everything else—including reason.

Although rejection is the obsessor’s biggest fear, when confronted with the growing lack of interest or the loss of a lover, obsessors don’t let go. Instead, they become even more desperate for their target’s love.

While obsessive love may appear to be the ultimate passion, in reality it has little to do with love or passion. It has to do with neediness and longing. Obsessive lovers never have enough of what they want, whether it is more attention, love, reassurance, or commitment.

Whenever you become obsessive it means there is something more going on than mere attraction. You are desperately trying to fill the void inside yourself by merging with someone else, avoiding being alone, avoiding fac- ing your own internal problems, or replaying some drama from the past.

Obsession is when you love someone for what you need him to be instead of for who he really is. It is when you feel you
must
have someone or you will die. It is when you feel you need the other person so much that life seems unbearable without him.

While real love is easy, gentle, kind, and giving, obsessive love is diffi- cult, possessive, and needy. Dominated by fear and jealousy, it is volatile and sometimes even dangerous.

Tell Yourself the Truth

In chapter 6 I encouraged you to tell the truth about yourself to the men in your life. In order to stop losing yourself in your relationships, it is equally important to tell
yourself
the truth about your relationships and the men you become involved with.

There are several ways women fool or lie to themselves about their rela- tionships. Some imagine a relationship is far more serious that it actually is or that a man is far more interested in them than he really is. They misinter- pret innocuous signs of friendliness as deep interest. They read into a man’s behavior motives that don’t exist. And they assume that if he wants to have sex with them it must mean he is in love.

By the same token, many women assume that their own interest in a man means more than it does. Some women convince themselves an intense

attraction is love even though they really don’t know the man. Instead of ques- tioning their motives for getting carried away so quickly (e.g., fear of being alone, being “horny,” or trying to rewrite the past), they allow themselves to be lulled into a love affair with someone they don’t know.

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Question Your Motives

Part of facing the truth about your relationship is questioning your motives for wanting a relationship at this time. Answering the follow- ing questions as honestly as possible may help you uncover some motives you were unaware of:

1. Are you especially needy right now? Are you just getting over a bad love affair in which your self-esteem was damaged or you were made to question your perceptions, your desirability, or your attractive- ness?
   

2. Are you experiencing problems at work, in your career, or in school? Have these problems caused you to doubt your abilities, intelligence, or ability to get along with others?
   

3. Is your self-esteem at an all-time low because you don’t feel good about your body or your lack of accomplishments, or because you’ve just been dumped by a man?
   

4. Have you just turned thirty, forty, fifty, or sixty and become over- whelmed with the fear that you’ll never have another relationship?
   

5. Are you tired of being alone?
   

6. Has an unresolved issue from your childhood suddenly come back to haunt you? Are you desperately trying to avoid dealing with this issue by getting involved in a relationship?
   

7. Are you really looking for a mother or father substitute?
   

Tell Yourself the Truth about Who He Is

It is easy to get caught up in the initial rush of excitement a new relationship brings. But sooner or later you will need to come down to earth enough to assess the situation more realistically. If you have taken the time to get to know one another as recommended in chapter 5, you now have a fairly good idea who this man really is and how compatible you are together. The problem is, you may not want to face the truth about the relationship because you don’t want it to end.

Even when a woman spots a potential problem in her new lover or in her relationship, she will often fool herself into believing that it isn’t that impor- tant. She may convince herself that the problem won’t affect the relationship that much.

Many women ignore or minimize the importance of certain aspects of a man’s personality or a man’s life in order to justify their willingness to get involved or to stay involved with him. This was the case with Gloria Steinem in her relationship with Mort Zuckerman, a multimillionaire real estate devel- oper who was strongly disliked by many for his business dealings.

According to biographer Carolyn Heilbrun in
The Education of a Woman,
Zuckerman was a man who supported policies that Steinem had worked all her life to change. He advocated trade with governments she had publicly protested against, gave dinner parties at which her closest friends would have felt ill at ease, and yet somehow she was able to ignore these glaring problems to be with him. According to Heilbrun, “. . . she had to ignore aspects of his life that were not and could never be attractive to her.”

In
Revolution from Within,
Steinem explained it this way:

Having for the first time in my life made a lover out of a man who wasn’t a friend first—my mistake, not his, since I was the one being untrue to myself—I had a huge stake in justifying what I had done.

When he supported the same policies and hierarchies that I was working to change, I thought: Nobody said we had to have the same views. When I told him about a trip I’d made to raise a few thousand dol- lars for a battered women’s shelter that was about to close down, and he in the next breath celebrated an unexpected six-figure check that, he joked, would buy a good dinner, I said to myself: It’s not his fault he can’t empathize—and besides, everyone can change.

This brings up an even more typical way that women deceive them- selves—by convincing themselves that they can change a man or that he will be different with her. Afterward, of course, this same woman will inevitably ask herself, “How could I have been so stupid to get involved with him? Why didn’t I heed the warnings?” This was the case with Crystal:

I suspected Max was a player when I met him but he told me he’d changed, that he’s never felt so much love for a woman before, and I

wanted to believe him. I’d just come out of a six-month relationship with a man who told me he’d never loved me, that he was still in love with his ex-wife. I felt so rejected and undesirable and I desperately needed to believe that a man could love me.

I resisted Max for a while because I didn’t want to get hurt again, but eventually I gave in. Now I feel like kicking myself for falling for his line. I mean, how stupid can you get? Max is incapable of loving a woman; he just likes to play the game.

You’ve no doubt done the same thing that Gloria Steinem and Crystal did— held on to a fantasy about a man rather than face the truth and the pain of end- ing a relationship. It should take only one time for us to learn our lesson, but unfortunately, many Disappearing Women don’t seem to learn from their mistakes. It’s as if they develop a sort of amnesia shortly after they recover from the pain of their last disappointment and then start the process all over again without taking with them the lessons from the past.

Don’t let this be you. Learn from your past experiences and vow to begin working on letting go of your tendency to pretend, fantasize, or deny the truth.

Rewriting the Past

Another way women step out of the present and reality is by attempting to rewrite the past. For example, most women who lost their father before they were grown either through death or divorce suffer from severe feelings of dep- rivation and abandonment and are left with an unbearable void and what psychoanalyst Ernest Abelin calls an overwhelming “father thirst.” This “father thirst” usually causes a girl to look for father substitutes, either in older brothers, grandfathers, or other male authority figures.

Although these substitutes do not provide the continuity needed to actu- ally replace a father in terms of a girl’s development, they can help overcome the absence of the father to some degree.

For a girl to feel free to seek out father substitutes, it is very important that her interest in men be supported and endorsed by her mother. However, some mothers convey the message to their daughters that it is not important or nec- essary to relate to men, and this will usually discourage the girl from her inter- est in men at a time when it is crucial to her development. When this occurs, one of two things can happen. The girl may grow into adulthood with either negative or indifferent feelings toward men in general, or, once away from the scrutinizing eyes of her mother, her “father thirst” may take over her life,

causing her to become promiscuous and/or to enter intense relationships with men—relationships that are highly charged with her unresolved conflicts and unmet needs. In my case it was the latter.

Looking for a Daddy

I was an only child raised by a single mother. I never knew my father, who died in an airplane crash when I was two. Not only did I grow up fatherless, but I had no other male relatives. Instead, I was raised by women—my mother, her friends, and female baby-sitters. Plus, I had only female teachers all through grammar school. The only men I was around growing up were my girlfriends’ fathers, but I was never close to any of them, since they were usu- ally at work. By the time I hit puberty I had mad crushes on several boys at school, but since I was overweight, none of the boys paid any attention to me. It wasn’t until I was out of high school and had lost a lot of weight that men began to notice me. My first real sexual relationship was with a man who was considerably older than I was, and we’d spend every weekend together, most of the time spent having sex. I couldn’t seem to get enough affection, and he couldn’t get enough sex. When we’d finally get out of bed I’d watch while he shaved and got dressed, fascinated by his maleness, hungry to soak

in everything masculine.

For years afterward I had one affair after another, mostly with older men. We’d always have an “instant” kind of attraction, end up having sex the first night, and then be together almost all the time after that. But none of them could tolerate my flirting, nor my insanity. Even though I flirted all the time and usually saw other men behind their back, I was insanely jealous myself, constantly getting angry if they even looked at another woman. I was spoiled and demanding and unreasonable, constantly accusing them of not loving me enough. No matter what they did, I was never satisfied.

People always accused me of looking for a father in these men, especially the older ones, but I always denied it. It seems obvious now that I was des- perate to get the fathering I’d missed out on as a child. I wanted all of their attention, just like a spoiled child, but at the same time I constantly tested them to prove their love.

I didn’t realize it then, but I was trying to rewrite the past, to provide for myself the father I’d never had. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way. I would have to discover ways to give to myself what I hadn’t received as a child. You don’t want the needy child within you who still hungers for good par- enting to be the one who is in charge of choosing your partners. That part of you is so desperate and emotionally hungry that her perceptions are distorted. Moreover, she is unaware of your adult needs. Put very simply, children don’t

pick very good adult companions. She may pick someone who is very “fatherly” and therefore also very controlling, she may pick a playmate who is probably immature and irresponsible, or she may become attracted to another “wounded soul” like herself who might have even more problems than she has—she won’t choose an equal partner who will meet your adult needs.

Try instead to connect with your adult needs and choose a partner who can satisfy them. This is obviously easier said than done, but your continued work on yourself will eventually make this possible.

Unconscious Patterns

Another way by which Disappearing Women attempt to rewrite the past is by unconsciously repeating experiences from their childhood in an attempt to resolve them.

If you have found that you have a pattern of picking a certain kind of man—someone who is always unavailable, someone who is always unfaith- ful—you may be trying to rewrite the past. Freud called this tendency to reenact the past the “repetition compulsion.” Author Judith Viorst writes about this compulsion in her book
Necessary Losses:

[W]hom we love and how we love are revivals—unconscious revivals— of early experience, even when revival brings us pain. . . . We will act out the same old tragedies unless awareness and insight intervene.

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Discover Your Patterns

To break such patterns you must first recognize them for what they are. The following exercise will help:

1. Draw a line down the middle of a piece of paper. On one half of the page, list the positive personality traits of your most current lover; on the other half, list his most predominant negative personality traits.
   

2. On two separate sheets, do the same for each of your parents or pri- mary caretakers.
   

3. Notice if there are similarities between the traits of your most current lover and those of your parents. Pay special attention to whether he shares
   negative
   traits with one or both of your parents.
   

4. Now, once again on separate sheets, list the personality traits of your previous three boyfriends (if you have had that many).
   

5. Notice if they share any personality traits, particularly negative ones.
   

6. Compare these traits with those of your parents.
   

7. Circle the negative traits that your partners (both present and past) and your parents have in common.
   

   Most Disappearing Women notice a close correlation between the traits of their partners and their parents. And with few exceptions, the traits that matched up most closely are the negative traits.
   

   While it seems logical to look for partners who compensate for, rather than duplicate, our parents’ inadequacies, the fact is, we do the opposite—we attempt to re-create the conditions of our upbringing in order to correct them. We attempt to return to the scene of our original frustration or wounding in an effort to resolve our unfinished business. Therefore, if one or both of your parents were over- protective or engulfing, instead of looking for someone who allows you plenty of freedom and space so you can overcome your fear of engulfment, you find yourself repeatedly attracted to men who smother you. If one or both of your parents neglected or abandoned you, either emotionally or physically, instead of looking for someone attentive and reliable so you can overcome your fear of abandonment, you find yourself attracted to men who are unreliable.