@@CHAP@@ Introduction
FOR NEARLY A QUARTER of a century, women have been turning to this book you hold in your hands for relief from their pain regarding men and love. First in the United States, and then throughout the world and in twenty-five languages, it has helped women in China and Brazil, France and Finland, Ireland and Israel, Saudi Arabia and Serbia—women by the millions whose lives are linked across cultural, socioeconomic, educational and generational lines by their need for help with loving too much.
Thankfully, attitudes have changed radically since Women Who Love Too Much first appeared. No longer regarded as the natural, normal state of things, loving too much is now widely recognized as a dangerous and debilitating condition. But that recognition has not been sufficient to halt the defining feelings and behaviors of this obsession.
Trudi, who you’ll meet in chapter two and again in chapter eleven, would no longer look or dress or even eat the way she did in the mid-1980s when this book was first published—and she certainly wouldn’t spend her summer waiting at home by the phone for the call that never comes. Today’s Trudi might even be able to acknowledge that perhaps she has a problem with loving too much as she repeatedly checks her cell phone in hope of a message from him, then emails or texts him with another desperate message of her own. Surface details in behavior may have changed somewhat but the basic obsession is as strong as ever.
Why, if we now freely put a name to our problem, can’t we overcome it? The damaged personality which is at the root of loving too much hasn’t the power needed to heal itself any more than we can lift ourselves by our own bootstraps. We must have help to change what is so deeply ingrained in our character and that is where this book comes in. For those who want to change, it provides that help.
This new edition of Women Who Love Too Much, now with an updated Sources of Help appendix and an expanded Suggested Reading list, both validates and celebrates the proven track record as well as the continuing relevance, immediacy, and efficacy of a message that has worked over time and around the world. This book, with its stories specific to relationship addiction and its guidelines for recovery therefrom, has enabled women everywhere to change their lives. Use it to help you change yours.
@@CHAP@@ Original Preface
WHEN BEING IN LOVE means being in pain we are loving too much. When most of our conversations with intimate friends are about him, his problems, his thoughts, his feelings—and nearly all our sentences begin with “he …”, we are loving too much.
When we excuse his moodiness, bad temper, indifference or put-downs as problems due to an unhappy childhood and we try to become his therapist, we are loving too much.
When we read a self-help book and underline all the passages we think would help him, we are loving too much.
When we don’t like many of his basic characteristics, values, and behaviors, but we put up with them thinking that if we are only attractive and loving enough he’ll want to change for us, we are loving too much.
When our relationship jeopardizes our emotional well-being and perhaps even our physical health and safety, we are definitely loving too much.
In spite of all its pain and dissatisfaction, loving too much is such a common experience for many women that we almost believe it is the way intimate relationships are supposed to be. Most of us have loved too much at least once and for many of us it has been a recurrent theme in our lives. Some of us have become so obsessed with our partner and our relationship that we are barely able to function.
In this book we will take a hard look at the reasons why so many women, looking for someone to love them, seem inevitably to find unhealthy, unloving partners instead. And we will explore why, once we know a relationship is not meeting our needs, we nevertheless have such difficulty ending it. We will see that loving turns into loving too much when our partner is inappropriate, uncaring, or unavailable and yet we cannot give him up—in fact we want him, we need him even more. We will come to understand how our wanting to love, our yearning for love, our loving itself becomes an addiction.