When being in love means being in pain, our relationship is not healthy. When most of our conversations with our friends are about him, his problems, thoughts, feelings, and nearly all are sentences begin with “he….,” we are loving too much.
When we make excuses for his bad moods, bad temper, or his constant put-downs, we are loving too much.
When we try to be his therapist and fix him, we are loving too much. When we read a self-help book and underline all of the passages that may 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 all of them, thinking he will change for us, we are loving too much. When this relationship that we are in takes a toll on our emotional well-being and perhaps even our physical well-being, we are definitely loving too much.
Despite all the pain and relationship dissatisfaction, loving too much is a common experience for many women. Most of us have been in a relationship or even a marriage where this is a recurrent theme. Trying to fix our man, mold him into the person you think he could be. Trust me, and if it’s not there, it’s not getting there.
In the next few blog posts, I will explore why, once we know a relationship is not meeting our needs, we still have a hard time ending it. I will explain how loving turns into loving too much when our partner is uncaring, inappropriate, or unavailable. We will understand how our desire to love and yearning for a romantic relationship becomes an unhealthy “fix-him” addiction.
If you have ever found yourself obsessed with a man, you may have thought this obsession was rooted in fear, not love. When we love obsessively and constantly, fear being alone, fear we are unlovable and unworthy, fear abandonment, we are in an unhealthy place.
Our fears and obsessions make us love harder and stronger, and when this strategy doesn’t work (it never does), we love too much.