Kitabı oku: «The 100 Most Asked Questions About Love, Sex and Relationships», sayfa 4

15 Why am I only attracted to the wrong, “bad boy” type of man, and feel no sexual chemistry with the “nice guys”?

For years I have had a series of very painful, dramatic relationships with men who don’t give me what I need or treat me the way I deserve to be treated. Some cheated, others were very critical, or simply emotionally distant. Finally, I met a really nice guy who is crazy about me. He’s everything I ever wanted—respectful, considerate, and really sweet. But there’s one big thing missing: I don’t feel the sexual chemistry with him that I used to feel with my ex-boyfriends. Lately I’ve been feeling I should break up with him, because I miss that passion and excitement. Help!!

You’ve come to the right place for help—not only is this one of the questions I’m asked most often, but I used to suffer from this same pattern and wonder what was wrong with me. Why did men who didn’t love me the way I wanted to be loved appeal to me so much? Why did I get “bored” in calm, peaceful relationships? Why did the phrase “nice guy” turn off every sexual impulse in my body? It took me years to understand and finally break this unhealthy love habit, but I did it, so I know you can do it too.

Okay, here’s what’s happening. You’ve obviously already figured out that it’s no accident that you happen to attract (or be attracted to) men who, in some way, make you feel unloved, and you’re right … there’s a reason it feels “right” when you’re with a man who withholds his love, and a reason it feels “wrong” when a man gives you all the love you’ve ever wanted. This reason has nothing to do with what your conscious mind tells you about those unloving partners: “You know he is wrong for you. He’s just going to hurt you like the last one. Run in the other direction as fast as you can!!” You may know this is true, but something makes that kind of man so appealing, and that something has to do with your unconscious mind and what I call the “Going Home Syndrome.”

I came up with the phrase “Going Home Syndrome” to describe how our emotional programming (see Question 12) can cause us to seek out emotional situations that are similar to those we experienced in childhood, regardless of whether those experiences were positive or negative. As human beings, we gravitate toward the familiar. I’ll bet you like to sleep on the same side of the bed each night, park in the same space at work, and go back to your favorite vacation spot. Returning to the familiar is a basic instinct that gives our lives a sense of continuity and safety in a very chaotic and changing universe. Unfortunately, this instinct can work against us when it comes to relationships, in that we may tend to unconsciously seek out emotional situations that are familiar to us.

Here’s how it works: When you were a young child, your home was the main source of love and safety in your life. Even if there was violence or chaos in your household, it was still “home”—it was where you were fed and had a place to sleep and received some sort of attention. So you associate LOVE with HOME. You also associate HOME with other characteristics, based on your experiences at home. For instance, if your parents fought a lot, you might have an equation in your mind that says HOME = CHAOS. If you weren’t shown much love or affection your equation might be HOME = LONELINESS. If one of your parents was abusive, it might be HOME = FEAR.

Remember your basic math from school, where you learned:

If A = B, and B = C, then A = C

Let’s use this same principle to illustrate “Going Home”:

If LOVE = HOME, and HOME = CHAOS, then

LOVE = CHAOS

If LOVE = HOME, and HOME = LONELINESS, then

LOVE = LONELINESS

If LOVE = HOME, and HOME = FEAR, then

LOVE = FEAR.

Your mind will equate whatever associations you have about “home” with what love is supposed to feel like. So if home felt like chaos, you might seek unstable partners who will help you create dramatic, chaotic relationships. If home felt like loneliness, you might seek a partner who doesn’t give you enough love, affection, or attention, so that you end up feeling lonely. If home felt like fear, you might attract someone who always criticizes you, or threatens to leave, or makes you jealous, so that you always feel fearful. You unconsciously choose what is familiar— YOU ARE GOING HOME.

Obviously, we all have positive associations with home as well, which we also seek to reproduce in our adult life. I’ve found, however, that it is the more painful associations that can cause the most trouble, because they are usually unconscious. In other words, if you came from a home where your parents showed you a lot of affection, but criticized one another, you might consciously seek a partner who was very loving, but unconsciously attract someone who was critical.

In your case, your previous partners were probably all “home” to you, possibly because when you grew up, you either watched your mom or dad be mistreated and abandoned by the other parent, or you felt unloved by one of your parents. So for you, it feels comfortable to be uncomfortable with a man! And this explains your present dilemma. You have love, and therefore passion and sexual attraction, associated in your brain with a sense of danger and pain. Of course you don’t “feel” attracted to your “nice guy”—he makes you feel too good!!

As I mentioned, I had a very similar pattern for years of my adult life. When I finally met my husband, Jeffrey, I didn’t even realize I was in love for months, because it didn’t “feel right.” I was used to drama, intensity, fear of criticism and loss, insecurity—all signs of an unhealthy relationship. For the first time, I had developed an emotional connection with a man based on friendship, trust, openness, safety, consistency, and true caring, and I hadn’t even recognized it because it felt too peaceful to be love!!

It took a little while for me to discover the healthy passion and excitement with Jeffrey, and to literally reinvent my experience of love, but when I finally did, I felt more attracted to him than I had felt to any other man in my life!! So my advice to you is: Don’t break up with this wonderful man. He’s the best thing that ever happened to you. Instead, do some work to explore and heal your emotional programming: LEAVE BEHIND THE PATTERN, NOT THE PERSON!!

16 Can a relationship work when you’re in love with your partner’s potential?

A few months ago I met a man I really care about. We get along well, but he’s going through a difficult time right now. He’s just recovering from a serious drug addiction and a bad divorce in which his ex-wife got most of his savings. I know he has a lot of anger and mistrust from his past, and he has a hard time showing any affection, but inside, he’s a very sensitive, talented person, and I feel like he needs someone to believe in him. Can this relationship work?

I wouldn’t call what you’re in a relationship—it’s closer to gambling, and I’m sorry to say the odds are against you. You aren’t in love with who your boyfriend actually is; you’re in love with who you hope he could become. You even talk about him like he is a project, a “fixer-upper.” You’re describing someone who is barely capable of loving himself right now, let alone you. Obviously, every relationship between two people involves some hopes and dreams of how you’d like to see your partner grow and improve. But the key is feeling satisfied with how your mate is today, not living for the future. Having a healthy relationship with a person means loving him for who he is now, not loving him in spite of his situation, or in hope of who he will change into tomorrow.

Inside, you know all this, yet you ignore the facts because something about this situation is so appealing to you, almost irresistible, and very hard to walk away from. That’s what we need to talk about. People who fall in love with their partner’s potential tend to have several issues of their own that attract them to this kind of situation:

1) You need to be in control in relationships. When you love someone in order to improve him, you get to feel superior. Perhaps you felt controlled or criticized for never being good enough as a child, and now you unconsciously are attracted to someone whom you can turn the tables on.

2) You get to avoid your own life and dreams by focusing on rehabilitating your partner. When you’re busy looking at how someone else can improve, you don’t have much time left over to face your own sense of inadequacy or your own fears.

3) You made a decision as a child that you couldn’t get what you wanted. If you felt rejected or unloved as a child, you may have decided you can’t get what you want from people you love, and so you unconsciously seek out a man who doesn’t give you what you want. You’re “going home” (see Question 15).

If you care about this man, end the relationship now. Does that sound strange? Well, here’s what will happen if you don’t. Soon you will end up feeling angry at him for letting you down, bitter that you wasted so much time with him, and guilty for rejecting him after you promised undying love and patience. Ending it now will free him to do the healing he needs, and will open you up to attracting someone you can love and respect as he is today.

17 Is there such a thing as being too “picky” when choosing partners?

I’m single, in my thirties, and having a hard time finding the right person to spend my life with. All of my friends accuse me of being too picky, and warn me that I’ll never find anyone if I don’t compromise more. I’m afraid if I’m less careful, I’ll end up settling for someone who isn’t right for me. What’s the answer?

Here’s what “too picky” means: You meet a potential mate who has all of the qualities you’ve been looking for … except you love tennis and he doesn’t, so you disqualify him immediately; or you get to know someone who seems to be just what you’ve always wanted … except she could lose about ten pounds, so you end the relationship. See what I mean? A person is too picky when he finds small things about a potential partner that probably won’t affect the core of the relationship, and uses those missing items as excuses to avoid intimacy and cover up his fear of not being good enough himself—“I’ll reject you before you have a chance to reject me.” So perhaps this describes you, and if it does, take a look at the fear that underlies your hypercritical attitude.

I have a sense, however, that in your case, you are simply being choosy, not picky. You are holding out for the kind of person you truly want to spend the rest of your life with, one with whom you are highly compatible in all the important areas of your life. I talk about ten areas of compatibility that you should look for in a mate:

1) Physical style: appearance, personal fitness, and eating habits, etc.

2) Emotional style: attitude toward relationships and affection, ability to express feelings

3) Social style: personality traits, how he interacts with others

4) Intellectual style: educational background, attitude toward learning, creative expressions, cultural experience

5) Sexual style: sexual experience and skill, ability to enjoy sex, attitude

6) Communication style: how he communicates, attitude toward communication

7) Professional/Financial style: relationship with money, attitude toward success, work and organizational habits

8) Personal Growth style: attitude toward self-improvement, willingness to work on relationship, ability to change self

9) Spiritual style: attitude toward Higher Power, spiritual practices, philosophy of life, moral views

10) Hobbies and interests

You don’t have to have total compatibility in all these areas, but in the ones that are most important to you, you should have very strong compatibility. (For an extensive discussion of compatibility and how to determine it, pick up my book “Are You the One for Me?”)

The truth is, I wish more people were as “choosy” as you. There would be fewer divorces and dysfunctional relationships. So don’t let yourself be pressured by your family or friends to compromise what you know in your heart is important. And don’t give in to the artificially manufactured social timeclock that says you “must” be married before a certain age. Remember, your soul mate is waiting for you out there. He (or she) doesn’t want you to give up looking before you find him. “Hang in there!” he’s whispering. And when you find him, I know it will have been worth the wait, and you won’t care how long it took.

18 Can long-distance relationships work?

Last year I met a wonderful man at a friend’s wedding, and we’ve been having a relationship ever since. The problem is that we live in two different parts of the country, two thousand miles away from each other. Does our relationship have a chance? How can we keep it working when we are so far apart?

Of course your relationship has a chance, but since it is a long-distance romance, you have to be aware of the possible problems and do what you can to avoid them. The very same factors that make a long-distance relationship so exciting also make it hazardous. It’s easy for you to think the relationship is much better than it is because you don’t spend consistent quality time together. Your goal becomes trying to see one another again, rather than really taking a close look at the relationship.

There are three major problems in long-distance relationships:

1) You don’t get to see what your partner is really like.

You know that if you have three days to spend with your lover, you are going to be on your best behavior and so is he. It’s easy to hide the difficult parts of your personality for seventy-two hours, and leave feeling wonderful. But you never really get to know one another, because you don’t see your mate under pressure, in a crisis, when he is ill, when he is frightened. All of these situations reveal a lot about someone’s character, an essential part of determining compatibility. You need consistent time to discover these dimensions of a person.

2) You avoid dealing with problem areas.

Let’s imagine that you haven’t seen your long-distance lover in two months, and he’s flown in to spend the weekend with you. Over dinner that night, he says something that annoys you. Now you have to make a decision: Do you confront him on what is upsetting you, and risk ruining your weekend, or do you forget about it? Most people choose to avoid the confrontation, fearful that by the time they get through the argument and hurt feelings, half of the weekend will already be over. The problem with this habit is that you and your partner never learn to problem solve together, or advance the relationship to deeper levels of communication and harmony. The unresolved issues and the unexpressed resentments just sit there like Emotional Time Bombs, waiting to explode. It may look like you have a great relationship on the surface, but you haven’t allowed it to move through the transition stage every healthy love affair must experience.

3) You have an unrealistic view of your compatibility.

Long-distance lovers often don’t even know how little they have in common because they are too busy entertaining themselves. If you only have three days with your partner, you will treat it like a mini-vacation—you’ll spend all your time together; you’ll go out to restaurants, movies, shows, etc.; you’ll have lots of sex; and you’ll avoid friends and family. This gives you a very unrealistic picture of your relationship. You may actually enjoy the excitement of the fun weekend more than you enjoy your partner and not even know it. Many couples find themselves extremely disappointed when they finally move to the same city or decide to live together. “It doesn’t feel like it used to,” they often complain. Of course if doesn’t. It’s not a twenty-four-hour-a-day party anymore. It’s a real full-time relationship, and if you and your partner aren’t truly compatible, you’ll find out real fast.

For a long-distance romance to evolve into a healthy, lasting relationship, both partners will eventually have to live in the same place. That’s the only way you can truly know if you are compatible, and develop the level of intimacy you need to sustain your love. But while you’re still apart, the most successful long-distance affairs are those in which the couple treats the relationship like it is a full-time romance. So:

 Don’t try to make every moment together special, but do normal things together

 Don’t try to hide difficult parts of your personalities, but be yourselves

 Don’t edit how you feel, but allow yourselves to communicate honestly and deal with conflicts as they come up.

19 How important are cultural differences in a relationship?

My fiancée and I are from very different cultural backgrounds—hers is much more traditional and strict, socially and spiritually, than mine as an American. We’ve always told ourselves that our love was more important than where we were born, but we’re starting to run into some very big problems as we discuss wedding plans, having children, and other serious issues. Am I making a mistake in telling myself the differences don’t matter?

Don’t kid yourself … differences always matter—it’s just a question of how many there are and how much conflict they create in the relationship. Love is not enough to make a relationship work: you need compatibility, and as you’re discovering, cultural differences aren’t just about where you were born. They spill over into most areas of your life, from your spiritual beliefs; your social, intellectual, and emotional style; your values; your choices about child-rearing; customs; and on and on. It’s not that you and your partner have to agree on everything and have gone through the same life experiences. But there’s a point beyond which too many differences will create too much tension, and make a harmonious relationship next to impossible.

You’re experiencing what many engaged couples go through—you’re just now confronting some big issues between you that hadn’t fully surfaced before. I’ll bet you both avoided seriously talking about some of the cultural differences while you were dating because, intuitively, you knew they would be “hot buttons.” So here you are engaged and Pandora’s box is opening!! And I can hear that you’re having some serious doubts. That’s what an engagement is supposed to be for—a period of time during which you can really take an honest look at all of your remaining issues, and hopefully, come to agreement on how you will blend both of your cultural backgrounds together.

I know what’s scaring you … it’s possible that as you confront these topics you may discover that your values and beliefs are just too different for you to live compatibly together. As uncomfortable as it will be, find the courage to talk about everything that’s bothering you. After all, if it’s not going to work, isn’t it better to find out now, rather than waiting until after you are married and have children?

20 Is it damaging to a relationship when one partner is still controlled by his parents?

My fiancé is thirty-three, but he might as well be three years old, because his parents still control him, especially his mother. He talks to her on the phone every single day, and she calls here at all hours, with no respect for our schedule. Now that we’re engaged, she is pushing all of her ideas about the wedding on him, and we end up fighting about her constantly. I’ve tried to get him to look at his relationship with both of his parents, but he says they’re just a close family, and that there’s nothing abnormal about it. My childhood was very unhappy, and I have a very distant relationship with my own parents, so I wonder if I’m judging him unfairly. Help!

Why are you asking me this question? You already know the answer. You can’t marry someone who is emotionally married to one or both of his parents. You can’t marry someone who hasn’t grown up. Well, actually, you can marry someone like that, but you’ll be miserable. You have every classic sign of coming face to face with what I call “Toxic In-Laws.” Toxic in-laws do not respect the boundaries of your relationship and the boundaries between them and your spouse. They will interfere in your life, become time and energy vampires, and even refuse to acknowledge you or your relationship, because to them, you are an outsider. They haven’t let go of their son and will resent you for taking him away from them.

Do these things sound bad? Well, there’s nothing compared to how toxic in-laws will drive a wedge between you and your partner by creating dissension in your relationship. It sounds like that’s already happening with you and your fiancé. You end up feeling unsupported and misunderstood by him, furious at his parents for manipulating him, and everyone starts thinking you’re a real bitch! And if you think it’s bad now, wait until you have children!!

In spite of what you may believe, your fiancé’s parents aren’t the problem—he is. If he took a stand with his parents and set boundaries in their relationship, it wouldn’t make any difference how much they tried to interfere. He needs to make you number one in his life. You need to be his first priority; your marriage has to come first before his relationship with his mother and father.

The children of toxic in-laws need to communicate the following information to their parents if they want to save their relationships with their partners:

1. I have chosen my spouse to be my lifelong mate, and I expect you to treat her (him) with total respect, courtesy, and warmth. We are a couple, and when you criticize or hurt my partner, it is the same as hurting me.

2. If you cannot bring yourself to behave with respect around my spouse, then I do not wish to see you. You will either see us together and treat us with love, or not see us at all.

3. My home is mine, not yours. When you come over, you will call first, and if we want to see you, we will tell you. When you do come over you will not tell me or my wife how to run our lives, raise our children, arrange our furniture, etc.

4. You need to respect our time and privacy. That means I do not wish you to call my house five times a day. Give us the space to want to call you. Naturally I will be here for you if there is a real emergency.

5. I know this may be difficult for you to understand, but that’s the way it is. I want you in my life, but not if you cannot accept my marriage and respect our relationship.

If you discuss this with your partner, and he repeatedly refuses to confront his parents, you can try suggesting counseling so he can get a third opinion. If he refuses that, you need to ask yourself why you are staying in this relationship. It isn’t going to get any better, and you know it’s already tearing you apart. Do not get married unless this is resolved!!