Love is both sacred and profane. As a virtue, love brings blessings. As an obsession, love brings pain. As an emotion love is so addictive, so intoxicating, so invigorating that we all want to be in love.
We want to experience the passion, tne exhilaration, the magic of walking on air. In our Dictionary of Love and Danger, addiction is fatal. Although love means different things to different people, in our society, being in love and being in a relationship are synonymous.
The search for love is perpetual. Men search. Women search. Two people meet. The chemistry is there. So is the gentleness, the understanding. It is as if you had both been touched by the same star. At first it is sweet and touching.
Ecstacy: At first you can think of nothing more than being with the one you love. You want to touch and hold and care for the other person. From the moment of first passion — the moment in which you are utterly convinced that you have found the love of your lives — you are in ecstacy.
Then something happens. The love starts to crumble. He blames her. She blames him. The love that once consumed is burning into an angry hate.
The problem is addiction. You become co-dependent or addicted when each person needs the other as if they were a “fix.” You may wait for the emails. You live for the next phone call. Panic if the text message doesn’t appear. Think of sex from moment to moment. If you are living together, you might make numerous calls during the day to check on her whereabouts. It is almost of if just the connection gives you a high.
What’s the problem here? When love is an addiction, often times a man’s needs become secondary because the woman is so focused on her own. AND the man excuses it because of any number of reasons of things “she is going through.” She may say “the right words” but deep inside, she is so consumed with her own needs that she does not have the capacity to wake up each morning and put her partner’s needs first.
How does it start? Very often it starts with an overwhelming desire on the man’s part to be protective. She tells a story of loss, pain, or mistreatment. Sometimes it is the other way around — I called it the Nurse Nicey syndrome in one of my books. A man is in need and she is hooked — addicted, co-dependent. Her life becomes that of caretaker for his life. Her needs mesh into his needs.
How does a man fall into Savior Syndrome? A way of measuring is the anger you feel towards those who have hurt your new love. The doctors who misdiagnosed. The husbands or parents who absued. The situation that created the loss. We can all feel empathy. But with men, if you write yourself a checklist here you’ll see how wrapped up you have become in those who were in her life. Do you wish you could “get” those who hurt her? Do you wish you could avenge the wrongs, not just make them right? Do you see how things could have been better for her “if only” she had someone like you by her side?
I wrote a column about a man who was convinced that his very talented new girlfriend had a brilliant potential career and he could help. Her former husband held her back. But he was the Savior. He ended up in an ugly threesome being so manipulated that his ex- arrived to take down the door of his house in the middle of the night. Interesting enough, they are on again off again together becuase, “If you only knew what her family had done, you would understand. I could help her and she loves me.”
She is his drug of choice: I finally said to this man, “What does her family have to do with the two of you? What has she brought to the table to help you with your work, your children, your career that depends upon a large social network?”
His answer, “She really can’t because…. ” Because he is addicted and she is his drug of choice.
Wanting to know everything too early on in a relationship, is an addictive sign. Or having too much information spilled out too soon is addiction flag. Relationships should be an unfolding, a learning process. Too much, too soon beomes a “reel in” factor that masks some of the “real” issues that don’t surface until a man is in the boat.
A regular taxi driver confessed the other day that his wife told him, “She reeled him in and tricked him into marriage.” He says he is very happy with her, but he doesn’t quite understand why she felt she needed to manipulate him.
Hooked: Told the story to one of my friends and he said, “Because that’s what women do. We get hooked on them, and they suck us right in. It’s like they see us coming.” Look at the language of love and addiction.
Women seem to know when they are being manipulated and will oftentimes admit it, but realize that a part of them wanted the relationship enough to allow the situation to continue.
Sometimes women seize upon a situation and very carefully plan. “They see me coming,” said one man who appears to make the same mistake over and over again. Perhaps “a woman in need” is his drug of choice. And I can say this because we all know the feeling. We have all tasted the same addictive ecstacy at one time in our lives.
copyright 2008, The Dictionary of Love and Anger by Rita Watson