"I am all the love I've ever been searching for."
I've been thinking about this and some related ideas the last couple of days.
Why you attract and are attracted to crazy women.
According to a lot of what I've been reading lately, if you are a man and you didn't get the kind of love and nurturing you should have as a child, you often end up in relationships with women who have a personality disorder like borderline personality disorder ("BPD") or a woman who has a bunch of the symptoms. These women are often very attractive. They have the same type of damage from childhood that we do. They are desperately seeking validation from men, just like you are seeking validation from women.
These women have learned that they can get their validation from men by using their looks, charm, and sexuality. They learn how to find men who need to be built up, and they pour on the sex, love, and validation. They tell the man how brilliant he is, they want sex all the time, that he is best lover ever, and all kinds of stuff that makes the man feel great.
We also get validation from another source with these women. They often need to be rescued from some shit in their lives. When we rescue them, that validates us. It makes us feel worthwhile and like we have some meaning to our lives. And the women feel validated because they see that they are worthy of somebody rescuing them.
Therefore, we are attracted to this type of woman because of our extreme need for love, validation, and approval. We tend to fall especially hard for the BPD type because in the beginning of the relationship, they are pouring on the approval and validation in order to hook us in. This isn't calculated; it's a survival mechanism. And don't be so quick to be judgmental about her behavior, because you are likely promising to always love her and take care of her, in order to hook her. These are just two sides of the same dysfunctional coin. Her face is on one side, but yours is on the other.
We are flying high and happy when the woman is heaping on the love and affection. It makes us feel as if life is worthwhile and that we are good human beings.
The perfect couple: She validates him, he validates her back in return. It is the perfect co-dependent relationship--at least at first.
By the way, even if we end up with a woman who is more or less emotionally healthy, we still want validation and approval from the woman, and we subconsciously try to get it--which makes us seem needy--but that's a different dynamic than what I am talking about here.
You have another problem that makes it nearly impossible for you to have a successful relationship with these types of women.
If you had a strong enough frame, you might be able to live with this type of woman and even enjoy it--it might be good for her too and provide her healing. (But I highly suggest you don't reproduce with her--she will start using your kid to validate herself and the kid will not get the kind of mother love it needs--and guess what? The cycle repeats).
But don't kid yourself, 90% of us don't have what it takes to handle this type of woman. (I can already hear the wheels spinning in some of your brains: Yeah, but I am special, my inner game is tight, I can handle this, and I will be a hero to her. Pause for a moment and realize that you are already pandering to your intense need for validation).
We can't handle this type of woman because the intense need some of us men have for validation and approval makes it almost impossible for us to establish reasonable boundaries in our relationships.
For example, say you like to play small-stakes poker with your buddies a couple of times a month. Not unreasonable, in my opinion. But if your playing poker makes you fear that your woman will take away her approval, love, and validation because she doesn't like you spending time away from her, you are likely to eventually give up the poker game.
Or maybe she is highly critical of some habit you have, like tapping your foot. Over time, she gets more and more upset with your foot-tapping and starts to criticize your character, your earning ability, your intelligence, and your worth as a human being because you tap your foot (believe me, I've had it happen). She might even smack you when you are doing it. And instead of kicking her ass out of your life, you put up with this shit, and maybe even try to change it. Why? Because you are afraid to lose her approval.
Or maybe she picks a fight with your family at family gatherings and then when you are in private, she heaps abuse on you for not backing her up during the argument.
Or maybe you like to eat pizza for breakfast, like to listen to rock and roll in the shower, like to sleep with the window open, like to watch football on Sunday morning, prefer to go on road trips instead of flying, like old movies and not new ones, have a beer with your pizza, eat red meat every once in awhile, or whatever the hell you like to do--a lot of stuff that is really no big deal, but just kind of the way you do things in your life--and you start to change these behaviors because you are afraid of your woman's disapproval. You are afraid that she will stop validating you, so you stop doing them.
You are afraid of confrontation, because you are afraid she will leave you if you resist her, so you change. When you draw a line, she packs up her stuff and tries to leave or does leave for a night or two (if you have a sense of humor like me, you chuckle at the irony of this woman packing stuff you bought her into your suitcase and using one of your cars to drive out of your life).
At any rate, you love her and get tired of drama, so you change, thinking that she will be happy after you fix this one little problem she brought up. You convince yourself that it is "compromise" and you need to compromise in order to be in a relationship. Eventually you discover that she will never be happy no matter how much you change.
Trying to fill her up with love is liking trying to fill up a bucket with a hole in it. When you realize this, hopefully sooner than later, it's time to follow David Deida's advice in the chapter of his book Way of the Superior Man, "Stay With Her Intensity To a Point":
A superior man penetrates her mood with imperturbable love and unwavering consciousness. If she still refuses to live more fully in love, after a time, he lets her go.
The trap of Superior Man is that you want to be superior, because being "superior" validates you. You get to feel special by putting up with your woman's shit. So you stay with a woman whose moods you can't penetrate. Deida also says that if you can't penetrate her moods in five minutes, you are doing something wrong. Take a hint: If you are spending hours, day after day after day, trying to bring this woman into a loving place--you bit off more than you can chew. Let her go.
By the way, you are often really confused about this, because you are pretty happy with her when she isn't on one of her tirades. You don't want her to change at all--you just want her to be happy. Because when she is happy, she makes you feel like you own the world.
After awhile as the dynamic continues, because you get tired of arguing with her and because you are hoping she will give you a crumb of the validation she used to give you by the dump-truck full, you give in on almost everything she asks. You can't set a boundary to save your life, because you are afraid you will lose even the small amounts of approval and validation she still gives you. And because you are afraid of her disapproval.
But what happens when you fail to set boundaries is that you start to lose your sense of identity, bit by bit (I think the professionals call it "engulfment"). And eventually, you start to feel as if you do not know what you like and what you don't like.
You get very very tired of the conflict with the woman about what we want to do and don't want to do. You get very tired of pretending to be somebody you aren't and of repressing your real desires. You can spend a weekend with your woman and go back to work on Monday feeling as if somebody just spend two days beating the shit out of you.
Of course, this eventually gets to be something that no human being can take. So, the typical reactions us men are likely to have include things like:
- 1. Passive aggressive behavior like working late and finding excuses to not spend time with her;
2. Exploding into an angry tantrum and telling her how horrible she is for mistreating you (some people call them "victim pukes"--I love that term);
3. Becoming physically violent with her, even if you have never been a violent person;
4. Withdrawing from her sexually, and cheating on her or using a lot of internet porn; or
5. Suddenly and almost out of the blue ending the relationship.
Do not fool yourself into thinking that finding the "right woman" will help you
You might think that finding the "right woman" will help you. You might think that a relationship with a non-crazy and well-adjusted woman will help you--it will NOT.
First, in the needy state you are in, you will not be attracted to this type of woman (and she won't be attracted to you, either). You won't get the thrills and chemistry and validation that you so desperately need. You might not even be able to get an erection with her. You will end up resenting her and treating her poorly because you feel she isn't meeting your needs. You have a little bit different dynamic, but it still doesn't make you happy. You probably will end up cheating on her or finding excuses to not spend time with her.
Second, you will unconsciously do everything you can to create the same validation dynamic with this "right woman". A relationship that doesn't include the dynamic will feel wrong and strange to you--so, you will try to create something that feels "right", according to your twisted sense of what is right. This will either start to unhinge her and make her feel insecure, and you will be successful in creating the same dynamic again OR she will get tired of your passive aggressive manipulation and leave your ass.
Or third, she may just stick around and take advantage of the situation. You can't blame somebody for wiping her feet on a doormat; that's what it's there for. You will be working your ass off, paying for her car, taking her on vacations, buying her fake tits, and she will fucking the personal trainer while you're at work. You made yourself a doormat--you are getting what you deserve.
There is only one real solution to this
The only solution I can think of to our little problem is to learn to be self-validating. Or as my ex girlfriend said, realize that you are the love you have always been looking for.
This is essentially what you learn about yourself in the early stages of childhood development, if you are the rare person who had a mother who knew how to give you love and nurturing without her own issues getting in the way.
It is my conclusion that we will never be happy or content until we can learn to give ourselves some of the basic validation of our own "Beingness" (I had to borrow one of those funky new-age terms here, because I couldn't think of anything else).
In other words, we stop needing validation from women (or father figures or mother figures or God or whatever your thing is) because we know that we are human beings with the full rights and privileges of that title, without having to prove a damn thing to anybody, without getting validation and approval from a woman or anybody else.
If you know without a doubt that your Beingness is secure, you are able to set healthy boundaries, because you are not afraid to lose your woman's validation--her validation of you is irrelevant because you have enough already. You will have a good sense of when you should draw a line and say "no", when you should insist on her changing her behavior, when you should compromise or change your behavior, and when you should just leave the relationship.
When you set appropriate boundaries, then you won't start to feel like you are losing your identity. You won't act in passive-aggressive ways to avoid spending time with your woman. You will be direct about what you are doing and why you are doing it. And you will get more enjoyment out of the time you do spend with her.
But you can't set the appropriate boundaries until you learn to find all the love and self-validation inside YOU.
Okay, this sounds like a good plan to me.
Does anybody know where I can buy some of that self-validation?
Because it sounds very desirable.
I am going to find a source and when I do, I will report back to you all.
Added On 11/26/2010
Okay, something that I've been thinking about, is another type of validation, in addition to self-validation, that we need in relationships.
I think it is healthy to require that the woman validate that she is in the relationship with us and that she is dedicated to moving it along and building it into something better. I need to think about this a little bit more.
