Secrets About Men Every Woman Should Know. Barbara Angelis De

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СКАЧАТЬ if you want to spend time with them, that’s your business,” Lawrence replied. “Just don’t expect me to participate.”

      JoAnne was furious at Lawrence for his superior attitude, but she secretly wondered if he was right, if her friends weren’t good enough for her. She was afraid of what would happen if she continued to see them. Would Lawrence break up with her? Over the next few months she began to spend less and less time with her old friends, until she stopped seeing them entirely. She felt lonely – but after all, she had Lawrence.

      Jackie’s parents had never approved of Mike when Jackie dated him in college, and they were even more upset when the couple decided to move in together. Mike was a heavy drinker, and even though he claimed he could stop any time he wanted to, he never seemed to want to. Jackie loved Mike, and knew he loved her, but was afraid to really confront him about his drinking. Jackie had always been very close to her parents, since she was an only child, but all that began to change once she and Mike started living together. Each time Jackie would mention that she’d spoken to her mother or father, Mike would start complaining that Jackie was still depending too much on her parents, that she was acting like a little girl, and that she needed to break away from them and be her own person. Jackie loved her parents, but she didn’t want to lose Mike, so she began to taper off her phone calls and visits with them, until she hardly had any contact with them at all. Mike told Jackie that he was proud of her for being so “strong.” But Jackie drives by her parents’ house every week, parks the car across the street, and cries.

      If I asked you, “Would you reject a friend or family member if a man asked you to?” you’d probably answer with a resounding “No Way!” And yet many women do just that. They turn their backs on people who are important to them rather than risk the loss of a man’s love.

      Why do some men try to separate you from people who care about you?

       MEN WHO ARE INSECURE WITHIN THEMSELVES WILL TRY TO CUT YOU OFF FROM YOUR SUPPORT SYSTEMS

      There are men who need to feel they have total control over their partner, who are frightened of being controlled themselves. One of their tactics for exerting that power over you might be to cut you off from those people and groups who love and support you – your family, your friends, your church or spiritual group. This can have two results.

      1 You become more dependent on the man for love, since you’re getting less of it from other sources.

      2 Your relationship becomes isolated from the scrutiny of the people who love you, thereby protecting your partner from possible criticism and negative feedback about his treatment of you.

      3. We become “emotional chameleons,” walking into the relationship like a blank slate, and becoming whatever the man wants us to be. One of the most common ways women put themselves second is by being willing to sacrifice who they are, and become whatever their man wants them to be. I call this being an “emotional chameleon,” willing to change yourself, your looks, your behavior, and even your beliefs in order to fit your man’s image of his ideal woman. I’ll be the woman of his dreams, we decide, and we proceed to mold ourselves into someone else’s picture of what is lovable.

      Here’s a true and sad story about how one woman sacrificed her entire personality for a man. Janice, a 32-year-old singer, walked into my office full of bitterness and rage. She’d just ended a three-year relationship with Tony, a telephone repairman. “Do you know what I did every weekend for three years?” she asked me. “I went to wrestling matches. Not to a movie, or the theater, but to goddamn wrestling matches. And when we were home, what do you think we watched on TV? Wrestling. I knew every wrestler. I knew who hated whom, I knew all the moves.”

      “I don’t understand,” I replied. “You still haven’t told me what the problem was.”

      Janice looked at me with daggers in her eyes and growled, “I hate wrestling! In fact, I hate sports. But Tony loved it, and whatever Tony wanted, I did. I became a wrestling groupie just to please him. I even convinced myself that I liked it. I thought of it as a love sacrifice.’ Now, whenever I think about it even for a second, I want to throw up. I am so pissed off at myself for being such an idiot.”

      Janice had walked into her relationship with Tony a blank slate, willing to alter her personality in exchange for love. Living in Los Angeles, I often meet women who are making this unfortunate mistake in extreme ways, to the point of altering their physical appearance with plastic surgery because the man they’re involved with wants them to look different. I’ve counseled dozens of women who were “instructed” by their men to have their breasts enlarged or their backsides lifted, went ahead with the surgery, and are now dealing with their feelings of rage and humiliation.

      4. We give up our own dreams, in order to help a man make his dreams come true. The wife who drops out of school to support her husband while he becomes a doctor, and realizes, fifteen years later, that she forgot about her own dreams of teaching retarded children …

      The woman who quits her job in a major corporation to help her boyfriend with the bookkeeping for his import business, only to realize when they break up three years later that she did it for him and not for herself, and that now she has nothing to show for it…

      I’m sure that if you haven’t done this yourself, you know a woman who has. It’s so sad that as women we are so willing to give up own dreams and adopt those of the man we love.

      WHY WOMEN SACRIFICE THEMSELVES IN RELATIONSHIPS

      Perhaps this question seems unnecessary to you. As a friend of mine put it, “Darling, sacrifice is my middle name!” There are several reasons women sacrifice themselves so readily with men.

      

Men expect us to put ourselves second. They’ve been trained for thousands of years to think of women as second-class citizens, as less important. After all, we live in a world where, in many countries, women still have to walk behind their man on the street as a sign of subservience. Is it any wonder, then, that men expect us to be the one to sacrifice?

      

We’ve been trained as women to put ourselves second. Many of us watched our mothers and grandmothers sacrifice their talents, interests, dreams and careers in order to be a support system for our fathers. We’ve been taught that putting ourselves first is “selfish.”

      

We glamorize sacrifice as some kind of achievement, rather than going out and making our real dreams come true. It’s so much easier, and less personally challenging, to say: “Well, I would have gotten my degree and become an attorney, but I wanted to be there for Henry when he was in law school, so I decided to make the sacrifice.”

      THE RESULTS OF SACRIFICING FOR LOVE

      When you sacrifice for love and put yourself second in a relationship, you believe inside that your man will end up loving you more. This may or may not happen. But what will happen is:

       WHEN YOU SACRIFICE WHO YOU ARE IN ORDER TO BE LOVED MORE BY SOMEONE ELSE, YOU END UP LOVING YOURSELF LESS

       Each time you give up an interest, a friend, or a dream in the hope of winning a man’s СКАЧАТЬ