Are You the One for Me?. Barbara Angelis De

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ been almost twenty years, three kids, and four affairs later, and I just can’t handle it anymore. I’m so lost, I’m hurting my wife and children, and letting everyone I love down.’

      I watched Lenny weep like a frightened little boy, and felt so much empathy for this man who had been under pressure for so long to live up to everyone else’s expectations of how his life was supposed to be. The truth was that Lenny had been letting himself down for years by not listening to his own heart, by making decisions others thought were best, not because he thought they were. In doing what his friends and family thought he should, Lenny had robbed himself of a chance to experience true love and happiness.

      When you make a decision to be with someone because of the pressure you feel (from yourself or others) rather than because the person seems right for you, you are giving your power away and ensuring an unhappy end to your love story. If you have been in this position often, or are in it now, ask yourself what you want and need, and give that first priority over what anyone else thinks.

      Wrong Reason 2

       Loneliness and Desperation

      

You’re lying in bed at night, alone. It’s been a long time since you’ve been in love, let alone made love. Your body feels empty, your heart hurts. Your mind thinks back to your ex, and the one before him, and remembers the happy times when you had someone to hold you and make you feel special. And then you hear yourself say, ‘Maybe I should just call him up and tell him I miss him. It can’t hurt, can it? Maybe it wasn’t so bad after all.’

      

It’s Friday afternoon, and once again you have nothing exciting planned for the weekend. You are tired of being single. You’re beginning to dread Saturday nights, renting a video and sitting home without anyone to share it with. Then you remember the guy you met at the car wash who asked you out for Saturday night. You told him you would get back to him today when you found out if you were free. Of course you’re free. But do you want to go out with him? He seemed kind of boring. You decide to call him. After all, it’s better than a date with the video store.

      

You’re out on a date with a woman you’ve seen a couple of times. You know she likes you, but she isn’t really that appealing. You finish dinner, and she invites you over to her apartment. On the way there in the car, she puts her hand on your thigh. She obviously likes you. You aren’t really attracted to her, but it’s been over five months since you’ve been with a woman, and you miss the closeness. So what if you decide to sleep with her. It doesn’t mean you have to marry her, does it?

      We can all relate to these stories, because we have all experienced loneliness, periods in our lives when we felt so emotionally empty that we were desperate for someone, anyone to love. But unfortunately, what starts out as a lonely act of reaching out to another human being can end in a very complicated and hurtful relationship.

      Take the woman in the first story above. She’ll call up her ex-boyfriend and tell him she is lonely. He’ll decide to come over and ‘cheer her up,’ and they’ll end up in bed. Suddenly they’re involved again—except he neglected to tell her he’s seeing someone else. She’ll go through months of ‘back and forth’ with him until they finally break up, this time for good. All of that pain from one desperate night of loneliness.

      The woman in the second story will end up going out with the guy she’s not really interested in. Six months later, when they’re still involved, she’ll meet someone she really cares for. Now she has to hurt the first man, whom she was really only using, and tell him she doesn’t want to see him anymore because she has met a man she loves more.

      The man in the third story may think he is in for a simple one-night stand, but this girl may have other things in mind. By always being there for him, making it easy for him to be in the relationship, she may indeed end up getting him to marry her. One day he’ll wake up and finally admit he isn’t in love with his wife, break her heart, upset their families, and feel like a heel.

      These three people didn’t just end up in these unfortunate circumstances because of bad luck; they got involved with people for the wrong reasons, and doomed their relationships to unhappy endings.

       WHEN YOU ARE FEELING LONELY OR DESPERATE, YOU ARE MUCH MORE LIKELY TO MAKE POOR LOVE CHOICES AND END UP IN UNFULFILLING RELATIONSHIPS.

       HOW RHONDA’S LONELINESS ALMOST KILLED HER

      The story of Rhonda is a sad example of the pain we can create for ourselves and others when we choose love out of desperation. Rhonda, thirty-five, had been overweight as a child. While her friends were dating in junior high school, Rhonda stayed home and absorbed herself in her schoolwork. Because of her tremendous scholastic achievements, Rhonda won a scholarship to a private university in the Northeast. She arrived at college never having been on a date in her life.

      In her first year of school, Rhonda lost fifty pounds (she says it was getting away from her mother’s cooking). She could hardly believe what she saw when she looked in the mirror: she actually looked attractive. And when young men began to ask her out, Rhonda knew her transformation was real. She went out on one or two dates before she met Karl.

      Karl was a senior in college and from a very wealthy family. He was athletic, good-looking, and very domineering. When he asked Rhonda out, she was sure he’d made a mistake. She never expected anyone that handsome to be interested in her. In fact, Rhonda had no idea what to expect in a relationship. She’d never been in one. So as the months passed, and they began dating exclusively, Rhonda was so overjoyed she didn’t pay much attention to some of Karl’s characteristics that were, to say the least, a bit strange. For instance, Karl liked to gamble—not just small amounts of money, but also large ones. He also liked his sex rough and dirty, and needed to push Rhonda around to get really turned on. And when he wasn’t with Rhonda, he frequented porno film theaters and strip bars.

      Rhonda was a smart girl—in the back of her mind, she knew something wasn’t right. But she didn’t want to lose Karl. After all, he was the only man who had ever really wanted her. So she ignored the problems and worked hard to please him. And when Karl suggested they get married, Rhonda was sure her dreams were finally coming true.

      When Rhonda came to me fifteen years later, she was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Her dream of a happy marriage had quickly become a nightmare. Karl was a compulsive gambler and a sexaholic with a violent temper. His behavior had progressively deteriorated until he’d gambled away most of his family inheritance, and like many men who link sex and anger together, his need for violent sex increased until he would beat Rhonda before he slept with her. The fat little girl who lived inside Rhonda was so afraid of losing Karl that she put up with this treatment until the night before she called me, when, for the first time, Rhonda fought back against Karl’s abuse and he raped her. Fearing for her life, she fled with her two small children to a friend’s house.

       Rhonda’s healing was not just in leaving Karl, but in forgiving herself for staying with him for so long. She needed to work hard to understand that her desperation to be loved had driven her to tolerate such inhumane treatment by her husband.

      Rhonda’s case is extreme, but the pattern is not. If you suspect that you’ve allowed your emotional vulnerability to influence your choice of partners, and you have ended up in unhappy relationships, you should be excited to know that СКАЧАТЬ