Barbara Angelis - The 100 Most Asked Questions About Love, Sex and Relationships

It might help you to understand where your husband is coming from. You see, it’s easy for him to be so emotionally generous with his children. They don’t nag him, criticize what he says or does, or see his faults!! In other words, they still love him unconditionally. That feeling of being loved purely and completely allows him to feel safe enough to open his heart and share the most giving part of himself with them. With you, it’s a different story. You don’t have him on a pedestal, like the girls do; you don’t think everything he says is so smart; you see him as he really is. So it’s much more difficult for your husband to feel as safe and loved with you as he does with his daughters. This is true for all parents—it’s a lot more challenging to be as consistently loving with our mates as we are with our kids, but that’s the whole point of marriage—ideally, to learn how to love another person in spite of their imperfections.

That’s the compassionate part of the answer, but the second part is more practical: Your relationship with your husband must be placed first, before your relationship as parents to the kids. I believe strongly that, as a wife, you need to feel you are Number One to your husband, and not that you get the emotional leftovers, if there are any, after your daughters are loved. If your marriage isn’t healthy, it won’t matter how much your children feel loved … you will end up feeling resentment toward them, and they will not grow up with a positive example of how a woman should be treated. The stronger your relationship with your husband is, the better both of you will be as parents to your kids. Keeping you happy and well loved should be your husband’s first responsibility to the family, because that ensures a stable and lasting home life for your children. And the happier you and he are together, the happier your girls will be. Tell him I said so!!!!

I have the opposite problem than most women have—my boyfriend loves me too much. He wants to be with me every second; he never takes his hands off me; and when we aren’t together, he calls me every few hours. I’ve asked him to back off, to give me some space, but he gets really hurt and rejected, and I end up comforting him. I really care about this man, but I’m starting to turn off, and even feel scared of him. How can I make him see that I need him to love me less?

Your problem isn’t that your boyfriend loves you too much— it’s that he doesn’t love himself enough. He’s what I call an “emotional vampire.”His heart is like an emotional container that’s empty, and he desperately needs you to fill him up, only there’s a hole in the bottom, so no matter how much you give him, it will never be enough, and he’ll always crave more. No wonder you feel uncomfortable: although he appears to be giving in his desire to be with you, touch you, and call you, he’s actually taking. He’s feeding off your attention, your presence, your energy.

People like your boyfriend who seem to “love too much” are almost always desperately needy, seeking to distract themselves from their pain with a temporary dose of love, sex, or affection. They can fall in love instantly, and become easily compulsive and obsessed, sucking their partners in by sweeping them off their feet, and, eventually, keeping them around with guilt and pity. Your boyfriend probably has been very hurt in his life, perhaps by a family member, and he has an emotional wound that will not heal until he deals with it at its source. Your relationship and all the others he has had are like Band-Aids, temporary solutions for a deep and chronic problem.

What am I telling you? Probably to end this relationship now, before things get worse, and they inevitably will. The only circumstances under which you should keep seeing him would be if he admitted to the problem and sought help immediately. There’s a chance that, if your boyfriend receives some intensive counseling, you could work things out together. However, I sense that you’ve already had enough. And don’t forget to take a look at why you got sucked in by this kind of person. (Hint: He begs for your love—you withhold it … Are you punishing Mom or Dad? Are you staying in control?)

After surviving a very bitter divorce and custody battle for my children, I finally met a wonderful man who is everything my ex-husband wasn’t. He’s kind, open, and willing to talk about everything. Our problem is that his ex-wife left him for his best friend, so he’s afraid to trust love again, and so am I. How can we leave the past behind us and make this new relationship work?

First of all, congratulations!! You are faced with what I call a “high-class problem,” a problem that looks like a problem, but is really a great situation with some challenges attached to it. In essence, what you’re asking is, “How can my partner and I get rid of the fear in our relationship so we can love fully?” That’s a wonderful question to be able to ask. So the first step is for you and your sweetie to remind yourselves that you’ve worked very hard to get to this place. Before you get too intense about climbing your next mountain, take a moment to stop and really celebrate how far you’ve both come to finally have found a healthy relationship.

Okay, now, back to the fear. I’m going to say something that might sound strange— a little fear isn’t such a bad thing for you and your boyfriend to feel … it will keep you on your toes and force you to pay attention. I’ll bet if you and he look back on your failed marriages, you will notice that you didn’t pay attention to warning signs, problems, conflicts, unmet needs, and all kinds of stuff. Eventually, it was precisely what you weren’t paying attention to that sabotaged your relationships, right? You didn’t treat those relationships carefully enough. So here you are with a new, wonderful partner, and you’re both scared of making mistakes again, and a little reluctant to just blindly trust. I say, that’s great! It’s about time! You should be afraid of making mistakes, all of us should. You should be careful to make sure your needs get met. You should be paying very close attention, because the more you pay attention to your relationship, the better it will be.

Do you get my point? It’s like someone who carelessly used a sharp knife and cut herself badly. The next time you pick up the knife to use it, you are afraid. You respect its power much more, as well you should. A relationship is like that—a powerful tool that can be used to help us or hurt us, and I feel not enough people respect that tool.

Here’s something practical you can do to help. Each of you should make a Relationship Mistake List. Go back and honestly assess your former relationship from the very beginning to the end. Write down every mistake you made. Examples: “Let my ex-husband talk me out of my feelings, and then pushed down my resentment.” “Didn’t ask for what I wanted in bed, and felt dissatisfied.” Don’t be surprised at how long these lists are. Share yours with your partner, and have him share his. Talk about each item. Then, together, come up with a new Relationship Rule for each old mistake, and write these down. Example: “When I disagree with something my partner does or says, I will express my feelings, even if it causes tension between us,” or “I will let my partner know what I enjoy sexually so he doesn’t have to guess.”