Barbara Angelis - Secrets About Men Every Woman Should Know

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.

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.”

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 love, you give away a piece of yourself. The more you sacrifice, the less of yourself remains, until one day you wake up and you feel empty. There is nothing of you left. You’ve cut it all away to become more acceptable, and in the process you’ve lost your essence, the soul of your womanhood.

This loss is almost always followed by anger or depression. You feel so much resentment toward yourself for what you have done, and an enormous loss of your self-respect and self-esteem. And you feel resentment towards the man you sacrificed for who, more times than not, didn’t end up loving you the way you wanted to be loved anyway.

1. Make a list of all the ways you have sacrificed for love in every relationship you’ve ever been in.This is NOT a fun exercise to do, but I highly recommend it as a powerful technique for getting you motivated and disgusted enough so that you will stop putting yourself second once and for all.

2. Make a list of people, interests, activities, and beliefs that are important to you.This will help you remember who you are and what you care about. It will be a lot more difficult for you to convince yourself that you really do enjoy dirt-bike racing, or fishing, or stamp collecting, or whatever the next man you meet is into.

3. Make a commitment to your own dreams, so you can become full in yourself, rather than an empty “emotional chameleon,” waiting to be filled up by a man.The more complete and whole you are as a woman, the less likely it is that you will walk into a relationship desperate for validation and therefore a likely candidate for sacrifice. In the final chapter of the book, I’ll give you some suggestions for becoming the powerful woman you know you can be.