Women Who Love Too Much -- Or Too Little
Self Help
What's A Mother/Father To Do?
Parenting For The New Millennium
"This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends." -- John 15:12-13
A struggling California artist, Lisa lived in modest quarters, which also doubled as her studio. The apartment had paintings and canvasses stacked here and there so that when therapist and best-selling author Robin Norwood went to see her, she had to lean across some of the canvasses.
"Would you like some tea?" Lisa asked. Norwood nodded as she was invited to sit on the quilt-covered mattress in a less littered section of the room. As Lisa brewed the tea she gestured toward a framed verse on the wall. It was timeworn and faded, with a background of an old-fashioned landscape.
The poem was titled "My Dear Mother." It read:
Mother, dear mother
When I think of you
I want to be all that is fine,
That is true.
All that is worthy
Noble or grand
Has come from you, Mother,
From your guiding hand.
"It's too much, isn't it? So corny!" Lisa then related how a friend found it in a thrift shop as a joke. "I think there's some truth to it, though, don't you?" Lisa laughed and then said to therapist Norwood, "Loving my mother has gotten me into a lot of trouble with men" (Women Who Love Too Much, Robin Norwood, pp. 47-48).
It was stories like these that helped Robin Norwood sell over three million copies of her book, Women Who Love Too Much. And it was stories like these which surprised a lot of people, especially women, who found themselves described as the pages and case histories unfolded. Strangely, and ironically, many women begin to see their problems couched in terms not of hate or hostility or indifference, but in terms of love.
Could it be that women get into trouble by loving too much? Yes, it could be, says Robin Norwood, because she was just such a woman herself. She said, "Having been a woman who loved too much most of my life until the toll to my physical and emotional health was so severe that I was forced to take a hard look at my pattern of relating to men. I have spent," she says, "the last several years working hard to change that pattern. They have been the most rewarding years of my life" (Ibid., pp. xvi-xvii).
So on Mother's Day when sons and daughters might be inclined to give our mothers a sentimental poem or card not unlike the one Lisa had on her wall, and when most all sons and daughters have a measure of guilt for not having loved their mothers enough (especially if they are elderly), we are brought up short by statements like Lisa's and books like Norwood's, which suggest we love too much, rather than not enough.
Besides, in the context of our Christian faith and worship, and in the context of the scripture where we are commanded to love as Christ loved, we seem to see a contradiction. More than that, if we are to love as Christ loved, we are to be ready to lay down our lives for our friends even as he did.
In this age of self-affirmation, self-discovery, self-fulfillment, and self-realization, notions of self-giving and self-sacrifice may seem a bit much. Perhaps Norwood is right. Possibly women do love too much. Possibly men do too.
Despite the apparent surface contradiction between Norwood and John's Gospel, I believe Jesus' parable of the vine can be helpful at getting at the question of women who love too much and women who love too little.
I.
Let's look first at women who love too much.
Let's take another look at Lisa, the struggling artist. She was the middle child of three, the only planned and wanted child of her parents. Her parents hurried to marry to "legitimize" her older sister and were surprised at the birth of her eight-years-younger brother. Lisa was the favorite.
But Lisa's parents were alcoholic. Her father gambled away his good income and was rude. Soon Lisa and her alcoholic mother changed roles. Lisa became the mother and her mother became the child. Lisa tried desperately to meet her mother's needs, to make her happy, and to protect her mother from her father. In fact, said Lisa, I tried to make my mother into the kind of mother I needed, into my idealized mother, into the mother of the faded, framed poem on the wall.
Lisa went on to an unhappy marriage and divorce. Eventually she entered into a six-year relationship with a man who informed her that if it ever came to a choice between buying drugs and paying the rent, he would buy the drugs. The man rarely worked, so Lisa supported him, felt sorry for him, cried when he told her of his unhappy childhood, and generally loved him and cared for him.
Then Lisa watched television. The show was about a woman who had been beaten by her husband. The woman said, "I didn't think it was that bad because I could still stand it." But when the woman was told she deserved something more than the worst she could stand, the light went on, and she got out of the marriage.
And the light went on for Lisa too. While her boyfriend was away, she packed his stuff and put it outside the door, and called a friend and her husband to come over for the showdown. The boyfriend left. He called and he threatened, but he was gone.
Why the change? It was because Lisa had called her now-sober mother who suggested Al-Anon, a fellowship of relatives of alcoholics. Even though we may not ourselves be alcohol or drug addicted, we can become co-addicts who find our significance in caring for, nurturing, excusing, and attempting to reform our spouse or parent or child or lover.
"That was when I was beginning to understand myself," said Lisa. "Gary, for me, was what alcohol was for my mother: he was a drug I couldn't do without. Because self-sacrifice had always been my pattern, I wouldn't have known who I was without someone to help or some suffering to endure" (Ibid., p. 59).
Dr. Norwood observes that "Gary, with his addiction, his emotional dependency, and his cruelty, combined all the worst attributes of Lisa's mother and father" (Ibid.). So Lisa responded by loving too much to make things right, and believing that through her suffering love she could control things and make things better.
Lisa is typical of the case histories Norwood relates in her best seller. Women who love too much often come from a dysfunctional home and feel a need to supply the nurture they never had. Women who love too much are afraid of abandonment, and try extra hard to please, to make things right, to assume more than their share of the responsibility or blame or guilt.
Women who love too much typically have low self-esteem, which they attempt to bolster by earning the right to be happy by helping someone in need, especially a man. Women who love too much are not, says Norwood, "attracted to men who are kind, stable, reliable, and interested in you. You find such 'nice' men boring" (Ibid., p. 9).
Predisposed to making things right, women who love too much have a desperate need to control their men and relationships. Consequently, they are attracted to dependent, emotionally damaged, frequently addicted men who need fixing and who can be shaped into the image the woman has for him. And so the spouse, lover, friend, or child is smothered by the woman who loves to manipulate, to dominate, and to control.
If you, man or woman, are in that situation, you'd better go for help, says Norwood. Find a support group and learn to develop the spiritual side of your life to bolster your sense of self-worth and self-esteem. Own up to your problems and stop trying to fix them by controlling and manipulating others. Come to understand that you in yourself are a child of God and "worthy" of his love.
Christ did not give his life for us because we were worthless in the sight of God. Instead, says John's Gospel, God so loved people that he gave his beloved Son. He sent the Son into the world not to tell people how worthless they were and worthy of condemnation and destruction. Instead, he sent the Son to make people well and whole.
That's where the parable of the vine comes in. Women who love too much are like a vine that is thwarted, with branches twisted, brittle, without bearing fruit. Cut them off, says Jesus. Don't let the diseased branches destroy the vine. Purge them. Cleanse the self and soul. Let go of the manipulation, the oppression, and the compulsion to control. If you love like that, it is too much.
II.
Let's talk next about women who love too little.
In some ways this seems more natural in the context of worship and Christianity. We all are distressed today about the apparent increase in hatred and violence throughout the world. A recent story in the Atlantic Monthly says world order is increasingly disintegrating. It predicts that in a few short years we will have an epidemic of warring nation-states which will blur the distinction between gangsterism and war, and where criminality will be justified under the flag of greedy dictators and warlords.
In these times of stress and cynicism, in these days of all-out pursuit of happiness at the expense of the common good, in these times when almost everyone seems hell-bent to do their own thing, in an age when right makes right more and more -- in times like these it seems that people are not loving too much, but far too little.
And if in the past we could count on motherhood and apple pie to pull us together, we are not so sure we can count on that today. Some women disdain motherhood in favor of economic and political success and power, and others, perhaps even mothers, haven't the foggiest notion of how to bake an apple pie. Besides, who needs to? Go buy one that is already baked by professionals.
The world may not need more apple pie baked by women or mothers, but it surely needs more love. It is ironic that women who love too much often come from dysfunctional families where they were not loved enough. Eavesdrop on any therapist's counseling chambers, listen in on any minister's counseling sessions, or put an electronic bug in a psychiatrist's couch, and you will often hear the same story -- my parents didn't love me. In one way or another, they all say, we all say, they didn't love me enough.
Yet, our popular culture urges us toward self-fulfillment, self-understanding, self-realization, and self-actualization. To deny oneself, as Jesus taught, seems to suppress our vital impulses, say the critics. Notions of self-sacrifice tend to devalue human beings and contribute to exploitation by various authorities. Loyalty to a company or business or marriage is less and less in vogue. Instead, we urge people to do their own thing, to find love and happiness wherever they can find it. Don't postpone self-realization to some far off, unknown future. Do it now.
It sounds good for ourselves, but when we see it in other people, it becomes quite repulsive. Who is it that makes us angry in the checkout line or on the train or on the expressway? Is it not the person who cuts in, who is aggressive and abrasive, abusive of the rights of others? How is it the Hitlers and the warlords come to power, if not by insisting on their way and their vision of things, no matter what?
Well-known author Erich Fromm criticizes any notion of self-effacement and says we must affirm ourselves. Christianity, he says, has restrained freedom and repressed productive love. And yet he fails to note what happens when freedom and self-affirmation get out of control and lead to violently destructive fanaticism.
In that sense we all love too little, says theologian Daniel Day Williams in his classic book The Spirit and The Forms of Love. Love is not obsession or possession, says Williams. Rather, "the lover learns to let the other become himself. Love respects the margin of freedom in every self, and remains loyal even when rejected or misunderstood" (p. 208). A healthy love gives to the other not to control or oppress, but to liberate into a fuller selfhood.
Besides, says Williams, love is relatedness, and one of the strongest urges of us all is the urge to belong, to feel we are included; that we have a larger identity with a nurturing relationship or community. Few of us come to true selfhood in isolation. Rather, we come into the richer self, the fuller identity, by inter-relating lovingly with other people.
Perhaps women understand this better than others, and perhaps women understand Jesus' parable of the vine better than others do. For in the biblical story, the vine tends to represent the feminine. Israel and the New Israel, the Church, are the vine of God, the bride of God, from whence comes the fruit of new life.
So with women -- from them comes new life. The genetic stream of the ages emerges from their wombs and the world is nurtured by their life-giving mammary glands, giving them the natural designation of mama, the mothers of all the living.
But love is more than wombs and breasts, of course. It is connectedness, a sense of belonging and being, a deep sense of being included and nurtured without being thwarted. And mothers (and fathers) who have learned to give and give healthy love are then able to let the children go in the rebellious teens and in the indifferent and neglectful twenties, knowing that in the thirties they'll be back, usually with babies in their arms, celebrating the nurturing love which at once made them feel included enough that they could bear to be separated.
As it turns out, women who love too much probably aren't loving at all, but manipulating, obscuring, and controlling. But this Christ who commands us to love as he loved, to give to others in non-oppressive generosity, and to nurture others in compassionate but non-controlling care -- this Christ calls us to purge the vine of diseased branches and then to draw deeply upon the roots of the vine to bear the fruits of genuine life and love.
And believe it or not, women are still uniquely equipped for this magnificent role in the world. Women, we need -- the world needs -- your healthy love.
Prayer
Loving Father of the universe, who sustains galaxies in your right hand and solar systems in your left, and yet who counts the hairs of our head and notices when a sparrow falls, praise and thanks be to you for your sustaining power and all-encompassing love. Out of chaos you have brought order, and from perplexity and confusion, you develop insight and understanding. We thank you.
Out of your Divine Being you have brought forth femininity and womanhood. Eve, like Adam, was fashioned from the dust of the earth, and made to reflect your very glory. From her you have brought forth life after life, bearing your image, conscious of your will, sensitive to your Divine Presence within. We thank you for the gift of womanhood, the entrancing delights of femininity, the deep mysteries and miracles of human loving.
Look with favor upon the women of today so much in need of your presence and power. For women rejected and unwanted, for women neglected and thwarted, for women abandoned and forsaken, for women alone and desolate, for women abused and exploited -- for all these and more we pray for ways to new life and meaning.
We pray for widows mourning even yet their lost love, for mothers grieving their lost child, for lovers their lost love, for the unemployed and their lost job -- for all women struggling with losses necessary and unnecessary, we pray the comfort of your compassionate and encouraging Spirit.
We earnestly pray for young women today. Protect them from abuse and rape and incest. Save them from denigration and tawdriness. Help them come to the full expression of their gifts in satisfying careers and productive marriages and families.
And for women advantaged and successful, for women of influence and power, we pray a wise stewardship of their gifts and a humility, which instead of exploitation serves your nobler cause in the world. Amen.
A struggling California artist, Lisa lived in modest quarters, which also doubled as her studio. The apartment had paintings and canvasses stacked here and there so that when therapist and best-selling author Robin Norwood went to see her, she had to lean across some of the canvasses.
"Would you like some tea?" Lisa asked. Norwood nodded as she was invited to sit on the quilt-covered mattress in a less littered section of the room. As Lisa brewed the tea she gestured toward a framed verse on the wall. It was timeworn and faded, with a background of an old-fashioned landscape.
The poem was titled "My Dear Mother." It read:
Mother, dear mother
When I think of you
I want to be all that is fine,
That is true.
All that is worthy
Noble or grand
Has come from you, Mother,
From your guiding hand.
"It's too much, isn't it? So corny!" Lisa then related how a friend found it in a thrift shop as a joke. "I think there's some truth to it, though, don't you?" Lisa laughed and then said to therapist Norwood, "Loving my mother has gotten me into a lot of trouble with men" (Women Who Love Too Much, Robin Norwood, pp. 47-48).
It was stories like these that helped Robin Norwood sell over three million copies of her book, Women Who Love Too Much. And it was stories like these which surprised a lot of people, especially women, who found themselves described as the pages and case histories unfolded. Strangely, and ironically, many women begin to see their problems couched in terms not of hate or hostility or indifference, but in terms of love.
Could it be that women get into trouble by loving too much? Yes, it could be, says Robin Norwood, because she was just such a woman herself. She said, "Having been a woman who loved too much most of my life until the toll to my physical and emotional health was so severe that I was forced to take a hard look at my pattern of relating to men. I have spent," she says, "the last several years working hard to change that pattern. They have been the most rewarding years of my life" (Ibid., pp. xvi-xvii).
So on Mother's Day when sons and daughters might be inclined to give our mothers a sentimental poem or card not unlike the one Lisa had on her wall, and when most all sons and daughters have a measure of guilt for not having loved their mothers enough (especially if they are elderly), we are brought up short by statements like Lisa's and books like Norwood's, which suggest we love too much, rather than not enough.
Besides, in the context of our Christian faith and worship, and in the context of the scripture where we are commanded to love as Christ loved, we seem to see a contradiction. More than that, if we are to love as Christ loved, we are to be ready to lay down our lives for our friends even as he did.
In this age of self-affirmation, self-discovery, self-fulfillment, and self-realization, notions of self-giving and self-sacrifice may seem a bit much. Perhaps Norwood is right. Possibly women do love too much. Possibly men do too.
Despite the apparent surface contradiction between Norwood and John's Gospel, I believe Jesus' parable of the vine can be helpful at getting at the question of women who love too much and women who love too little.
I.
Let's look first at women who love too much.
Let's take another look at Lisa, the struggling artist. She was the middle child of three, the only planned and wanted child of her parents. Her parents hurried to marry to "legitimize" her older sister and were surprised at the birth of her eight-years-younger brother. Lisa was the favorite.
But Lisa's parents were alcoholic. Her father gambled away his good income and was rude. Soon Lisa and her alcoholic mother changed roles. Lisa became the mother and her mother became the child. Lisa tried desperately to meet her mother's needs, to make her happy, and to protect her mother from her father. In fact, said Lisa, I tried to make my mother into the kind of mother I needed, into my idealized mother, into the mother of the faded, framed poem on the wall.
Lisa went on to an unhappy marriage and divorce. Eventually she entered into a six-year relationship with a man who informed her that if it ever came to a choice between buying drugs and paying the rent, he would buy the drugs. The man rarely worked, so Lisa supported him, felt sorry for him, cried when he told her of his unhappy childhood, and generally loved him and cared for him.
Then Lisa watched television. The show was about a woman who had been beaten by her husband. The woman said, "I didn't think it was that bad because I could still stand it." But when the woman was told she deserved something more than the worst she could stand, the light went on, and she got out of the marriage.
And the light went on for Lisa too. While her boyfriend was away, she packed his stuff and put it outside the door, and called a friend and her husband to come over for the showdown. The boyfriend left. He called and he threatened, but he was gone.
Why the change? It was because Lisa had called her now-sober mother who suggested Al-Anon, a fellowship of relatives of alcoholics. Even though we may not ourselves be alcohol or drug addicted, we can become co-addicts who find our significance in caring for, nurturing, excusing, and attempting to reform our spouse or parent or child or lover.
"That was when I was beginning to understand myself," said Lisa. "Gary, for me, was what alcohol was for my mother: he was a drug I couldn't do without. Because self-sacrifice had always been my pattern, I wouldn't have known who I was without someone to help or some suffering to endure" (Ibid., p. 59).
Dr. Norwood observes that "Gary, with his addiction, his emotional dependency, and his cruelty, combined all the worst attributes of Lisa's mother and father" (Ibid.). So Lisa responded by loving too much to make things right, and believing that through her suffering love she could control things and make things better.
Lisa is typical of the case histories Norwood relates in her best seller. Women who love too much often come from a dysfunctional home and feel a need to supply the nurture they never had. Women who love too much are afraid of abandonment, and try extra hard to please, to make things right, to assume more than their share of the responsibility or blame or guilt.
Women who love too much typically have low self-esteem, which they attempt to bolster by earning the right to be happy by helping someone in need, especially a man. Women who love too much are not, says Norwood, "attracted to men who are kind, stable, reliable, and interested in you. You find such 'nice' men boring" (Ibid., p. 9).
Predisposed to making things right, women who love too much have a desperate need to control their men and relationships. Consequently, they are attracted to dependent, emotionally damaged, frequently addicted men who need fixing and who can be shaped into the image the woman has for him. And so the spouse, lover, friend, or child is smothered by the woman who loves to manipulate, to dominate, and to control.
If you, man or woman, are in that situation, you'd better go for help, says Norwood. Find a support group and learn to develop the spiritual side of your life to bolster your sense of self-worth and self-esteem. Own up to your problems and stop trying to fix them by controlling and manipulating others. Come to understand that you in yourself are a child of God and "worthy" of his love.
Christ did not give his life for us because we were worthless in the sight of God. Instead, says John's Gospel, God so loved people that he gave his beloved Son. He sent the Son into the world not to tell people how worthless they were and worthy of condemnation and destruction. Instead, he sent the Son to make people well and whole.
That's where the parable of the vine comes in. Women who love too much are like a vine that is thwarted, with branches twisted, brittle, without bearing fruit. Cut them off, says Jesus. Don't let the diseased branches destroy the vine. Purge them. Cleanse the self and soul. Let go of the manipulation, the oppression, and the compulsion to control. If you love like that, it is too much.
II.
Let's talk next about women who love too little.
In some ways this seems more natural in the context of worship and Christianity. We all are distressed today about the apparent increase in hatred and violence throughout the world. A recent story in the Atlantic Monthly says world order is increasingly disintegrating. It predicts that in a few short years we will have an epidemic of warring nation-states which will blur the distinction between gangsterism and war, and where criminality will be justified under the flag of greedy dictators and warlords.
In these times of stress and cynicism, in these days of all-out pursuit of happiness at the expense of the common good, in these times when almost everyone seems hell-bent to do their own thing, in an age when right makes right more and more -- in times like these it seems that people are not loving too much, but far too little.
And if in the past we could count on motherhood and apple pie to pull us together, we are not so sure we can count on that today. Some women disdain motherhood in favor of economic and political success and power, and others, perhaps even mothers, haven't the foggiest notion of how to bake an apple pie. Besides, who needs to? Go buy one that is already baked by professionals.
The world may not need more apple pie baked by women or mothers, but it surely needs more love. It is ironic that women who love too much often come from dysfunctional families where they were not loved enough. Eavesdrop on any therapist's counseling chambers, listen in on any minister's counseling sessions, or put an electronic bug in a psychiatrist's couch, and you will often hear the same story -- my parents didn't love me. In one way or another, they all say, we all say, they didn't love me enough.
Yet, our popular culture urges us toward self-fulfillment, self-understanding, self-realization, and self-actualization. To deny oneself, as Jesus taught, seems to suppress our vital impulses, say the critics. Notions of self-sacrifice tend to devalue human beings and contribute to exploitation by various authorities. Loyalty to a company or business or marriage is less and less in vogue. Instead, we urge people to do their own thing, to find love and happiness wherever they can find it. Don't postpone self-realization to some far off, unknown future. Do it now.
It sounds good for ourselves, but when we see it in other people, it becomes quite repulsive. Who is it that makes us angry in the checkout line or on the train or on the expressway? Is it not the person who cuts in, who is aggressive and abrasive, abusive of the rights of others? How is it the Hitlers and the warlords come to power, if not by insisting on their way and their vision of things, no matter what?
Well-known author Erich Fromm criticizes any notion of self-effacement and says we must affirm ourselves. Christianity, he says, has restrained freedom and repressed productive love. And yet he fails to note what happens when freedom and self-affirmation get out of control and lead to violently destructive fanaticism.
In that sense we all love too little, says theologian Daniel Day Williams in his classic book The Spirit and The Forms of Love. Love is not obsession or possession, says Williams. Rather, "the lover learns to let the other become himself. Love respects the margin of freedom in every self, and remains loyal even when rejected or misunderstood" (p. 208). A healthy love gives to the other not to control or oppress, but to liberate into a fuller selfhood.
Besides, says Williams, love is relatedness, and one of the strongest urges of us all is the urge to belong, to feel we are included; that we have a larger identity with a nurturing relationship or community. Few of us come to true selfhood in isolation. Rather, we come into the richer self, the fuller identity, by inter-relating lovingly with other people.
Perhaps women understand this better than others, and perhaps women understand Jesus' parable of the vine better than others do. For in the biblical story, the vine tends to represent the feminine. Israel and the New Israel, the Church, are the vine of God, the bride of God, from whence comes the fruit of new life.
So with women -- from them comes new life. The genetic stream of the ages emerges from their wombs and the world is nurtured by their life-giving mammary glands, giving them the natural designation of mama, the mothers of all the living.
But love is more than wombs and breasts, of course. It is connectedness, a sense of belonging and being, a deep sense of being included and nurtured without being thwarted. And mothers (and fathers) who have learned to give and give healthy love are then able to let the children go in the rebellious teens and in the indifferent and neglectful twenties, knowing that in the thirties they'll be back, usually with babies in their arms, celebrating the nurturing love which at once made them feel included enough that they could bear to be separated.
As it turns out, women who love too much probably aren't loving at all, but manipulating, obscuring, and controlling. But this Christ who commands us to love as he loved, to give to others in non-oppressive generosity, and to nurture others in compassionate but non-controlling care -- this Christ calls us to purge the vine of diseased branches and then to draw deeply upon the roots of the vine to bear the fruits of genuine life and love.
And believe it or not, women are still uniquely equipped for this magnificent role in the world. Women, we need -- the world needs -- your healthy love.
Prayer
Loving Father of the universe, who sustains galaxies in your right hand and solar systems in your left, and yet who counts the hairs of our head and notices when a sparrow falls, praise and thanks be to you for your sustaining power and all-encompassing love. Out of chaos you have brought order, and from perplexity and confusion, you develop insight and understanding. We thank you.
Out of your Divine Being you have brought forth femininity and womanhood. Eve, like Adam, was fashioned from the dust of the earth, and made to reflect your very glory. From her you have brought forth life after life, bearing your image, conscious of your will, sensitive to your Divine Presence within. We thank you for the gift of womanhood, the entrancing delights of femininity, the deep mysteries and miracles of human loving.
Look with favor upon the women of today so much in need of your presence and power. For women rejected and unwanted, for women neglected and thwarted, for women abandoned and forsaken, for women alone and desolate, for women abused and exploited -- for all these and more we pray for ways to new life and meaning.
We pray for widows mourning even yet their lost love, for mothers grieving their lost child, for lovers their lost love, for the unemployed and their lost job -- for all women struggling with losses necessary and unnecessary, we pray the comfort of your compassionate and encouraging Spirit.
We earnestly pray for young women today. Protect them from abuse and rape and incest. Save them from denigration and tawdriness. Help them come to the full expression of their gifts in satisfying careers and productive marriages and families.
And for women advantaged and successful, for women of influence and power, we pray a wise stewardship of their gifts and a humility, which instead of exploitation serves your nobler cause in the world. Amen.
