How do you break the habit of falling in love with a man who needs rescuing?

As women, we have a natural nurturing instinct. We want to help others, to mother them, to take care of them. Evolution made us the caregivers.

Unfortunately, many women try to take this skill into their romantic relationships and wind up choosing men who need to be rescued -- fixer-uppers, as they say in the real estate world. And it rarely ends well. Why not? Because while it's true that a lot of men need repairs, it's seldom possible for a girlfriend or wife to provide them. Self-improvement is called SELF-improvement for a reason: The change has to come from within.

Men don't like to be nagged, molded, and sculpted into something else. Be honest: If someone came along and made YOU their project, how would respond? Yet despite the obviousness of this fact -- you can't change a man, so you shouldn't even try -- countless women still make the attempt. Therapists write books about it. Talk show hosts devote episodes to it. Comedians make jokes about it. ("She made me change everything about myself -- and then complained that I wasn't the man she fell in love with!") Why do we do it? Sometimes the problem is very easy to understand: We just don't notice we're doing it.

Studies show that for as much as women tend to dissect their individual relationships, they often overlook threads that run among several of them. Hence, though you might have had four bad relationships in a row, you might not notice that they were all bad in the same way -- i.e., that the men needed "fixing" and you weren't able to make the repairs.

Identifying the pattern is the first step in breaking it, of course. Having recognized that you choose these men, what are the underlying reasons for it? It often goes back to a woman's earlier life and childhood. Despite our best efforts, we often subconsciously seek out relationships that mirror the ones our parents had. If your father was a deadbeat there's a good chance you'll unwitting look for men like him.

Sometimes it becomes a conscious thought: "My father was abusive to my mother, so if I find a man like that, I can fix him, and do what my mother couldn't. I'll make the world a better place." Of course, reason tells us this just isn't feasible most of the time.

Research suggests that what it usually boils down to is self-esteem. Deep down, some women need these "projects" in order to feel good about themselves. They need to accomplish something, and this is all they feel there is available to them. Psychologists say these women who feel incomplete without working on something should work on themselves first.

Finding out what's really causing the problem -- the low self-esteem -- is critical. Therapy and self-help books can be of assistance, but many times good old-fashioned soul-searching is all that's needed. What is it about yourself that you don't like? Does it need to be changed, or is your negativity toward it irrational? If it needs to be changed, can you change it yourself?

Page 1 of 2 :: First | Last :: Prev | 1 2 | Next