Are you loving someone too much?

It’s good to love. Loving others is supposed to make us feel good; it’s not supposed to make us feel bad!

Women, especially, often seem to get emotionally beaten up by toxic relationships.

Are you concerned that you or a friend might be stuck in one of these toxic relationships?

Take this test  and find out. It’s not an official, scientifically validated test, but it seemed very sensible to me.  The test doesn’t just apply to women in romantic relatioships; it applies to everyone in close relationships. It is, in fact, taken from the opening paragraphs from the preface of the  book Women Who Love Too Much by Robin Norwood. 

When being in love means being in pain we are loving too much.

When most of our conversations with intimate friends are about him, his problems, his thoughts, his feelings – and nearly all our sentences begin with “he. . . “, we are loving too much.

 When we excuse his moodiness, bad temper, indifference or put-downs as problems due to an unhappy childhood and we try to become his therapist, we are loving too much.

 When we read a self-help book and underline all the passages we think would help him, we are loving too much.

 When we don’t like many of his basic characteristics, values, and behaviors, but we put up with them thinking that if we are only attractive and loving enough he’ll want to change for us, we are loving too much.

 When our relationship jeopardizes our emotional well-being and perhaps even our physical health and safety, we are definitely loving too much.