Another question: "Do you find that you have a pattern of repeating bad relationships?" could also be responded to affirmatively by almost every person I know. It also pretty much sums up every plot line in "Sex and the City". But maybe that's just me. Other questions were more intense, but upon completing the whole questionnaire I got the message: "Have you ever thought that there might be more you could do with your life if you were not so driven by sexual and romantic pursuits?" Well, hell yes! The problem is, we're all instructed from a very young age that our main goal in life is to find our perfect soul-mates. T.V. show and movies and ad campaigns are constantly selling us on this airy idea of everlasting romance. But re-reading fairy tales through the prism of self-help books is not a pretty picture. After all, The Little Mermaid had to give up her voice to stalk some guy she barely knew (in the original version of the fairy tale, she was offered a knife to stab the Prince, but was turned into sea foam instead!). Snow White found herself in a coma surrounded by a crew of necrophiliac dwarfs, and Cinderella's love-starved sisters cut off their toes to fit into her glass slippers.
From Romeo and Juliet (underage bride, double suicide) to Wuthering Heights (animal torture, violent death) and Jane Eyre (insane hidden wife, arson), every great love story had two things in common: A healthy dose of suffering and a body count. Not to be outdone, Hollywood has offered up heroes like Lloyd Dobler, super-stalker. For women who aren't old enough to remember an era before trench coats in high school were considered threatening, the movie featured John Cusack as a lovable teen outcast, dumped by his brainy valedictorian, who then parked himself outside her bedroom window holding a boom box. Where once I saw cute, I now see as creepily codependent. Lloyd was just one of a long line of romantic heroes who deserved a restraining order.
If the above piques your interest, read the article for more thought-provoking information. The following quiz I grabbed from the Sex Love Addicts Anonymous website.
1. Having few healthy boundaries, we become sexually involved with and/or emotionally attached to people without knowing them.
2. Fearing abandonment and loneliness, we stay in and return to painful, destructive relationships, concealing our dependency needs from ourselves and others, growing more isolated and alienated from friends and loved ones, ourselves, and God.
3. Fearing emotional and/or sexual deprivation, we compulsively pursue and involve ourselves in one relationship after another, sometimes having more than one sexual or emotional liaison at a time.
4. We confuse love with neediness, physical and sexual attraction, pity and/or the need to rescue or to be rescued.
5. We feel empty and incomplete when we are alone. Even though we fear intimacy and commitment, we continually search for relationships and sexual contacts.
6. We sexualize stress, guilt, loneliness, anger, shame, fear and envy. We use sex or emotional dependence as substitute for nurturing, care, and support.
7. We use sex and emotional involvement to manipulate and control others.
8. We become immobilized or seriously distracted by romantic or sexual obsession or fantasies.
9. We avoid responsibility for ourselves by attaching ourselves to people who are emotionally unavailable.
10. We stay enslaved to emotional dependency, romantic intrigue, or compulsive sexual activities.
11. To avoid feeling vulnerable, we may retreat from all intimate involvement, mistaking sexual and emotional anorexia for recovery.
12. We assign magical qualities to others. We idealize and pursue them, then blame them for not fulfilling our fantasies and expectations.
12. We assign magical qualities to others. We idealize and pursue them, then blame them for not fulfilling our fantasies and expectations.
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