Women who love too much is book by Author, Robin Norwood. The title threw me into complete confusion when I saw it posted on a popular social media site. My first thought was “wow this woman is misguided…”. Women who love too much, women who love too much, women who love too much, let that sink in, let it roll around on your tongue a few times. It tastes a little sour to me, how bout you?
I don’t think I’ve ever heard a woman say “I think my problem is that I just love too much”. Who would say that? I think most of the time our problem is that we don’t love enough!
Our culture has given the word ‘love’ a horrible reputation. Love has been turned into a self satisfying, personal pleasure seeking glorb of emotions and feelings that we forcefully impose on another person, demand that they receive and reciprocate it, and retract it when it stops feeling like it once did. Then we wonder why “love” makes us feel so empty and unfulfilled in the end. We wonder why our hearts get damaged and broken, sometimes irreparably.
Surely a “#1 New York Times best seller” and relationship counsellor should know this right? Shouldn’t the Author, a so-called relationship expert, know that if a woman is bending over backwards trying to make her husband happy despite his emotional or physical abuse; that is complete blinding idolization and not at all love?
It dismays me to see how many “Love experts” really don’t seem to know that much about love.
Throughout this book the words “Loving too much” is repeated over and over again, attaching itself to many different abusive scenarios. In each of these scenarios, said woman, is being walked all over, abused, mistreated, and pushed around. Because she “loves too much” she puts up with this crap and tirelessly does all she can to make these abusers happy, sacrificing her own physical, emotional, and spiritual needs. These are very real events that go on in many women’s lives. My heart breaks for these women and I pray against this in their lives. But attaching the words ‘loving too much’ to the victim’s side of this is a BIG problem. In such statements, love is made out to be weakening and burdensome. It implies that the women who have the most love in the hearts are the ones who are vulnerable and abused doormatts whose “primary disease is her addiction to the pain and familiarity of and unrewarding relationship” [Norwood:p.225].
This book claims to ‘empower women’, but how does vilifying love and falsely pointing to “loving too much” as the reason for all their issues do that?
Real love does not weaken a person, it strengthens them. Real love does not accept attacks or cruel words, it neutralizes them. Real love is patient, prayerful, and casts out fear.
I’ve only just recently come a little closer to realizing what love truly is (and I don’t even think that realization is complete or ever will be). I used to think it was all about how I felt, and so I threw the word around quite a bit when I was dating. When I met my husband-to-be 8 years ago, I felt like I had never known such love. It wasn’t until after we were married that I realized that so often, what one believes is love, is really only a shadow of the real thing.
Marriage is really hard and we seemed to have had it especially bad. Many people would say that my husband and I are pretty incompatible in a lot of ways. So how is that love? Isn’t that the test right there… It can be pretty easy to love someone who loves you back, but what about the people who don’t? What about the people you’re sick of? What about the people who make you feel insecure and meaningless? What about the people who makes you feel small?
Have you ever thought about that? Not so easy to love those people is it? If it was a stranger, you’d probably just ignore them or tell them off, walk away, and never see them again. But what if it was your child, husband, sister, dad, best friend? Don’t get me wrong, in those moments, that person is NOT showing you love. But what if you were take a moment and see those people for who they truly are, hurting maybe, confused, lost, misguided, loved by someone in this world, loved by Jesus. Does it not expose love for what it really is to choose to love these people in the times where it is most difficult to do so? Love is strong and courageous. Love does not mean that you let the words of these people penetrate your heart, it doesn’t even mean that you stay with people who physically or mentally abuse you. It means that you forgive, release the bitterness and pain, pray for that person, and move forward.
To love is to be unselfish. I’ve learned recently that love is really not about me… What a revelation(I praise God for that one)! Here’s where I get all spiritual and stuff 😉 It’s about being a reflection of Christ’s love. I’ve cursed God, run away from Him, abused Him, felt shame in being one of His children, made Him small to fit in a box, put other things before Him including myself, ignored Him, and refused to follow, and astonishingly, he waits on me patiently with open arms. Despite all I do and all I am he forgives and he loves. He asks me to do the same for my brothers and sisters.
That’s the power of the Gospel. Thats the power of Jesus. Thats the power of Love.
I don’t claim to know everything there is to know about love. I get my information from my Heavenly Father who is Love, from the book he wrote that is all about love, and from being married for 4 years and in a serious relationship for 8 (with the same person of course).
I implore you friends to know the difference between love and idolization in your relationships. If you don’t know, search for the truth and live by it.
And so I refuse to believe this twisted message of love. Instead, I will believe what the Creator of the Universe says about love:
By this we know love, that he laid down his life for us, and we ought to lay down our lives for the brothers. -1 John 3:16
If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing. Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; – 1 Corinthians 13:1-13
The wandering disciple 