Rhonda was a smart girl—in the back of her mind, she knew something wasn’t right. But she didn’t want to lose Karl. After all, he was the only man who had ever really wanted her. So she ignored the problems and worked hard to please him. And when Karl suggested they get married, Rhonda was sure her dreams were finally coming true.
When Rhonda came to me fifteen years later, she was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Her dream of a happy marriage had quickly become a nightmare. Karl was a compulsive gambler and a sexaholic with a violent temper. His behavior had progressively deteriorated until he’d gambled away most of his family inheritance, and like many men who link sex and anger together, his need for violent sex increased until he would beat Rhonda before he slept with her. The fat little girl who lived inside Rhonda was so afraid of losing Karl that she put up with this treatment until the night before she called me, when, for the first time, Rhonda fought back against Karl’s abuse and he raped her. Fearing for her life, she fled with her two small children to a friend’s house.
Rhonda’s healing was not just in leaving Karl, but in forgiving herself for staying with him for so long. She needed to work hard to understand that her desperation to be loved had driven her to tolerate such inhumane treatment by her husband.
Rhonda’s case is extreme, but the pattern is not. If you suspect that you’ve allowed your emotional vulnerability to influence your choice of partners, and you have ended up in unhappy relationships, you should be excited to know that happy relationships are just a decision away. The solution for you is to be much pickier. Don’t lower your standards just because you’re feeling times are tough. You’re not a store trying to get rid of old merchandise that puts it on sale—you are a valuable, lovable human being who deserves to have the kind of relationship you want, not just the kind you think you can get.
Wrong Reason 3
Sexual Hunger
You know what I’m talking about—it’s been a while since you’ve had sex, and you get involved with someone you normally wouldn’t be with, because you feel ‘the hunger.’ Eventually you face the fact that the relationship is not what you want, and have to admit to yourself that you were probably just horny. How embarrassing! How humiliating! But how common.
I’ve heard countless stories of people who ended up in relationships simply because they wanted the intimacy of physical touching and the release of sex so badly that they took whomever they could get. When you are feeling this kind of sexual pressure, you become good at having a relationship with just about anyone, and at making tremendous compromises to convince yourself you are doing the right thing.
Here’s an important point: I’m not talking about falling in love with someone because you have intense sexual chemistry. I call that ‘Lust Blindness,’ and we’ll talk about it in Chapter Four. With sexual hunger you may not even feel attracted to the person you get involved with. You just want to be with someone.
HOW LONNIE’S SEXUAL HUNGER LEFT HER STARVING FOR LOVE
‘I’m disgusted with men,’ Lonnie complained to me. She’d called my radio talk show to ask my advice on a pattern in her life. ‘I’m twenty-four years old and I’ve had eight relationships in five years,’ she began. ‘I have really bad luck. I meet these men and have a brief affair with them, but when we stop seeing one another, they go out, find a woman, and get married. I’m not kidding, Dr. Barbara, all eight of them got married after being with me. I can’t figure out what I’m doing wrong.’
My first question to Lonnie was, ‘Where do you meet these guys?’ When she answered ‘in bars,’ I saw part of the problem. My second question was, ‘How long do you know them before you sleep together?’ When she answered ‘one night to a week,’ I saw more of the problem. Then I asked her what she’d been taught about sex growing up. ‘My mom told me that all men want women for is our bodies,’ Lonnie said. Now I saw the whole problem.
‘There is no such thing as bad luck, Lonnie,’ I told her. ‘But there is such a thing as bad choices, and you keep making them. You have such a strong need to be loved by a man, and you think that means a man who wants you sexually, you’ll take anyone who’ll sleep with you, which is just about any man. You don’t love them, or even like them—you like the attention they are giving you. They fill up that empty place inside your soul. Then, when they leave to find a complete relationship, you feel angry and rejected. You set the whole thing up as a way to hurt yourself.’
Lonnie was getting involved for all the wrong reasons, and her self-esteem was paying the price.
THE HIGH PRICE NICHOLAS PAID FOR BEING HORNY
‘I’m in big trouble, Dr. Barbara,’ Nicholas said with a pained expression on his face. Nicholas was a nice-looking thirty-five-year-old dentist attending a lecture series of mine. ‘I met this woman, Jackie, three months ago. She was an ex-girlfriend of a friend of mine, and I wasn’t really that attracted to her. But it had been over a year since I’d slept with a woman. A year! I felt like something was wrong with me. I felt like people could just look at me and say, “Hey, that guy looks like he hasn’t gotten laid in a long time.” I just hadn’t met anyone I really liked, and the months went by. So when Jackie came along, I thought, what the hell, I don’t really like her, but at least I’ll break the cycle.
‘We went out once or twice and ended up sleeping together. The big joke was, the sex wasn’t even that good. I knew it was going nowhere, but I figured since I didn’t know when I’d have sex again, I might as well stock up now. I know it sounds awful, but it gets worse. Six weeks passed, and I’m getting disgusted with myself, so one day I decided to tell Jackie that night that we really shouldn’t see each other anymore. That afternoon I got an emergency call at my office in the middle of fitting a patient for dentures—it was Jackie, and she had to talk to me immediately. When I picked up the phone I heard her say, ‘Nicholas, I’m pregnant.’ I was so shocked, I dropped the man’s teeth right on the floor.
‘That night I went over to Jackie’s house and we talked about everything. Dr. Barbara, she wants to keep the baby. I told her I didn’t love her, that I didn’t even like her, that it was wrong of me to sleep with her and lead her on, and she told me that she didn’t care how I felt. She loved me and wanted my child. I can’t believe this is happening to me.’
Nicholas didn’t plan on paying such a high price for his sexual hunger. Jackie had his child, and Nicholas pays child support and sees his daughter fairly frequently. He has a lot of anger at Jackie, and even more anger at himself, especially for not insisting on using birth control. And although he claims he wants to find a woman to love, he hasn’t found anyone yet.
WHAT’S YOUR SEXUAL HUNGER LIMIT?
Do you have a Sexual Hunger Limit (SHL), a period of time beyond which you feel ‘something is wrong’ because you haven’t been sexually active? If you’re single, ask yourself what your limit is—a few months or a year or more. You might have to look back through your calendar or datebook to figure it out, but it’s well worth the effort. Remember, I’m not talking about what makes you physically uncomfortable, but what time period makes you psychologically uncomfortable. It’s good to know your Sexual Hunger limit. You might want to put it on your calendar as the time approaches, so you can be careful to avoid getting involved with