Women Who Love Too Much Are Fucking Doormats!

Yeah, I said it. I said it because I exemplify it. I am the walking dictionary definition of a fucking doormat…

I’m learning though. I’ve been absorbed in reading lately. I can’t put my phone down because I’m constantly reading one book or another.

The most recent book is… you guessed it…

“Women Who Love Too Much.”

There are 14 different signs of women who love too much. Of course, I fully embody each and every sign. I take the phrase “Go big or go home to heart”. So if I’m going to fuck up, then I might as well do it right.

So, without further ado, I present to you the symptoms of what I like to call “How to know that you’re a complete doormat, and total pushover so that you may never find the love that your heart is aching for.”

1. You come from a dysfunctional home, where your emotional needs weren’t met.

2. Due to a lack of nurturing you have now become the caregiver of needy men.

3. Because you were unable to morph your parents into loving caretakers, you repeat this dynamic in your relationships by “falling in love” with emotionally unavailable men.

4. Motivated by your fear of abandonment, you will do anything, and put up with anything, just to keep the relationship from falling apart.

5. You jump into action at nearly any request from the man you are with, many times he doesn’t need to ask, you just intuit his needs and give it/do it for him. No matter how much trouble, how much time, or how much the cost.

6. Because you are used to relationships void of love, you will try harder, and wait longer, hoping for recognition and reciprocity.

7. You willingly shoulder more than your share of the burden, responsibility, guilt, and blame in any relationship.

8. Your self-esteem is low, not because you believe you are incapable, but because you believe that you must work to earn all love. Deep down you don’t believe you deserve happiness without earning it first.

9. Having experienced little, if any security as a child, you lack trust and need to control your relationships. You mask your efforts to control people as “being helpful”.

10. In relationships, you are more in love with the dream of what it “could be” and out of touch with what it truly is.

11. You are addicted to men and emotional pain.

12. You are addicted to sex, drugs, alcohol, or food.

13. Your overinvolvement with unavailable men, and chaotic relationships, is a way of avoiding being responsible for yourself.

14. You find yourself frequently depressed and lonely, which you avoid by involving yourself in “exciting,” unstable relationships.

What the book doesn’t touch on are attachment styles and CPTSD. I don’t fault the author, CPTSD wasn’t even a concept yet, and attachment styles weren’t really mainstream, despite our awareness of them. 

All of these theories are correct, in their own way, but they are just pieces of a larger puzzle. The problem I find with science and the acquisition of knowledge is that we have become so microscopic in our examination of things. In a way, we must, because if we try to examine things at a larger scale then we start introducing more and more variables that are compounding in their magnitude of effects. When this happens, we’re unable to draw conclusions. 

Like a puzzle, we must examine every piece for what it is and then figure out where it fits into the bigger picture. 

This is the picture that I see…

Humans have evolved to have emotions, like love. The love that we have for each other helps keep us alive. Women, especially, are needing of love. Because we expend a large biological investment in our offspring (years beyond birth, unlike other animals), love ensures our survival and the survival of our babies. 

Women are also limited in the number of offspring that they can produce, as well as the number of years that they are fertile, meaning we must be selective in who we decide to procreate with. 

Men, on the other hand, have no limits to the number of offspring they can produce. There literally limited by the number of women they can impregnate during their lifetime. Love, for men, is a requirement (sometimes) to release that horrible ache in their balls from producing so much damn sperm.

Love also ensures that the children they make with the person they love will survive. All the other little bastards, crotch goblins can fend for themselves. If they die it’s whatever, because men have millions more sperm being produced every day to replace it.

THIS is why men are the gatekeepers of love and women are the gatekeepers of sex. We leverage and manipulate. We finesse and play games, just to get an end to the means. Many times we perform this dance without even knowing why we do the things that we do, we are just compelled to do them. 

As children, we are supposed to be taught many things through interactions with our caregivers. We begin to understand how we are to engage in relationships and the world. When we grow up with trauma, especially over a long period of our childhood, the lessons we learn are toxic ones. The behaviors we incorporate as part of our personality are typically a grab back of trauma responses.

It gets so much deeper than this, and I want to bring you as deeply as I’ve traveled on this journey of self-exploration. But I’m still figuring it out, and it’s well beyond the scope of one article. So stay tuned for more about how trauma turns good women into walking doormats for fuck bois and losers.

Knowing better is only one part of the solution…

The easy part is knowing better. The hard part is doing better. A woman who loves too much is paralyzed by fear. With a head full of “what ifs” the security of pain is better, only in the fact that it is known and familiar.

I think of myself, and how much I’ve chased after love. I think about how I keep this fantasy of how things “could be” alive. I see how I’ve jumped at the opportunity to help needy men. I can understand that I was doing it because I lacked faith in my own abilities. I figured that if I could just get a man to see how amazing I am, then he would give me all the love, reassurance, and validation that I was looking for. Then there wouldn’t be any need to figure shit out for me, which I was (and still am in many ways) terrified that I’m incapable.

I was also afraid that by having standards in the way that people interact with me (you know… boundaries) I would inevitably lose everyone that I love because no one would stick around for a heartless, selfish bitch.  I thought that being selfless was honorable and showed loyalty, but all it really taught people was that I didn’t respect myself and that I’d always be around, no matter how shitty they treated me.

In acting on this knowledge, I must put myself first. I must prioritize myself. I must be able to say no, and mean it, without feeling guilty. I must accept responsibility for myself, and ensure that no one is allowed to enter my life who isn’t capable of doing the same. 

I’m not going to pretend that I’m perfect though. I still have people in my life that take my kindness as a weakness, and that is because my kindness is a weakness due to the place it is coming from… My desperate and compulsive need for real and genuine love and acceptance. 

I know that I must cut these people off. There is no amount of self-deprecation that will convince them to love me or respect me. I’ve already taught them that there are no consequences for their actions. They can wipe their feet on me, and I will let them do it again and again, helping them muddy their boots in the process. 

I must distance myself from my emotions. Because to think of losing them, disappointing them, or not supporting them hurts me to my core. Because I feel like I’m abandoning people I love. But I do not love them. I love the void they fill in my lonely soul. I love that I am needed, despite not being appreciated, loved, or respected for being the person to meet their needs.