They love men who are bad

«How talented he is!» exclaims my friend, 40-year-old Rita. For half a year I watch her revel in her new love: he is 35, his name is Victor. They met when he offered to give her some advice about the interior, and so he stayed in this interior. He used to have an apartment on Ostozhenka, but he sold it to pay off his debts.

“He showed me photos of the environment, he has impeccable taste!” Rita admires. She introduces him to everyone as a designer: «He just needs a little help to unwind.» I have a bad feeling. I’m afraid one day Victor will disappear, leaving Rita with debts and a broken heart. Something like this disappeared her previous lover, an unrecognized artist. Rita also helped him to unwind. I remind her of this, she thinks for a moment: “Yes, there is something in common ….” But he immediately brushes it aside: “That was a mistake, and now – I feel – this is real.”

I think I’ve read about women who time after time choose men with problems and go out of their way to help them, most often in vain. For clarification, I turn to the psychoanalytic psychotherapist Elena Ratner.

“Sometimes men behave this way,” she notes, “but the desire to arrange the life of the chosen one is really more common in women. It can take extreme forms: the desire to heal, save, sometimes sacrificing one’s own interests. It’s probably dangerous, I guess. “There is no need to panic,” the therapist replies, “but if a woman notices that relationships hurt and are repeated with different men, then she really needs to think.”

And I’m thinking. Not only about Rita — I remember my own story. I also once met such a person … and even married him.

«I wanted to save him»

“This kind of meeting is not accidental,” notes Elena Ratner. The woman chooses a partner. She does not at all seek to heal every man from any misfortune. Trying to help another, she unconsciously tries to solve her own problem. Someone is attracted to those men who were abandoned and lonely in childhood, others are attracted by mental imbalance.

A woman is trying to save her partner from a disaster that affects her personally. By helping him deal with his trauma, she wants to overcome her own. The similar pain in everyone’s past creates a sense of closeness from which love grows… or something that is easily mistaken for it.

I was 25 when I met Nikita. We often found ourselves in some company where we laughed and drank a lot. Bright and witty, he attracted me. I dreamed of a date. And I was beside myself with happiness when my dreams began to come true. It turned out, however, that the two of us also drink all the time. Soon I stopped trying to keep up with him. But he alone «persuaded» two or three bottles of wine per evening. The restrained attitude of my parents towards Nikita did not stop me, it even spurred my desire to link my fate with him forever.

“We will get married, we will be together, friends and companies will fade into the background, he will settle down …” — this is how I imagined it. I threw away the bottles that the young husband skillfully hid — one I found in a shoebox on the mezzanine — figured out how to distract him from trips to friends, from which he returned barely on his feet.

In the third year of marriage, I insisted that he begin treatment for alcoholism. He spent a month in the hospital. I thought I saved him. And for another month I enjoyed a quiet family life. Then he said: “Don’t you see that I am not living, but existing? I’m bored, I can’t even think! After that I saw him sober once or twice a month. A year later, I filed for divorce.

And if it’s not that I was “just unlucky,” as my friends said, then why did I choose such a man for myself?

“The cause may be departmental anxiety,” explains Elena Ratner. — The fear of losing a loved one often persists in women who, in childhood, experienced painful separations from their mother or other significant elder. For example, the mother went to work, and the girl was sent to a nursery. A move, a long illness, a divorce could give rise to fear — events that left the child alone with the experience of loss, which he could not cope with on his own.

Yes, this is similar to my story: my parents worked, and my grandmother, my father’s mother, lived with me. She walked with me, read to me. But when I was four, my grandmother died, and my father started drinking. I was sent to the garden for five days …

Sad time! I almost forgot about it and would not have remembered if it were not for the editorial task.

“The defense against separation anxiety is fusion,” Elena Ratner continues. — In a man, a woman wants to find someone who will never leave her, who will definitely be with her. The weakness of a partner is a kind of insurance: it is easier to tie him to himself, he is more predictable. Whereas a strong, fulfilling man is independent, he cannot be controlled, and his freedom looks like a threat to an anxious woman.

Love for merit

After Nikita, I also had other men, although I did not dare to marry again. I try to remember everyone and, to my displeasure, I understand that many actually had some problems. Endless debts, unfinished careers. But wait! I had a couple of romances with men completely without problems, successful and independent. Both of them ended rather quickly, and both times — on my initiative. I really wanted to be sure that I would not be abandoned.

“Often a woman who has this inner pain that came from the past feels insecure about her value,” continues Elena Ratner, “it seems to her that she cannot be loved just like that, that she must earn love, deserve it. And if a man himself copes with difficulties, then it is not clear why he will love her. This is worrisome. She may also perceive a successful partner as an unfavorable background for comparison.

It doesn’t seem to be about me anymore. More like Rita. No wonder she likes to look for different beginners — artists, musicians, writers. One of them dictated to her an endless detective series, and she resignedly wrote down — at night. Because during the day she is engaged in deliveries, negotiations and other things that are necessary for the operation of her boutique.

Next to such a lover, Rita looks both very self-confident and quivering, sacrificial. The only pity is that the sacrifices are in vain. None of her wards has yet achieved any noticeable success. And all of them sooner or later leave their patroness. Rita worries, feeling betrayed, broken and unnecessary. And then he finds another ward.

Repetition of childhood experience

“We reproduce in adult life the experience of relationships in which we were included in childhood,” emphasizes Elena Ratner. — If in childhood we knew that we were treated with respect, that we would be heard and protected, that our needs were not indifferent to the elders, then we will also look for a partner with whom we can enter into such a relationship.

If the girl was humiliated, her needs were neglected, even if not on purpose, due to circumstances, she has nowhere to get the experience of equal relations in her adult life. The feelings of fear, humiliation, impotence accumulated since childhood are locked in her, and she is looking for a person who will allow these feelings to manifest themselves.

In such a situation, it may seem that a partner who does not want to be saved and become a “good” and “correct” partner is the cause of our painful experiences. In fact, meeting with him is the result of the fact that we are used to painful experiences and are looking for a new meeting with them in an unconscious attempt to fix everything — an attempt that is again doomed to failure. Because this man, to be honest, did not ask to save him at all. And he did not promise us for this either eternal love, or even gratitude.

Are such relationships always doomed to failure? “Not at all,” Elena Ratner replies. “They can last for years, sometimes a lifetime. Another thing is that the participants in such relationships experience less and less joy from them and more and more difficult experiences.

For someone who, as a child, felt that he meant nothing to those he loved, at first it is pleasant to become a support for another, this is reassuring. But imagining oneself as Mother Teresa is a dubious substitute for a full personal existence. We are looking for a pair of the same sufferer as ourselves, hoping that we can give him what he lacks, and then he will give us what we lack.

But he will not make up for that parental love that we crave with a part of our soul stuck in an unhappy childhood. In the same way as we cannot replace the support that he did not create within himself.

Can the script be revised?

Then I try to put the question in a different way. Can these relationships be changed? “Rarely, but it happens that quantity turns into quality,” the psychotherapist answers and explains: “Analyzing her experiences, a woman may one day notice that the cause of her suffering is not in a man, but in herself. But for this, first of all, you must at least try to honestly answer yourself the question: “What do I get in these relationships, what is my emotional benefit here?”

I remember how Rita once confessed to me: “Next to him, I feel like a mighty giantess, sometimes like a Thumb Boy who is about to be eaten by an ogre.” Maybe this is how awareness begins?

“If you notice recurring scenarios, it’s better to contact a therapist,” Elena Ratner interrupts my thoughts. “Because these are very deep and unconscious feelings, it is difficult to notice them, it is even more difficult to admit them to yourself: consciousness rejects them because they are too strong and painful.”

To face again the fear of childhood, with the horror that covers me at the thought that I might be abandoned? Maybe I’m not ready for this. But I remember another story — it was told to me by 47-year-old Dina.

“My first husband was also an alcoholic,” she confessed in response to my brief autobiography, set out over a glass of carrot juice in a fitness club. — And the second was constantly depressed, which did not prevent him from taking out his anger on me, including with his fists. Then there was a lover, a retired military man, he plagued me with complaints about his health, and I went with him to various specialists until I got seriously ill myself, and then he left me.

Dina thought that she would not meet anyone, but two years ago she met 50-year-old Vadim. “Surprisingly, he is not at all like those egoists whom I chose before.”

So there is hope! Both for me and for Rita. And although I really want to tell her that her attempts to arrange a career for Victor and her life with him, most likely, will end in nothing, yet I’d rather wait until she asks me herself. Or read this article. Of course, I changed her name. But I think that, despite this, Rita recognizes herself. If he wants, of course.