Women Who Love Too Much: When You Keep Wishing and Hoping He'll Change

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of emotional abuse, child abuse, addiction, sexual content, substance use, and illness.

“Loving too much does not mean loving too many men, or falling in love too often, or having too great a depth of genuine love for another. It means, in truth, obsessing about a man and calling that obsession love, allowing it to control your emotions and much of your behavior, realizing that it negatively influences your health and well-being, and yet finding yourself unable to let go. It means measuring the degree of your love by the depth of your torment.”

This foundational quote directly supports the key takeaway to Learn The Difference Between Love and Obsession. Norwood clarifies that loving too much isn’t about the intensity or frequency of romantic feelings but about mistaking obsession for genuine love. The quote provides a clear diagnostic framework: If one is measuring love by how much one suffers, or if the relationship negatively impacts one’s health and makes leaving feel impossible, it’s likely obsession rather than love.

“It is important to understand, however, that what all unhealthy families have in common is their inability to discuss root problems. There may be other problems that are discussed, often ad nauseam, but these often cover up the underlying secrets that make the family dysfunctional. It is the degree of secrecy—the inability to talk about the problems—rather than their severity that defines both how dysfunctional a family becomes and how severely its members are damaged.”

Norwood explains why some families that appear to communicate openly can still be highly dysfunctional. She distinguishes between discussion of surface-level problems and the ability to address core issues honestly, emphasizing that it’s the secrecy and denial rather than the problems themselves that create lasting damage. This insight helps readers understand that growing up in a family that talked a lot doesn’t necessarily mean they learned healthy communication patterns and thus supports the key takeaway to Examine Your Childhood Patterns to Understand Your Relationship Choices.

“The situations and people that others would naturally avoid as dangerous, uncomfortable, or unwholesome do not repel us, because we have no way of evaluating them realistically or self-protectively. We do not trust our feelings, or use them to guide us. Instead, we are actually drawn to the very dangers, intrigues, dramas, and challenges that others with healthier and more balanced backgrounds would naturally eschew. And through this attraction we are further damaged, because much of what we are attracted to is a replication of what we lived with growing up. We get hurt all over again.”

This quote connects to the advice to examine one’s childhood patterns to understand relationship choices by explaining how family dysfunction impairs one’s ability to recognize unhealthy situations. Norwood describes how people from dysfunctional backgrounds lose their natural self-protective instincts and instead feel drawn to familiar patterns of chaos and drama.