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I got married right after college. I never lived on my
own. I had no idea who I was. I knew that I wanted a career. I wanted a family.
I wanted it all.
Well, the family came quickly and I had two children,
but then I began to feel very unfulfilled. I loved being a mom, but knew that I
needed more in my life in terms of my “own thing”. I was lost and unfortunately,
because I lost myself in this marriage, I ended up divorcing my
husband.
I can’t be too hard on myself. After all, I saw my mom
give up much of her identity in her marriage to my father. She was my role
model. She built her life around him, his family, his friends and it worked
fairly well. I think they had a good enough marriage, but I wanted more in my
life and I had no idea where to begin to find myself.
In her Huffington Post article,
author, Vicki Larsen speaks about this. She quotes
Psychoanalyst Beverly Engel, author of Loving Him Without Losing Yourself,
who calls this the Disappearing
Woman -- what happens when women lose track of what they believe in, what
they stand for, what's important to them and what makes them happy just because
they happen to be in a relationship.
"No matter how successful, assertive, or powerful some
women are, the moment they become involved with a man they begin to give up part
of themselves -- their social life, their time alone, their spiritual practice,
their beliefs and values," Engel writes. "In time, these women find they have
merged their lives with their partners' to the point where they have no life to
go back to when and if the relationship ends."
Why can’t we stay true to ourselves in a relationship?
Engel says that we want to be nice because we’ve learned that being nice is
important in order to sustain a relationship.
"She'll pretend to agree when she doesn't really agree,
she'll go along with things she doesn't really believe in, and if she does that
long enough, she'll no longer know what she feels," Engel says.
Author Larsen says
"How many women do you know who will break plans or give
up a favorite activity for a guy? Not that it's not OK to do that from time to
time or for certain situations; it's just that somehow in the togetherness of
coupledom too many of us forget to have a life of our own. Instead, we look to
our partner to fulfill all our needs -- and get frustrated and resentful when he
doesn't. Then we see the problem as something wrong with him, and not
us."
What are your thoughts? Are we just fulfilling the nice
girl syndrome or is it that we don’t have a clear picture of our identity and
core essence as a woman outside of a relationship?
To Your Success!
Bonnie Marcus
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