The key ideas

Women Who Love Too Much

Robin Norwood, 1985

Why does a calm, reliable person seem boring, while a cold and distant one pulls at you so hard you cannot break away? The family therapist Robin Norwood spent years working with people with addictions and those close to them, and she saw a pattern that kept repeating. This book is about where that pattern may come from and how, in her model, you can get out of it.

Who it is for

For anyone who keeps ending up in relationships where loving means suffering, and for anyone who wants to understand someone close to them in that situation. The book is written for women, but any reader may recognize many of the patterns it describes.

When being in love means being in pain, we are loving too much.

What the book is about

Why are some people drawn, again and again, to those who hurt them? To the cold ones, the always busy ones, the ones who drink, the ones who are taken. Meanwhile the calm, reliable person nearby seems boring.

In 1985 the family therapist Robin Norwood, who had spent many years working with addiction, wrote a book about this puzzle. It is written for women and built on the stories of her clients. Two years later it topped the New York Times bestseller list.

An important frame: this is the author's model and her clinical experience, not a scientific diagnosis. The book helps you see a pattern, but it does not diagnose you or your partner. Some of its claims sound questionable today, and we will say so plainly.

Ahead: a student who called every evening, an observation Norwood made while working with people with addictions, and an unexpected answer to the question of why good people seem boring.

Idea 1. Jill and the long-distance calls

Jill is twenty-nine and studying law. She meets Randy, an attractive lawyer, and within a week they are in a long-distance romance. They agree to take turns calling each other, but it is mostly Jill who calls. She flies out to see him, and once she is there, by her account, he pays her little attention and drinks a lot. The colder Randy gets, the harder she tries.

Norwood sees a typical picture in this story. Loving too much, as she defines it, is an obsession with a man that gets called love and starts to run your feelings and your life. The main sign, in her model, is that love becomes almost inseparable from pain.

Someone spends the whole evening with the phone in hand, counting the hours since the last message, and then calls it a strong feeling.

On its own, the intensity of what you feel may say little about how deep the love is. Sometimes behind it is anxiety, which is easy to mistake for passion.

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About the author

Robin Norwood (born 1945) is a licensed American marriage and family therapist. She worked in addiction treatment for about fifteen years and specialized in codependency and relationship addiction. Her book Women Who Love Too Much became a number one New York Times bestseller and has been translated into more than thirty languages.

All books by this author: Robin Norwood

Terms from the book

  • Codependency
  • Support group
  • Relationship addiction: The author's concept: in her model, loving too much works like an addiction to the partner and to emotional pain. A working term, not a diagnosis.
  • Dysfunctional family: A family where a child's emotional needs may go unanswered, for example because of a parent's addiction, conflict at home or a parent's coldness.
  • Emotionally unavailable partner: Someone who, for whatever reason, is not ready for closeness and give and take. An image from the book, not a scientific category.
  • Healthy selfishness: This retelling's name for Norwood's step of becoming “selfish”: putting your own recovery and needs first without giving up caring for others.

All terms

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