Relationship Advice for Women: Stop Overfunctioning and Start Getting the Love You Want
By Rori Gwynne
Overfunctioning is doing too much. It's doing more than your share, stepping in to help, stepping up to rescue. It's offering before being asked, giving instead of giving back. It's trying to manage your life and get things done by playing all the parts in the relationship -- both your part and his.
Overfunctioning is a deeply unsatisfying thing. If you turn your man into a puppet you can manipulate, you’re not going to like him very much. You’ll have clean dishes and no garbage, and a Saturday night date at the restaurant and movie of your choice, but look -- your man will be a puppet! Not much fun there.
So -- do you deserve a red-blooded, real, strong minded, secure, responsible, respectable, thoughtful, and caring man? Or do you only deserve a shadow of yourself? Can you allow yourself to be loved by a man who can really love? Or can you only sign up with a man who makes it one-third the way to you and then expects you to pick up the slack?
By always picking up the slack, what you mostly get is your own deep feeling of resentment. And from him, instead of the appreciation we all crave -- you get coldness, anger, and withdrawal.
By always cutting to the chase and doing everything ourselves –- or directing how it’s done –- we put up a wall between ourselves and our men that keeps us from getting what we all say we really want: The Big Ticket Items –- Love, Affection, Romance, Trust, Harmony, Peace, the ability to Negotiate anything. (And I mean anything.)
By always stepping in, we guarantee that our lives with our men will always be about the small stuff –- the nuts and bolts of life, and not the deep, soul-satisfying stuff that we come together in relationships and marriage to get.
What if you really didn’t have to watch how things are going, didn’t have to ask for everything you want, stopped overseeing the doing of things that are important to you even though you’ve already agreed that it’s his job, and could just relax and be?
It’s a little scary.
So take it slow. Baby steps is the way to go. Make a list of all the things you do in the household, on a date, and in a relationship, and pick three things that seem easy to let go of. And then stop doing them. Just stop.
It might get a little messy. At first he may seem upset that you’re not doing for him all the time, but very quickly you’ll start to see things change for the better. Sometimes it happens so quickly it’s a shock -- you’ll start to see those Big Ticket items showing up and be amazed at how relaxed you feel.
Keep your eye on the prize: Stop giving all your energy to managing your man and everything in your daily lives, and start using it to love yourself first.
In her completely original, controversial Los Angeles workshops, relationship coach and author Rori Gwynne teaches women the step-by-step tools for transforming your love life she created in her new book, Turn the Relationship You Have Into the Relationship You Want. Visit Rori at www.CoachRori.com
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