When we start out as teenagers loving boys and hiding our crushes with blushing smiles, we're acutely sensitive to whether they like us back. Teenagers can be cruel. The most popular boy in school may not know that we exist, but that's better than confessing our feelings and hearing him laugh in our face.
As we grow older, we find out that our adult lovers may be more tactful, but their rejection doesn't hurt any less. In my work with Save My Marriage Today! [1], I hear stories about partners who are trapped in a cycle of hurting one another, building walls of silence and indifference to defend themselves against the person who's supposed to be their ally in love.
None of us like to think about the painful consequences of loving someone. But when we have feelings for someone, their critical opinion can wound us like no one else's. Healthy relationships require us to understand our own reaction to such criticism. We must learn to develop a healthy response to wounding words. Otherwise, those rejections will carry over to future relationships and negatively impact our interactions with a loving man who doesn't understand why his casual remarks trigger such anger.
Recently I've been reading a novel by my favorite romance writer Nora Roberts, and one of her female characters illustrates this point perfectly. In Suzanna's Surrender, the main character is a single mother who's been recently divorced from an ambitious corporate lawyer. He constantly told her that she disappointed him and couldn't measure up to the other society wives. She accepted the humiliation because of her love for him. It took years – and his infidelity – before she could recognize what their marriage was doing to the children and her self-esteem, and escape.
We'd all like to believe that those experiences – if we're aware of them and how they've affected us – won't carry over into our future relationships, because we know enough not to make the same mistake again. But they do. We develop habitual patterns of reacting to abuse or rejection, and those instincts kick in whether or not they're merited.
In Roberts' novel, the main character learns to grow out of her past through the healing love of a man who shows her just how much he needs, wants, and admires her. But not all of us are that lucky.
We don't leave the past behind every time we enter a new relationship. Every new relationship is affected by the ghosts of past relationships – his and yours.
And, sadly, what sticks with us most about past relationships are often the parts we disliked or that hurt us the most.
It's funny that I still remember the guy who told me that everything about me was perfect except for my personality. Or the man who told me that I didn't look like a model, "you know." Both were men I cared for deeply, and those critical comments stuck with me longer than all the loving compliments they'd given me.
If I review my relationship history, those incidents are anomalies. Almost all of the men I have been with have been loving, complimentary, and appreciative. But I can't remember any compliments as clearly as I remember those two criticisms.
I'm not unique. Studies have shown that negative experiences are better remembered than positive experiences. When an experience carries a strong emotional charge, we remember it more vividly. When something someone says hurts us in a powerful way, it sticks in our memory in a way all the "I love you"s in the world can't.
So what do we do about it?
First of all, don't accept hurtful criticism or abuse in silence. If you can tell your partner that you felt hurt by his comment in a calm, un-accusatory way, then there is the chance that the emotional impact of the situation can be defused. A situation that started out with angry words might evolve into an honest discussion. The key is to express how you feel with "I" statements rather than hurling "you" statements in self-defense (e.g., say "I felt hurt by your comment" rather than "YOU hurt me when YOU said that").
Second, if your feelings seem out of proportion to the situation, ask yourself whether you're responding to the particular person you're with, or whether a past experience is haunting you still. Sometimes simply becoming aware that we're sensitive about an issue because a previous partner used to criticize us is enough take away its charge.
Finally, forgive yourself for not being perfect. It's okay if you don't look like a model or aren't perfectly compatible with someone else's idea of the perfect woman. You're you. And that's all you need to be for the right man.