Direct Answers
Mike, not his real name, and I started dating over a year ago. I quickly knew I was in love with him, but he was never quite sure. He would tell me in a variety of ways he liked me, but in his words "he didn’t crave me."
After a few months we broke up. Then I found out I was pregnant. He stood by me through it all, but in the end a miscarriage resulted. Through everything we became the best of friends. We talk every day on the phone for hours, we hang out together, and we are like a couple except we are not a couple. Every so often we mess around, stopping short of sex.
Mike is very picky. He is obsessed with hot, thin girls with big breasts. I am thin but don’t have big boobs. As an example of his pickiness, these are the other things he says he must have: brunette, brown eyes, cute face, tan, sexy, smart, good job, good in bed, and overall smelling good.
Back when he was in college, Mike had a serious relationship with the best looking girl he ever dated—the only girl he ever craved. But she left him. He says no one lives up to her. He still thinks about how perfect her body and face were, though she’s married now with kids.
Mike is an attractive, 30ish, charming, professional guy who gets just about any woman he wants. He has no problem letting girls perform sexual acts on him, even when he doesn’t like them or see it going anywhere.
Lately I feel depressed. I’m beginning to doubt my own attractiveness because I cannot understand why he doesn’t crave me or find me hot enough to marry. As stupid as this might sound, I used to think I was hot but now feel no guy would want me. Do you believe in time Mike might see me in a different light?
Tracy
Tracy, pioneers drove wagon trains straight across the Platte River. They declared the river was "a mile wide and an inch deep." That’s how superficial Mike is. Mike is the dog in the fable who dropped the bone in his mouth to seize the reflection of the bone in the water. He craves an illusion.
He’s not looking for a partner, he is looking for a possession. He doesn’t care who it is, he cares what it is. He’s shaved his world down to a fantasy. I get to choose the mare. That’s his mindset. Any woman’s future with him is precarious. Breast cancer, an accident, stretch marks--any brush with the externals of life and he’s gone.
Of course you are depressed. You are supposed to feel depressed when you are in a depressing situation and won’t leave, just as you are supposed to feel pain when you leave your hand on a hot stove. You’ve had too much contact with him. You’re starting to devalue love. You are starting to think as he does.
Staying in contact with a man like this puts you under his perspective of the world; it makes you judge yourself by his standards. You think the ads in magazines are shallow? He sees the whole world this way. Someone who loves you doesn’t compare you to others and find you lacking. Someone who loves you makes you feel good about yourself, not doubt yourself.
How many women are asking themselves the same questions you are? 50? 100? More? How many women are trying to recover their self-worth after being with him?
Very few people are strong enough to stand up to a corrosive personality. The change in themselves is so gradual, they don’t realize they, too, are changing for the worse. The only woman Mike can’t damage is a female version of himself, a person a mile wide and an inch deep.
Wayne & Tamara
Authors and columnists Wayne and Tamara Mitchell can be reached at www.WayneAndTamara.com.
Send letters to: Direct Answers, PO Box 964, Springfield, MO 65801 or email: DirectAnswers@WayneAndTamara.com.
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