Lexicon ·
loving too much
verb phrase, usually as a gerund
- Stated meaning
- Devotion to a partner who is unavailable or uncaring, understood as an addiction.
- Operating meaning
- Continued investment in an account that returns nothing, explained as a condition so that the investor is not asked to explain it.
- Origin
- From Robin Norwood's 1985 book Women Who Love Too Much, by a marriage and family therapist who had worked in addiction. It was the number one advice paperback in the United States in 1986 and again in 1987.
Robin Norwood (opens in a new window) was a licensed marriage and family therapist who had worked in addiction for 15 years, specializing in co-alcoholism and relationship addiction. Her book opens on its definition (opens in a new window): “When being in love means being in pain we are loving too much.” It happens, she wrote, “when our partner is inappropriate, uncaring, or unavailable and yet we cannot give him up.” She had first recognized it as a syndrome “after several years of counseling alcohol and drug abusers.”
The book was published in 1985 and was the No. 1 paperback in its category in 1986 (opens in a new window), and again in 1987. Its subject is a phrase any reader can apply to themselves, and its frame is the recovery vocabulary of the decade: “our loving itself becomes an addiction.” The phrase outlived the decade and the frame came with it.
Under load, loving too much is sunk cost with a diagnosis attached. The investment continues after the returns have stopped, and the book’s contribution is to move the explanation off the ledger and onto the investor, where it is filed as a condition. A condition can be treated, and the treatment is a further investment, with its own reading list. The account itself goes unreviewed, because the diagnosis has already named what is wrong with it, and it is the person keeping it.