The Allure of Drama in a Relationship

For some of us, the prospect of involving ourselves with someone unstable, someone's who's long on problems and short on solutions, can really be a strange, even compelling, enticement. The feeling can be exhilarating; the same thing that makes the partnership unhealthy gives it an edge of excitement, the sensation that one is being swept away.

Crazy-making partners can also provide endless distraction, an excuse for us not to look at ourselves or put our energy into tackling our own problems. If, for example, you have a girlfriend who lives on a perpetual emotional roller-coaster, it can make you feel pretty nutty but at the same time it provides excitement and escapism. After all, life never gets stale if you don't know from day to day, or even hour to hour, whether your significant other is going to be maniacally happy or on the edge of a breakdown.

I was involved for two years with a woman who vacillated between these kinds of extremes. Very little time was spent on an even emotional keel. At the time I was facing a lot of frustrations in life, from financial woes to spiritual ennui, but within this particular relationship I was able to ignore all that to a large extent and instead project my worry onto the woman who I was forever playing hero for. At least, I did that until I realized that I was fighting a never-ending battle; and she saw, at that point, that I actually wasn't the hero at all and so she broke it off.

Women definitely aren't the only ones to suck a person's energy dry with drama, though. We've had generations, now, of men predominantly with either no relationship or else a very poor connection with their fathers, who learned to seek their emotional nurturance first from their mothers and then, later, with the women they're attracted to in adulthood. A man like that will look to a woman to be his salvation, the balm for all his wounds. This kind of single-mindedness can lead to obsession, jealousy, possessiveness, and just an overall need to monopolize a woman's attention. I have been guilty of it myself and had to work through it. But there are women who get addicted to trying to save lost men, just as there are men addicted to saving drama queen women.

Not everyone gets caught up in the seductive pull of the roller-coaster relationship, but for some men and women it can be an irresistible force. The effects can be devastating, too, because they happen despite our better judgement. A partner who is unstable is not only self-destructive in one way or another but also not very good for us. He or she can't really love us for who we are, and this might provide a little clue into the ways in which we're afraid of intimacy or don't feel deserving of real love.