Some women avoid any intimacy. Others venture forth but only partway. They pick a partner who will keep his distance: a person with a low drive, a narcissist, a loner, a man who travels frequently. He does not ask her many questions and is content to live with a superficial self, which is all that she can give him.
The strategy is to be with him but also to keep her eating disorder. It is like being married and having an affair. She juggles two lovers. Or she builds a wall around herself, hides behind it when she engages in her food rituals, and then, once in a while, steps out of her fortress to meet her partner. Stephan Van den Broucke, a social psychologist at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Leuven, Belgium, conducted a study that illuminates this kind of woman. He compared three groups of couples: those in which one partner has an eating disorder, those seeking counseling for marital troubles but no eating disorder, and a control group with no reported marital problems and no eating disorder.
After observing the partners' interactions, Van den Broucke found, not surprisingly, that the three groups form a spectrum of happiness: couples without an eating disorder or marital woes showed the greatest satisfaction in their partnership; couples with marital problems and no eating disorder fared the worst; and eatingdisordered couples fell in the middle. This seems like good news for a couple with an eating disorder between them. But there was a glitch in the study results. Couples in which one person had an eating disorder fought less because they interacted less.
"They are avoiding dealing with conflict-ridden issues altogether," Van den Broucke says. "There is no discussion at all. Not even in an escalating way." The couples with eating disorder issues are avoiding conflict not because they are working in harmony, but because they are orbiting in two separate spheres. "Eating disorder couples have the propensity to censor their negative communication, but they also fail to provide each other with positive messages," says Jan Lackstrom, an eating disorders therapist at the University of Toronto. "Their communication is not hostilely destructive, but somewhat bland and unrewarding." This is how Joanna, 25, manages to keep her relationship going. She is a biologist who was diagnosed with anorexia nervosa. After she left an outpatient clinic four years ago, she took off the weight that she had gained and fell back into her old patterns.
She met her partner - a manager at a restaurant where they had both worked. They dated and, a year ago, they became engaged. This should make her happy, but instead Joanna senses that something is wrong. She avoids thinking about the wedding and has not yet set a date. Instead, she fixates on her 5-foot, 8-inch, 100-pound body, her size 0 jeans bagging out on her. She has taken up an extreme regimen of dieting, running, and weight loss. It has taken over her life, coming ahead of everything, including her relationship with her fiancé.
In the mornings, when she sleeps at his place, she feels so compelled to run, she cannot stay in bed with him. The couple rarely eats meals together, in part because they work different shifts. Joanna admits that scheduling is probably an excuse; if her fiancé were to pop into her work one afternoon and say, "Let's go for lunch," she would "freak out," obsessing about the calories and fat that she inevitably would have to eat. She probably would not go. And she feels horribly guilty about that. "I should be able to go home, have a lovely dinner with my fiancé, and get it on," she says. "But I feel so disgusting and concerned about my weight, I just want to curl up in a fetal position and watch Must See TV."
Joanna and other women like her have pseudorelationships, picking men who will accept distance and frigidity as the norm. The men, in turn, have their own reasons for attraction, ranging from insecurity about their own masculinity to simple acceptance of what becomes the status quo in a relationship. Joanna's anorexia has caused her hormones to act as if she is in perimenopause. She has lost her intimacy drive and bemoans that. But she is not about to give up her disorder. So as long as he lets her keep her behaviors, which she tells him are mere eccentricities, she will stay in the relationship. And unless recovery happens, both will stay, more or less, in their separate worlds.
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