Dependence Syndrome: A Good Thing?

For the full article click on the title of this post to hyperlink to NYTimes article.

By BENEDICT CAREY
Published: March 6, 2007
The domestic scenes that would slowly suffocate the marriage were not scenes at all, in the usual sense, but silences, imagined slights, private fears that went unspoken. She would ask him to do the dishes after dinner and feel a shudder when he put off the chore, as if it were a rejection.

Or she would dress up to go out, and then struggle against a growing dread as the moments passed and he did not comment on how good she looked.

“I never once said anything, but I had this need for approval, this terrible dependence that he had no way to understand,” Ronni Weinstein, 61, a therapist living near Chicago, said about her former husband. Indeed, she added, she has since learned that her dependent urges might have been used to bind the marriage rather than undermine it.
“That’s what healthy couples learn to do,” she said, “to voluntarily depend on one another and decide who is doing what for the relationship.”

Neediness has a familiar face: the close friend who is continually asking for reassurance, for advice, for help with the wireless connection. The accomplished adult who lurches from one relationship to another, playing geisha for each new partner. The abused spouse who is afraid to walk out.

Yet only in recent years have researchers begun to realize that while in some guises dependence can undermine mental health, in others it can provide valuable social support.