She Loves & Craves My Attention, But Never Asks About Me Or My Life

What to do if your girl loves & craves your attention but never asks about you or your life.

In this video coaching newsletter I discuss an email from a viewer who has been following my work for many years. He says his girlfriend’s needy behavior is exhausting. She loves and craves his attention, but never asks about him or his life. Everything is always about her and complaining about what he doesn’t do properly.

He wonders if she will get better or he should finally end things. My comments are in bold italics like this below in the body of his email.

This particular guy has been following me for many years, and he basically says his girlfriend’s needy behavior is exhausting. So it’s like whenever they’re together, it’s always her, everything is about her, and she’s often complaining about what he’s not doing, should have done or should have done differently. “You should have texted me. You should have been sweeter. You should have sent this to me.”

So you could tell she’s got some daddy issues. She grew up, clearly didn’t get enough strokes from mommy and daddy, so she constantly needs attention and validation because she grew up in an environment where her parents probably didn’t show her much attention or love, and she grew up craving that. So now she’s in a relationship and the guy says, “It’s like when they’re together, the conversation’s always focused on her.” She never asks him anything about himself or what’s going on in his life or anything, and he feels like he’s always got to kind of keep the conversation going. So they’ve talked about it, I think he said she’s gotten some therapy and it got better, but now she’s kind of starting to revert back.

So he’s getting to the point now where like every time he gets together, he just feels exhausted, he doesn’t feel invigorated. Even though the sex is good, she’s feminine, she’s submissive, she cooks, shares his religion, it’s just not easy-going and she’s not easy to get along with because again, she always presupposes the worst, because the needy person didn’t get enough love and attention. It happened for so many years when they were a child that they just assumed that’s the way life is. So if you don’t hear from somebody soon enough, or they don’t appear to be as affectionate as you want them to be, or they don’t seem to care as much, they assume you don’t care about them because they grew up feeling like nobody gave a shit about them. So because of that, it just gets tiring. Most of what she’s complaining about is really her issues, her neediness, her lack of being happy whole and complete within herself. Two people come together to share their completeness.

In a lot of ways, when I read this, it’s like he’s become her emotional support human and she gets upset very easily if she perceives he didn’t do something to her liking. She has unreasonable expectations and then she gets upset when he doesn’t meet them whether she didn’t explain it or didn’t explain it properly. It’s like no matter what he does, she’s like getting upset and he’s mad at him, and this is just exhausting. You want a woman that brings peace into your life, not a woman that’s disturbing your peace. You want a woman that makes your dick hard, not your life. This just gets tiring. I mean, reading the email, it’s like, jeez. So now the guy’s at crossroads. He’s like, “Is this fixable? Is she gonna change? Is she going to get any better? Or should I just end things?” Because he’s like getting to the end of his rope. Again, it’s just not a fun place to be.

Viewer Email:

Dear Corey,

I’m a 30-year-old fan of your work since my early 20s, which has guided me through successful dating experiences, both reading the books multiple times and watching your videos.

Oh, before I forget! Today is Friday, obviously we got a live stream from 1 p.m. EST to 3 p.m. EST, so if you guys got questions for myself, Chunky and the girls, you can present them to YouTube. So just if you go to my YouTube channel @CoachCoreyWayne and click the “live” tab, just scroll down and select today’s live stream and click on it. You can have it notify you, or you can just tune in at 1:00 pm Eastern Standard Time, same time zone as Miami and New York, and we’ll get your questions answered.

We also do a Thursday live stream. Thursdays are from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. So you guys are welcome to join there. We do two days a week where we answer whatever questions you got.

I’m now in an exclusive relationship for the last few months with a woman I met at the end of last year. She’s smart, disciplined, works in law enforcement, shares my religion, good sex, cooks, is submissive, respects her strong father…

Who clearly didn’t hug her enough and love her enough, because if she’s needy like this, that’s his fault and his wife’s fault, or his baby mama’s fault.

…And seems deeply in love with me, largely due to the confidence I’ve built through your teachings. In my eyes, she seemed like a rare find. We live about an hour apart and have different work schedules, so we only see each other once a week or so – which isn’t easy, but not awful.

So you can imagine you only get to see each other physically in person because you’re an hour away. Your work schedules don’t line up, so most of your contact is going to be in through text, phone calls or FaceTime. If you got a needy person on the other end of the line and she’s just constantly getting butt-hurt, upset, offended and feeling like you don’t care because again, she presupposes the worst because she grew up not getting the love and attention she wanted. Just because she respects her strong father doesn’t mean that dad did a good job.S o she seems like she’s a little fucked up.

However, red flags make me question her as a potential wife to have my future children, my ultimate goal. She shows signs of unresolved issues from a past (4-5 year) relationship where her ex never committed, but she stayed with him.

So what jumps out at me with that? It’s like she wanted love but wasn’t getting love. So she wanted love from her dad, he didn’t give it to her. She gets into a relationship with a guy that does the same thing, doesn’t give it to her. She stays with him because that feels normal to her. Those are her expectations. So that tells you it gives you a lot of insight into her worldview and her reality filter, how she interprets the world.

In person and via text, she loves my attention, but she rarely initiates meaningful conversations about me or my life, focusing instead on seeking reassurance about my feelings for her.

Yeah again, it’s just constant obsessing over that. This is what needy guys do, so you get to see the other side of it, because this guy is dating a woman who is extremely needy and this is how when us guys behave this way, which I think a majority of us are watching this video, we’ve been there before, you can kind of see how in this case, we’ve got a woman that’s behaving this way, and we can see how it makes the man feel. So it can kind of gives us some insight in how we make women feel when we act this way. It’s like constantly checking out, trying to find out where you stand with her, you’re not calling her because you want to see how she’s doing or get together, you’re calling her because you’re worried she doesn’t love you as much as she did the other day. Maybe you spent a whole weekend together, and then when she left Sunday night or Monday morning, it’s almost like she was glad to leave. Her tone and her vibe was flat, instead of excited like it was when she came over Friday, that kind of thing, and the needy guy just assumes, “Oh my God, it’s the end of the world!” So in this case, you got a woman who just presupposes the worst.

So ideally, her having an awareness of what her go-to way of dealing with things, we call it her pattern. So what are her patterns? Her pattern is to always assume she’s not going to get the love that she wants. So he’s going to have to set some boundaries and let her know that this behavior is inappropriate, it’s unnatural, it’s not normal, and it’s obnoxious. It’s neurotic. She’s got some issues that she needs to deal with. He’s not her emotional support human. He’s supposed to be her lover, her teammate and his greatest cheerleader and fan.

She was never a great conversationalist…

So that’s the other thing. If you’re an introvert and you’re dating an introvert, it’s going to be hard to keep the conversations going. If you’re more of an introvert, it’s better to date extroverts. Meaning if you’re a guy that’s more introverted, kind of like I am, like 99% of the girlfriends I’ve had over the course of my life have always been very outgoing, very talkative, and I like to listen even though I talk for a living, basically.

…Which I was OK with, until the neediness crept in.

So this guy is probably a little bit more outgoing, so it works, but when you’re with somebody after a long enough period of time and they’re never like, “Hey, how is your day? How is your job going? How’s your business going? How’s things with your mom or your dad?” Because again, she’s seeking the love that she didn’t get. So she’s always focused and looking out for what she’s not receiving and then getting upset at him because he’s not giving her what she wants. It’s tiring for him because it’s like, “No matter how much I give, no matter how much I reassure I love her and I care about her, she still assumes that I don’t care.” Again, that’s just tiring because he’s trying to soothe her ego. He’s trying to smooth over the fact that she didn’t get enough hugs and “I love you’s” from mom and dad.

When we’re together, her effort to ask me questions is almost nonexistent…

And you would assume if somebody never asked you anything about yourself, your life or what’s going on, that typically means they don’t care, but if they’re always focused on themselves and they weren’t raised right, they’re going to come off as a little narcissistic. Well the narcissist, it’s like everything is always about them. Them and their problems, their family, their drama, their things, their needs, and they don’t really ask, “Hey, how’s your day going? How’s your life? How’s your business? How’s your mom? How’s your dad? How’s your stocks doing? How’s your boat?” Whatever. Just anything. “How’s the pets? How is your team doing?“

…And I lead nearly all conversations, which is becoming exhausting.

Yeah, it’s going to feel like it’s one sided. Remember, two people come together to share their completeness, not to complete one another, and you can tell she’s kind of looking to him to kind of complete her.

I’ve mentioned this multiple times, but nothing has changed, and now I’m starting to feel bad like I’m attempting to change her. Earlier on, she seemed to try harder and ask me more, but now our conversations are often her “joking” comments about me not liking her or something along those lines.

So the next time she does something like this, you got to say, “Honey, I love you. We talked about this many times, but this shit needs to stop. These jokes and these backhanded insults about me not loving you and me not caring about you, where that comes from is you didn’t get enough hugs and ‘I love you’s’ from your mom and dad when you were a little girl growing up. So you’re a little fucked up, you’re a little wounded and you need to work on that. Two people come together in a relationship to give. I want to give to you, I want to make you feel loved, but you’re always behind the eight ball. It’s like your bucket of self-esteem is always so empty and so full of holes. I’m just constantly dumping more water in it to fill it up and it’s never enough. You’re never satisfied. You never ask me about me. It’s like everything is always about you, and it’s exhausting, it’s tiring, it feels like a one-way relationship. I’m making all the effort, and you’re insulting me because you presuppose I don’t care and I’m fucking sick of it because it’s insulting to me. You’re basically saying I don’t care about you, even though I’m constantly going out of my way to show you.”

“This needs to stop. You need to go to a good therapist and work this shit out. Maybe you should work things out with your dad and your mom, and get to a place where you’re coming to me to be my lover and to give and to contribute and be my teammate. Not coming to me and using me as your emotional support human. Then on top of that, insulting me, ‘Oh, you’re not doing enough. You’re not telling me you love me enough. You’re not making me feel like you care enough.’ It’s fucking exhausting. I get together with you, and I feel drained instead of invigorated. You’re supposed to make my dick hard, not make my life hard. Every time I get together with you, you’re always berating me either in my face or in a joking, backhanded insult kind of way. It’s going to stop one way or another. You’re going to stop doing this, or we’re not going to work out because this is not fun for me. It’s exhausting every time. Lately, like when you leave, I feel relieved. I don’t feel excited. I feel drained. It’s like you’re an energy vampire when you behave this way, and it stems from the relationship with your mom and your dad. It’s your issue and you need to address it.”

“I love you, I will support you in it, but you gotta fix this because you’re driving me away with it.” That something to those effects. You can be a little more diplomatic about it, but that’s the issue, and she’ll either fix it or she won’t. He did say she got better for a while, but now she’s starting to revert back. So it’s pretty clear she hasn’t completely resolved it.

For example, in April, her negative mood ruined an evening, leading me to ask her to leave and nearly end things. It was borderline crazy. She improved briefly that night after I asked her to leave and for several weeks, even agreed to going to therapy.

Well, if she stopped going to therapy, she either needs to go back or she needs to find a better therapist. If she doesn’t feel like she’s progressing and getting better and you don’t see the changes in her, fire the therapist and go find another one. There’s a lot of shitty ones out there. Don’t just keep going and go, “Well, I’m going to therapy,” but if the therapist ain’t helping you, it ain’t making you better, you got to find somebody else. It’s OK to fire a therapist.

I emphasized my high standards and prior happiness, but fast-forward to now, she’s reverting to needy behavior, though not as bad.

She has improved, which is good. So that means there’s hope, but we’re not there yet. She’s not doing enough. She needs to do more. She needs to stop coming to you and blaming you for the fact that mom and dad didn’t love her properly.

Another example, she gets upset over minor things, like me complimenting my brother’s fiancée’s cooking, which was crazy…

Again, she supposes, “Oh, you like her cooking better than you like my cooking?” Because again, she didn’t get enough hugs and “I love you” as a little girl growing up. You can feel compassion for her, but she needs to fucking fix this.

…And daily if I don’t send reassuring texts with perfect tone or wording.

Yeah, it’s exhausting. If she’s expecting you to say good morning and good night, and constantly send her reassurance for the day. I’d say I’m just not going to do that anymore. I’m going to do it when I want to, when I feel like it. When it’s impulsive and it’s random. Because otherwise I feel like a fucking robot. I’m reaching out to tell you these things so you don’t get upset because of your childhood issues and your childhood trauma you haven’t dealt with properly yet. It’s like this is it doesn’t feel natural. I don’t like it. And on top of that, when you get together, you never ask me anything about myself. It’s like you don’t even care. You’re. You’re so focused on you and what you’re not getting. It’s like you don’t even think about what you’re doing for me and what you’re contributing to my life. I should feel invigorated when we’re together, not fucking drained.

This constant need for validation feels like fishing rather than building a genuine connection…

I’m with you, dude.

…Despite my clear communication about its importance. In fact, most of our text exchanges are about me not saying or doing something to her liking.

Well the other thing is, instead of her, you got to say, “The other thing is, stop sending me texts and fucking complaining about what I’m doing. If you’re upset about something, then let’s talk about it next time we get together in person, because that’s fucking draining. It’s the type of thing that I see your name pop up and I’m like, ‘Oh, what’s she upset about now?’ I’m not dealing with that anymore. You got to fix yourself.” Remember what Jim Rohn said? You can tell her this: “I’ll take care of me for you and you take care of you for me. I’m taking care of me for you, but you’re not holding up your end of the bargain. You’re not taking care of you for me.”

Sometimes, I find myself not reciprocating solely because I can tell she’s fishing and I’m not into constant games.

So in other words, what she’s fishing for, remember, she presupposes he doesn’t care about her. So she’s fishing just like a needy guy would. It’s like, “Does he still love me? Does he still care about me?” “Does she want to be with me? Does she care about me? Why haven’t I heard from her? Why did it take her two hours to text me back?” A guy who’s got a healthy self-esteem will be like, “Hey, she’s busy. She’ll get back to me when she can. No big deal.” The more you get upset about it, the more the woman backs off. In this case, you see the same thing. He’s just constantly reassuring her, and it gets to the point where he doesn’t even want to reciprocate because it’s exhausting.

Again, this is such a great email because you can really see how a needy guy makes a woman feel, because now you got the woman behaving that way and it’s making the guy feel the same way.

While she has promising qualities, her behavior is a turn-off, and I’m nearing my limit and it’s been on my mind all the time.

Yeah, you gotta fucking have a long conversation about this.

Having recently met my family, ending things could be awkward, but I’m considering it. I like her, but I don’t feel like I love her after seven months or so. 

You tell her that too. It’s like, “I know this is gonna hurt your feelings. I like you a lot, but the way you behave, you get in the way of me falling in love with you. It’s hard to love somebody that’s so difficult. That’s basically saying, ‘You’re not treating me right. You’re not loving me enough. You’re not doing enough for me,’ and no matter how much I give to you, how much I reassure you, it’s never enough. Your bucket is so empty, it’s like you can’t give away what you don’t have for yourself,” and if her bucket is empty, she’s got nothing left to give to you, that’s why she doesn’t ask you about your life or what’s going on.

Is this behavior normal?

No. This is a girl whose parents did not do a good enough job. He may be a man that she respects, but he was clearly as cold as ice. He was a fucking zombie. I know because that’s the way my parents were. They never said, “I love you,” they never hugged us when we were real little, but as we got a little older, they were just kind of like, “Ah, what do I do with these things? What do I do with these kids? This is weird.” It’s just because they were raised in the same kind of family. My grandfather, my dad’s father, would come over for Christmas, and I’m a little kid, he’d reach out his hand and shake my hand instead of hugging you and saying, “I love you. It’s so good to see you. Here’s your Christmas presents.” It was like a business arrangement.

I want to make sure I’m not going crazy – and also that I don’t end something good because I genuinely thought she was wife material. Can she improve…

Well, she has improved slightly, but again, you’re going to have to have another conversation about this, and you’re going to have to let her know that she’s got to have a good therapist, and she’s got to get over this because you’re not dealing with it anymore. This is the end of the line for it. “Fix it or I’m going to end things.”

…Or should I accept this is her?

Corey, thank you for your attention to this matter.

Best,

Bob

Well like I said, she did go to a therapist, but it looks like what you said in your email that she stopped at some point, so she clearly ain’t done yet. She needs more therapy by somebody that can help her, and by you sharing the things I’ve talked about in this video, it should help her better understand that as long as she can listen to you and not get super upset and take it all in and go, “You know what? You’re right.” Maybe you’ll help her find a good therapist together. Maybe you’ll sometimes talk with her therapist to give feedback to the therapist so the therapist can help your girlfriend. It should be somebody that you both like and is helping her.

So again, it looks like she got a little bit better, but she stopped. It’s like working out. If you work out for a few days, a few weeks or a month, you’re like, “Hey, I lost some weight. I look a little better. I see some muscle tone,” and they go, “OK well, that’s it. I’m done. I don’t have to do that anymore.” Then you revert back to being you losing your muscle tone in a matter of weeks, and then you’ll start gaining weight again. So I would give her the chance to do that. I would have a conversation, like I’ve said throughout the email newsletter, expect waterworks. She’ll probably be crying, but she needs this brutal honesty because you’re coming from a place of love. You know the purpose of all relationships as you go there to give, but you’re giving and giving, and no matter how much you give, it’s never enough, for she’s never satisfied. So she needs to learn and understand herself and learn how her childhood and the way her parents raised her negatively impacted her self-esteem and work with the good therapist that can help her fix herself, if you will. It’s totally possible.

So it’s possible, but she’s got to be willing to do the work. If she does the work and you get a good therapist, she should be able to work through these things and your relationship will be 100 times stronger. If she doesn’t, if she fights you on it, if she goes and half asses it, then quits, then reverts back in a few months, then I would dip. I’d give it 90 days and you could even tell her like, “I’ll give it 90 days. Let’s see how it goes. If you make the effort,” again just like Jim Rohn said, “I’ll take care of me for you and you take care of you for me,” and right now, she’s not holding up her end of the bargain. She’s not taking care of herself well enough to be a good girlfriend, partner and teammate for you because again, she’s basically a fucking energy vampire. You’re trying to make up for what her parents didn’t do successfully. So good luck with that one, dude. It’s possible, but you got to bottom line her actions and what she does, not what she says.

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