That Girl is Like a Virus Chapter 1: Rejecting Dating Horror Chapter 2: Falling Back into the Dating Dilemma Chapter 3: The Power of Words: My Dating Horror Story PART I: How a Loving Girl Became A Dating Horror Chapter 4: Life Is a Horror Movie, and I Can't Turn It Off Chapter 5: Finding Love to Be Unfair: How a Nice Guy Turned into a Total Maniac Chapter 6: Growing Up to Become a Nice Man: How a Woman Turned into a Total Woman Chapter 7: Loving Myself in a Dark Place: Can Love Ever Help the Addict? Chapter 8: My Dating Horror Story PART II: The Journey of an Addict Chapter 9: Life Without Love: Facing the Dreaded Truth Chapter 10: Being Reborn, Part 1 Chapter 11: Being Reborn, Part 2 PART III: Reclaiming Life Chapter 12: My Story in Healing Chapter 13: Receiving God's Love Chapter 14: God Loves Us Not in Spite of Our Failures PART IV: Life with Love Chapter 15: My Journey of Love Epilogue About the Author Dedication To my amazing daughters, Alex and Liza, I love you more than anything else in the whole wide world! With great love, Mom INTRODUCTION My Life without Love: The Horror Story of A Dating Addict One afternoon, as I was walking in a mall that is known as the mall of Christian bookstores in my town, I passed by a bookstore and saw the title of a book called _The Problem with Flirting._ It immediately popped into my head. I had read the book two years earlier and had so much difficulty with it that I could not even read the last couple of chapters. I decided I would not read this book in that particular bookstore. I walked out of the mall and then realized that this bookstore was the only Christian bookstore in my town. Since I was driving by, I stopped in at the bookstore to get out of the blazing-hot August heat. I went directly to the Christian book section and there it was, staring me in the face. With a sudden rush, I felt compelled to buy the book for one reason—that was just the problem with flirting. A couple of years earlier, I had been a happy, vibrant, single Christian woman who worked as a secretary and attended church every Sunday. For some reason, I started flirting with a guy at work, one whom I knew would never ever do anything about the flirting. I didn't feel any shame, guilt, or fear when I flirted with this guy. I didn't even understand why it made him uncomfortable. I just did it. I was still dating a guy at the time. One night I was out for a date and this guy and I were about to say good night at his house when he leaned in to give me a hug. A few seconds later, I found myself in his bedroom, completely naked, in the middle of the night. I was out of my mind and out of my body. I didn't want to be there. It was awful. I didn't know how that happened. I hated myself. I had absolutely no control over what was happening. I couldn't control it at all. I did not know how this happened or how to stop it. I just sat up in his bed completely naked and watched him dress and leave me. I sat there naked on his bed, completely out of my mind. I remember hearing a woman in his office scream, "You're a pervert!" A guy screamed, "He's using you!" I walked the rest of the way home like a zombie, not even realizing how I got there. The next morning, I left early and went to church that Sunday. After church, I went to work and went home and started packing up my stuff and moving to a new place to live. _My Life without Love_ is the sequel to this story. What makes this book different from many other books is the depth of the life-change transformation it outlines. I call it life with love. I write about the problems that come along with addictive behaviors in love and dating. I also discuss how loving relationships can help us stop the behavior. Love heals us, but we must first know the love of God and how to properly love ourselves. Only through knowing God and developing self-love can we then give love. There is a saying, "Know what you are doing before you do it." This is true in everything, including love. My life started out pretty happy, despite my flirting habit. I started dating my husband, who I met while I was still married to my ex-husband. I did not know God as well as I should have and I made some poor choices. I was not being as kind, loving, and forgiving as I could have been to people who were going through hard times. My actions were not loving. In this book I talk about the times when I was in relationships where the hurtful words I said to those around me never crossed my mind because I was hurting and angry at myself. When people reject us and do not return our love, this goes against our wiring to be loved. We try to make it up to them and then they reject us all over again. Love hurts. It's never fun to be rejected, but we must learn how to deal with rejection. The hurt must be healed, and through this we learn how to deal with those who reject us. These days, people are often in relationships that we did not anticipate or want to have. In these relationships we have to learn how to deal with the ups and downs. We learn how to be honest with ourselves and not lie about what is going on in our minds and hearts. We learn how to not judge others and not be self-righteous or judgmental of our partners when they make mistakes. The way we deal with these issues is directly related to our own heart and how we can learn how to love the people around us. I will tell you what it feels like to be a dating addict, a person who has an unhealthy or dysfunctional relationship with dating. I did not understand why I was flirting with all these different men. I did not know why I found myself doing things that I would never do. I did not know why I allowed myself to be in relationships with men I had known for a long time, and with men I did not know at all, who felt like strangers. The story will show you the heart of a dating addict. You will see the lies that led to these behaviors. This book is about me—my story. I want to open up and share what it was like for me to be married and a working professional and all of a sudden have all these dating problems. It is truly an "eye-opening" book. We can overcome all our shortcomings. I hope and pray that it helps many people. There are things you will want to share with your friends and maybe even more important, you will learn the importance of your role in the things that happen around you. I learned this while writing this book: there is always a lesson in everything. If there is any one thing that I wanted to get across to you in this book, it's that—through life-change transformation and God's love, we can learn how to love others. We must learn how to love our spouses. I pray that this book will be the kind of book that you can take to the beach or while traveling, read over and over again, read your children, and then keep in your heart forever, so that you can refer to it over and over again. I also pray that God will open your eyes and give you His heart and be the only thing that matters. A good book is one that takes the reader out of his or her everyday life. I pray that this book is one that does that for many readers and will get them thinking about how to really love their spouse and how to love the people who come into their lives. I invite you to read this book. You will be glad you did. —Nancy Leigh DeMoss PART I HOW A LOVING GIRL BECAME A DATING HORROR ONE A VIDEO GAME I was playing video games with my best friend and her boyfriend one day, when we started talking about God. Her boyfriend brought up God and said that he thought that God did not love him, but he did love him. He was talking about his issues and problems. I said to him, "If you are God's child, how could that be?" He looked at me and responded, "Maybe it was just a test. Maybe God didn't love me so that I could learn something about myself and how to become better for the rest of my life." He gave me a weird look. I told him that he was being dramatic. He then proceeded to tell me a story. His Story It happened about five years earlier when I was on the road with him, away from my apartment, a place where I worked