# Love Warrior by Glennon Doyle - Blinkist What’s in it for me? A story of recovery and redemption that doesn’t follow the usual path. Glennon Doyle chooses early fall for her wedding to Craig Melton. The turning of the season promises a fresh start. And, as she waits to walk down the aisle, Glennon can almost persuade herself that this marriage will be the fresh start she so desperately needs. The day is beautiful and sunny, the modest ceremony held outdoors, under the just-changing leaves. Glennon’s stomach swells beneath her white dress. In a few months’ time, she’ll give birth to a little boy. She tries to ignore the way her too-tight dress, too-high heels, and too-sparkly tiara seem designed for another woman: perhaps the woman she is trying to be. She tries to ignore the nervous way Craig keeps smoothing his hair and adjusting his tie as he waits for his bride. And she tries to ignore the fact that when she and Craig join hands, their grip is shaky rather than steady. She smiles through the ceremony. Later, she and Craig dance to U2’s song “Beautiful Day. ” The truth is, after years of disordered eating, binge drinking, and self-destructive behavior, Glennon wants this wedding to mark a turning point, wants it to be the event that puts an end to her downward slide. It isn’t, of course. In the end, this wedding is just another pit-stop on the slope to rock bottom. But what if rock bottom, when she finally hits it, is the place Glennon needed to be all along? A note before we start: some of the passages in these blinks contain descriptions of disordered eating (in Blink 1), and references to pornography (in Blink 3). Please take care. In these blinks, you’ll learn why fresh starts aren’t all they’re cracked up to be; what your inner voice might be telling you; and how you can make your pain your greatest strength. From Rock Bottom to Redemption Glennon Doyle has been summoned by her parents. She’s in her twenties – a bright young college grad. She’s also still wearing the dress and heels she had on the night before, though it’s mid-afternoon by now. Glennon’s drinking has gotten out of hand. She can’t hold down a job. She’s in debt. She’s been slapped with a DUI. She finds her parents sitting side by side on the living room sofa. They look serious. This is no ordinary visit, her parents explain. This is an intervention. How had it come to this? Glennon grew up in a loving, stable family. As a young girl, she was articulate, confident, and beautiful. Strangers would comment on her good looks. They’d admire her golden ringlets, her bright eyes. Glennon came to understand that being beautiful is important. In her pre-teens, something shifted. She was no longer as slender as her sister or her cousins. At family get-togethers, as the other girls splashed about in the pool, Glennon would remain stubbornly clothed. She was still beautiful. But her confidence was evaporating. By the age of 13, Glennon was in the habit of taking two cups into her bedroom each night, one filled with food, the other for vomit. She was bulimic. Binging and purging. The weight fell away. The bulimia stayed. High school struck Glennon as a place full of unspoken rules – rules about how girls should look (thin) and act (bland). Her eating disorder helped her follow these rules. It helped her so much, in fact, that even a senior-year stint in a hospital, to treat her now-chronic bulimia, didn’t stop her getting crowned “Leading Leader” at year’s end. If, in high school, the rules for girls had remained unspoken, in college they became explicit. Glennon pledged to a sorority where girls were reminded to flush the toilet after purging. She attended parties where women were admitted according to their physical attractiveness and reputed sexual availability. To loosen her inhibitions, Glennon drank. She slept around. She stayed thin. And she dressed and acted just as she was expected to. In other words, she perfected the art of fitting in. But when college ended, she was unable to shake these habits. She moved back to her hometown and started a new relationship with Craig, a sweet and sensible boy she’d known since high school. Despite these positive developments, she continued to spiral into bulimia and alcoholism. When, early in her relationship with Craig, Glennon got an abortion, she spiraled further. Now she’s here, facing her parents, who have decided to act. The intervention they’ve called her home for turns out to be a stern talk with a local priest. But it can’t stop the spiral, only pause it for a few weeks. Six months later, Glennon gets pregnant again. She’s still drinking, still unstable. But the blue cross on the pregnancy test feels like a sign – a chance for something new rather than a problem to be dealt with. In short order, Glennon gets sober. And married. Maybe things are looking up. Masking Pain, Performing Perfection From the day she hit puberty to the day she got married, Glennon walked a challenging path. And she knows it’s not going to get any easier – not for a while, anyway. The path ahead is still filled with obstacles and setbacks. But despite the difficulties she experienced in adolescence and young adulthood, these years also have lessons to teach Glennon. Throughout middle school, Glennon felt big. Heavy. Like she was taking up too much space in the world. In a way, she’d simply absorbed the message that society has for all girls: there is an ideal of femininity, and you need to conform to it. Bulimia became Glennon’s way of conforming, of literally shedding weight so she didn’t take up more space than society had for her. She learned that performing ideal girlhood didn’t start and end with simply being thin. She began to take cues from other, more popular girls. She learned to dress the right way. To project confidence but not too much confidence. To attract male attention without seeming to seek it. She learned that sex is amazing whether or not she actually enjoys it. During one high school incident, when a girl accused a popular boy of rape, Glennon learned another untrue lesson: that it’s more important to stay in the popular boys’ good books than it is to believe a girl. Glennon performed the role of popular girl so well that she came to think of going to school as putting on a mask and cape, a disguise that allowed her to walk undetected among her peers. But at some deeper level, Glennon also knew she was being untrue to herself. In her senior year of high school, her mask slipped and she was sent to a hospital for mental-health reasons. She shared a ward with other girls being treated for eating disorders. Each of these girls, she realized, had gone to extremes to project an image of beauty, or confidence, or competence. In truth, they were all in pain. But instead of speaking their truths out loud, they spoke them through starving or self-harming or purging. Even at this early stage in her fall to rock bottom – the “bathroom floor of life,” as Glennon calls it – Glennon knew that she wasn’t living her truth. She even knew that her efforts to disguise her truth were causing her, and the people around her, great pain. But it was hard to discard the disguise. Over the years, bulimia and, later, alcoholism had provided her with a hiding place where she didn’t have to confront her problems or dismantle the careful disguise she’d constructed for herself. The problem with a hiding place, of course, is that it doesn’t have room for other people. Glennon isn’t oblivious. Throughout school, college, and early adulthood, she knew that she was denying her authentic self and that this denial was causing pain to her and to others. But knowing something is one thing. Acting on that knowledge is something else entirely. Marital Miscommunication When her first son, Chase Doyle Melton, is born, Glennon feels for the first time in a long time like she’s done something right. Motherhood makes her feel alive and fills her with a sense of purpose. Craig, too, is besotted with his young son. When they’re cooing over Chase, walking him in his stroller, or watching for his first smile, everything feels perfectly right. Nothing can touch their happiness. They might as well be the only three people in the world. But the joy of parenting can’t paper over the cracks in Glennon and Craig’s marriage. Not forever. Glennon was raised on a steady diet of Disney films. Now that she finds herself a wife and a mother, she starts to wonder if she really has got the happy ending she was promised. Chase is a joy. But she also expected a passionate ever-after with Craig. And if she’s honest with herself, that’s failed to materialize. While Glennon has built a wall between her true self and the wider world, all her most intimate relationships up until now have been built on verbal communication. She connects by sharing vulnerabilities and memories and desires. With her sister and her closest friend she has bared her soul to build a foundation of trust, and has allowed others to bare their souls to her. Craig isn’t interested in this. He pays little attention when Glennon tries to engage him in conversation and shows even less enthusiasm for opening up to her. Craig is tactile. He demonstrates his affection through touch and sex. But for Glennon, sex is complicated. It's wrapped up with memories of booze and drugs and desperate efforts to achieve male approval. In an effort to save their marriage, Glennon and Craig schedule a weekly date night. Date night is designed to help them rekindle their early chemistry and connection. It doesn’t go well. In fact, it leaves Glennon doubting that she and Craig ever had much chemistry or connection to begin with. After one date night, Craig decides he’s ready to show Glennon something. Mixed up with VHS tapes of old football matches is a collection of taped porn. He suggests they watch some together. But Glennon is uncomfortable: the women on tape are all someone’s daughter, she thinks. Even though they have sex after watching, the next day she only feels regret. She asks Craig to get rid of the porn and he does. After a while, they stop trying to work on their relationship and instead pour their energies into what they’re good at: parenting and family. After Chase, Glennon gives birth to two girls, Patricia and Amanda. They might not do a good job of loving each other, but Glennon and Craig love their family fiercely. Writing from the Heart In the depths of addiction and disordered eating, in the aftermath of her abortion, Glennon thought she would never be worthy of marriage or motherhood. Now she has everything she thought she could never have. She should be the happiest she’s ever been. But marriage to Craig is complicated, and even motherhood, her redemption and the source of great joy, has unexpected challenges. When she looks back on this period of her life, she can see that all these difficulties are tied up in a greater problem: she simply wasn’t speaking her truth. And she still isn’t. In her relationship, all efforts to express herself have been met by indifference from Craig. But in motherhood she has also been silenced. She’s finding there’s an expectation placed on mothers to always be fine, to always cope, no matter what. Societal pressure has long prevented women from speaking openly about the difficulties and drudgery of parenting. When Glennon comes up against these difficulties herself she is thrown off-balance. And the pressure to be fine feels harder and harder to bear. She has quit her job as a teacher to be a full-time mom while Craig, now the sole breadwinner, has been clocking long hours in the office. When he comes home, Craig asks Glennon how her day was and she fantasizes about answering with brutal honesty. She wants to tell him her day felt like a lifetime. That she felt alternately overwhelmed with love for their children and desperate for them to stop touching her and needing her. That she’s never been so exhausted in her life. Instead, she says her day was – what else? – fine. At the playground or in grocery store car parks she finds herself smiling at other new mothers, when really all she wants to do is run up to them and ask, Is it this hard for you, too? Do you feel lost and angry sometimes as well? And then, one day, she’s scrolling Facebook when she notices friends sharing a list: “25 things about me. ” She could write a list like that, she thinks. And she’d like to write it as honestly as possible. She begins to type. The first item on her list? “I’m a recovering bulimic and alcoholic. ” By the time she’s finished, she can hear Amanda waking from her nap. She clicks share. The list strikes a nerve. It’s shared by friends and friends of friends. By the time she logs back in, Glennon has gone viral on Facebook. So she begins to write, waking at 4:30 in the morning to get her thoughts down. She starts to share her writing on a blog. She is finally starting to express herself. From Blessings to Betrayal When Glennon is diagnosed with Lyme disease, it feels like a blessing in disguise. Sure, there are days she’s so tired she can’t move or speak, when even the slightest touch leaves her yelping in pain. But Craig decides humid, tropical air will cure her. The family takes a trip to Naples, Florida. And, miraculously, Glennon begins to recover. Even more miraculously, Craig suggests they stay in Naples permanently. So, they move. Craig works from home. Glennon writes full time. Their family is closer and happier than ever. Glennon thinks maybe this is the fresh start she needed all along, forgetting that previous fresh starts, like marriage and motherhood, had never provided the simple solutions she was looking for. And, like all those failed fresh starts, this one also turns out to be a false promise. Her marriage hasn’t found a new calm. This is simply the eye of the storm. One day, she opens Craig’s laptop and discovers it is filled with downloaded porn. For Glennon, this is a breach of trust. Craig had already promised not to bring porn into their home or relationship again. But another, greater breach is looming. During a marriage-counseling session, Craig confesses that he’s been unfaithful. In fact, he’s had a string of one-night stands. The first one took place only a few months after their wedding. Glennon is stunned, then outraged. For years, she’s assumed she is frigid. That her issues with sex and intimacy have prevented her from connecting physically with Craig. What if, all along, the problem didn’t lie with her but with Craig’s behavior? Glennon and Craig decide that Craig will, temporarily, move out and Glennon will tell the children he’s on a work trip. Leaving the therapist’s office, Glennon feels like she has been broken apart by pain. Inside, she’s a raging, howling wreck. On the outside, though, she’s still a mother and a successful blogger. She still needs to drive home, make dinner, and face her children. When Amanda asks Glennon how her day was, she smiles and says, “Great. ” Then, still stunned, she locks herself in the bathroom and slumps onto the floor. She realizes she’s been here before – back when, still alcoholic and bulimic, she’d discovered she was pregnant with Chase. She thought she’d crawled off these tiles, thanks to marriage and motherhood. So why is she back here again? And how is she going to get back up this time? Confronting Rock Bottom Again So, how does Glennon get back off that bathroom floor? Well, to begin with, she does it by writing. She opens her laptop and makes two lists. The first is titled “Questions I Can’t Answer Yet. ” Here, she writes things like, “Will we ever be a family again? ” The second is titled “Questions I Can Answer. ” The last item on this list is, “Did I survive Rock Bottom before? ” Her answer is yes. Contemplating this new rock bottom, this disaster, Glennon is reminded that the roots of the word disaster are dis- meaning without and astro meaning stars. She tells herself that disasters happen when we lose sight of the light. Inspired, she writes one more list, “What I Know. ” The final item on this list is, “Just do the next right thing, one thing at a time. ” So this, more or less, is what she does. The first next thing? Glennon goes to bed, ready to wake up and make breakfast in the morning. She also picks herself up from the bathroom floor by listening. Not to others, necessarily. In fact, she finds that, beyond her inner circle, the people she confides in about her marriage troubles would rather compare her problems to their own, or suggest easy solutions, or even apportion blame for the marriage’s breakdown. She shuts these voices out and tries to listen to herself. What is the next right thing? she asks daily, sometimes hourly. Then she waits for her inner voice to answer. The voice is small at first. No wonder, really. Glennon has spent enough of her life ignoring it. She has to wait patiently to hear what it has to say. But her patience is rewarded. For a long time, when she asks the voice whether she should try to repair the relationship, it is clear: she’s not ready to try and make things work with Craig again. But when the question of divorce comes up, the voice is torn. Craig, meanwhile, has been doing the work. He’s in therapy and he’s volunteering with a local women’s shelter. He texts Glennon most days, sharing song lyrics and memories. He fills her gas tank and takes the children to their appointments. He receives nothing in return. His behavior strikes Glennon as different. He is serving her and their family, with no expectation of getting anything back. She wonders if he really has changed. Glennon and the children are working with a family therapist. One day, the therapist pulls her aside and tells her it's time to make a decision. Children are okay with divorce, she says, and with reconciliation. But they’re not okay with prolonged periods of uncertainty. So, Glennon decides. Craig will move back in. They will try again. But she is apprehensive. Up until now, she’s been trusting her voice. Her voice hasn’t told her to take Craig back. She is far from sure that this is the right decision. Reconciling Body and Mind Craig is home and the family is whole again. Everything would be perfect if Glennon’s pesky feelings didn’t keep getting in the way. She still feels betrayed, unsafe, and angry. It would be convenient if she could ignore these feelings. But Glennon knows how masking and silencing her truth has turned out for her in the past. So, she turns to therapy. To her surprise, her therapist, Ann, isn’t so interested in discussing Glennon’s marriage. What she wants to hear about is Glennon’s past. She asks Glennon, “Where does your story really begin? ” And, if she’s honest, Glennon knows it begins when she is ten years old. When she decided that, thanks to puppy fat and pre-teen awkwardness, she was somehow damaged. When she decided she no longer wanted to live in her body. Ann says that Glennon needs to find a reunion. Not a reunion with Craig. A reunion between her body and her mind. Glennon starts to think of her bulimia as the onset of a civil war within herself, one where her brain had rejected her body. Glennon starts to think about Craig, too. As a child, he was a gifted athlete and then a model. His body was praised. Through his body, he learned to show love. Perhaps he’d pushed his mental needs away, much as Glennon had pushed her bodily needs away. Perhaps each of them was only bringing part of themselves to their relationship. Slowly, Glennon works toward healing this mind-body rift. She starts yoga. She attends to her appetites. She eats what she wants to eat. She says her wants out loud. When she doesn’t want something, she says that, too, instead of slipping back behind her mask. Craig, meanwhile, asks if the two of them can “practice talking,” so he can communicate mentally, not just bodily. He invites Glennon on dates, where he listens, deeply, to what she has to say. The pair join a church. It’s inclusive and diverse. It teaches that God loves his children fiercely and unconditionally. Glennon starts to believe this might be true. Craig and Glennon have sex. It doesn’t feel like a physical transaction. It doesn’t feel like a desperate miscommunication. It feels like love. Later, on a beach in Mexico, Craig and Glennon stand facing each other. They renew their vows, just the two of them. They know this is not a fresh start, but it feels worth doing anyway. The Journey of the Warrior In the tentative early stages of her reconciliation with Craig, Glennon goes to a hot-yoga class where the teacher asks her to set an intention. Feeling intimidated, she says her intention is simply to stay on her mat, no matter what. That’s what she does. While the other attendees twist and bend, she sits on her mat. All the painful memories and emotions she’s been trying to outrun catch up with her. She wants to leave. She doesn’t. She wants to cry. She does. At the end of the class, she is still on the mat. The teacher tells Glennon that there is a name in yoga for what she has just done. It is the Journey of the Warrior. Glennon Doyle has overcome disordered eating and addiction. She’s weathered the joys and challenges of motherhood. She’s been through the trauma of infidelity and come out the other side. She’s picked up the pieces of a broken marriage and transformed them into something stronger and better. She’s hit rock bottom more than once – and survived. Now, sitting on her yoga mat, Glennon starts to understand that reckoning with her pain is an act of courage. It’s an act of liberation, too. Because when we can’t give in to pain, we lose the ability to give into other things. Joy. Connection. And, of course, love. If you can’t give in to pain, how can you give yourself over to love? We’re taught that painful emotions are undesirable. We’re taught to repress them and, if anyone asks, to say that we’re fine. Pain is a problem that needs to be fixed, says society. Pain can be solved with consumerism, or sex, or money, or professional success. But the pain we push away doesn’t disappear. It gets pushed onto the people around us. Glennon pushed her pain onto her family. Craig pushed his pain onto his wife. After a long time spent coming to terms with her pain, Glennon starts to wonder: What if our pain isn’t a problem but an invitation? After all, her pain had been her greatest teacher. Thinking about the Journey of the Warrior, Glennon realizes that a warrior isn’t someone who doesn’t feel pain. It is someone who doesn’t keep the pain inside, but shows it to the world – and isn’t afraid to look at it. She hasn’t mastered pain. There are no guarantees she won’t meet it again and end up back on the bathroom floor. But the next time pain comes into her life, Glennon is ready to invite it in and meet it as a warrior. Final summary Hitting rock bottom – more than once – taught Glennon Doyle some valuable lessons about embracing pain and living with courage. And those lessons haven’t stopped. After the publication of Love Warrior, Glennon and Craig realized that they had stopped growing within their marriage and decided to separate. Glennon has since found love with Abby Wambach, former champion soccer player and present-day activist and inspirational speaker. The pair married in 2017; Glennon and Craig continue to co-parent their three children. In both her marriage and her family, Glennon continues to pursue her bold vision of what a fulfilling, loving life can look like. Actionable advice:  Open up to therapy Are you on the warrior’s journey? Therapy can be one of the most valuable and empowering ways of facing your pain. But only if you bring your whole self to it. Glennon, like so many of us, used to go to therapy with the goal of saying just enough to address superficial issues then move on. When she really opened up to her therapist, she was able to confront her pain in its entirety. Got feedback? We’d love to hear what you think about our content! Just drop an email to remember@blinkist. com with Love Warrior as the subject line and share your thoughts!